ATI Crossfire

[quiksilver]

ATI Crossfire = nVidia SLI Killer??? either way i'll stick with ATI

Overview:
http://www.ati.com/products/crossfire/index.html

Features:

CrossFire’s unique parallel processing technology has development roots going back to ATI’s multi-GPU Rage Fury MAXX™. Based on the same technology used with ATI-based commercial flight simulators, CrossFire soars into a new dimension of graphics capability with multiple Radeon® graphics processing units (GPUs) working together in your PC.


Divide and Conquer
ATI’s CrossFire speeds your gaming momentum with “supertiling,” high-performance GPU sharing that evenly divides the processing and graphics rendering workload.

How Supertiling Works:

* Think of your screen image divided into subsections like a checkerboard, with alternating black and white “tiles.”
* CrossFire’s Supertiling intelligently alternates rendering duties of these tiles to each Radeon GPU for consistent, efficient load balancing with hassle-free compatibility.

CrossFire’s options include a multiple load-sharing “scissor” mode and an alternate frame-rate mode, combining optimal performance with game-conquering compatibility.
More info:
http://www.ati.com/products/crossfire/features.html

Its about time. This looks promising. Only thing i don't like is that only ATI will be making them...not even SAPPHIRE(according to info found on: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=23570).

What does everyone else think?

[Magma]

hmmm....this is new news to me, i guess thats wat i get for not being online for over 2 months, ati's reply, i guess i'll look into it, however for now my heart lies with nvidia, i have two past experiences with ati and they weren't the best one ones, and nvidia has always held true for me

[quiksilver]

seems the info found on http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=23570 is not entirely correct. Sapphire is listed amoung ATI's partners for their new cards.

[Greatis]

I Think I am going to buy myself an ATI Graphix card for once. Probably a X600 or something like that and put it in my second machine. See how it works. They seem to be pretty good but I have never really tried them just sticked with Nvidia all the way. Oh well.

[Cultus]

I Think I am going to buy myself an ATI Graphix card for once. Probably a X600 or something like that and put it in my second machine. See how it works. They seem to be pretty good but I have never really tried them just sticked with Nvidia all the way. Oh well.Believe me I know exactly how you feel....but I trusted my heart...I took the plunge and went straight out ATi....and today I am living to enjoy every moment of it. Nvidia cannot come nowhere to the power and glory of ATi....take it from an old Nvidia loyalist..

[quiksilver]

From reading numerous reviews it always appeared to me that doom 3 prefers nVidia cards and hence better scores without SLI.
Anyway,i found some benchmarks you might find interesting.

http://www.tweaktown.com/document.php?dType=article&dId=773


Since these results on their own are meaningless, we also ran the same tests on an nVidia GeForce 6800 Ultra SLI system. The only difference between this and the Crossfire system were the motherboard, which was a Gigabyte nForce 4 motherboard and obviously the video cards.

Finally, please note that all tests were run with Doom 3 set to Ultra Quality.


X850XT Crossfire

Normal
1024x768 – 85.4
1280x1024 – 83.1

4xAA 8xAF
1024x768 – 69.6
1280x1024 – 52.2

GeForce 6800 Ultra SLI

Normal
1024x768 – 83.8
1280x1024 – 82.5

4xAA 8xAF
1024x768 – 67.8
1280x1024 – 53.4


As you can see, we found that there’s little difference as far as performance is concerned between a high-end SLI and a high-end Crossfire setup. However, please keep in mind that the Crossfire system used early beta drivers (and probably early BIOS revisions), so there should be much more room for improvement.


The numbers speak for themselves. ATI has managed to pull this off and it will only get better.*plaese note that the benchmarks were run using the highest quality setting in doom3.*

Don't forget that the R520 is on the horizon.

Additionally, new boards based on the ATI Radeon Xpress 200 chipsets and Crossfire chipsets should be out by the end of this month or there about.

At the end of the day i'll go with ATI regardless.

[quiksilver]

Out of curiosity:
Is it me or is it that the majority of people here prefer nVidia?

[AGENTDRE]

Nope ATI for Me all The way

[quiksilver]

i knew there were some here who have seen the light. what you think about the benchmark scores?

[samurailos]

Nvidia for me, thought i have nothin against ati, infact have neva owned a ati b4, so far i have 2 nvidia cards, though not close to the high end one, they do their job enough for a poor folk.

What i'm saying though is that even though the crossfire according to those bench scores, runs a bit faster, u gotta look at price comparison, a few fps might not be worth so much extra dough.

[Billy The Kid]

Out of curiosity:
Is it me or is it that the majority of people here prefer nVidia?

Is not just you boss is nuff ATI haters orround the place......If you search this forum you will see at lot of tread about ATI vs Nvidia and if you follow some of the you would think ATI is the worst.

As for this tread though, it would seem to me that if you want to move forward with this ATI crossfire you going to practically need a new machine(crossfire ready motherboard). I will probably catch up with the crossfire 2 years down the road

[quiksilver]

well its just like if you want SLI, you need a board with dual pci-x8 slots and the nVidia SLI Chipset. The other thing is that the games are optimized for nVidia cards.

I know there are gamers who will go for Crossfire(if funds wasn't a problem i'd go with it).

[samurailos]

I see your point but funds is the prob 4 me.

[Billy The Kid]

well its just like if you want SLI, you need a board with dual pci-x8 slots and the nVidia SLI Chipset. The other thing is that the games are optimized for nVidia cards.

I know there are gamers who will go for Crossfire(if funds wasn't a problem i'd go with it).

This was the exact reason why SLI never appealed to me......the cost factor to get the lastest in technology up and running. What am I to with the system that I currently have.
Now that ATI have their version I might just put some though to it.

[logitech]

Nvidia for me still ...
I know some ATI cards are a bit better than their Nvidia counterpart ...
But as samurailos said the price is a factor, so for now ill stick with Nvidia ...

[BlaqMale]

ati and nvidia released cards at approximately the same time, taking about the geforce 6 series and the x800 series (ati winning direct x, nvidia winning opengl), ati then went on to release more competitve cards those being the x800xl to compete on a price to performance basis, also relesing the x850xt to attack the performance crown. nvidia hasn't responded to those introduced cards but watch out for the 7800gtx to be released next week.

[quiksilver]

I'll be waiting for ATI's counter attack. After nVidia comes with their 7800 series just look for cards based on the ATI R520 GPU to emerge.

The battle lines have been re-drawn. Choose your side and your weapon(s).

[quiksilver]

Check this out...

http://www.atitech.ca/products/crossfire/reviews1.html


Bernhard Haluschak, Tecchannel.de, Germany
"The manufacturer is demonstrating the superiority of the CrossFire-2-graphics cards-solution compared with Nvidia’s SLI-technology."

Francesco Ferrari – PC Magazine -Italia
"The advantage for users choosing the ATI solution is not only the performance increase, but better image quality too."

"We wait for the test, but if our benchmark will confirm what ATI says, it’s a tough battle ahead for nVidia SLI solutions."

Julien Jay, Clubic.com
" In terms of performance, ATI is able to reach a 60% advantage vis-a-vis an SLI system with two Ultra GeForce 6800 cards."

AnandTech.com
"Even at this early of a stage, performance and stability were both impressive. The system we were running had just been assembled hours earlier and didn't crash at all during our testing. In fact, the system was so new that the motherboard manufacturer who let us test with their hardware hadn't even seen it running - it was their first time as well as ours."

"The performance of the solution was equally impressive; at 1024x768 the dual GPU CrossFire setup improved performance by 49%. At 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 the performance went up by 72% and 86% respectively. We had our doubts that ATI would be able to offer performance scaling on par with what we've seen on NVIDIA's SLI but these initial numbers, despite being run on early hardware/drivers, are quite promising."


http://www.atitech.ca/products/crossfire/reviews2.html


SuperAA

HardOCP.com
" With those old games and these new AA settings, you should be able to crank up those old games to resolutions and AA settings to heights never seen before. Imagine putting in that old game that had many alpha textures where aliasing was a problem and being able to run with the 14XAA MS / 2XAA SS combination at a high resolution. If you look at the graph above, there are just a few examples ATI is showing you of the performance increase you’ll see even in older games. Obviously, there is a point at which the games become CPU limited, but, with the ability to crank them up to 14XAA, you should find that they become more video card limited meaning higher performance with CrossFire versus a single card."

AnandTech.com
" These modes add life to games that would not otherwise benefit from multiple graphics cards, as well as provide a compatibility mode to titles for which alternating or splitting frames is not an option. This is a key feature of ATI's CrossFire that separates it from NVIDIA, and we are very eager to get our hands on hardware and test it first hand."


This seems to be aimed at the casual gamer.
http://www.atitech.ca/products/crossfire/reviews5.html


HardOCP.com
"The Radeon Xpress 200 CrossFire Edition chipset is available on both an Intel and AMD platform, and both are loaded with all the latest features. Both the AMD and Intel versions support dual core CPUs. You can read about our experiences with the AMD platform Radeon Xpress 200 here (http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=Njg1) where we also examine performance. From our experience, the Radeon Xpress 200 is a very fast and capable chipset.”"

"With the Radeon Xpress 200 CrossFire Edition, you will have two PCI-Express graphics slots. Unlike NVDIA, ATI does not require any kind of hardware selector card or jumper settings to enable CrossFire -- everything is handled via the BIOS. In CrossFire operation both the CrossFire Edition and regular X800 or X850 series video card will be running in x8 PCI-Express mode."

"With the ATI Radeon Xpress 200, ATI is delivering a very solid chipset for both platforms for all users to experience CrossFire."


And ppl were making it seem like the nvidia nForce 4 chipset is the "only" chipset.

[BlaqMale]

quicksiler, you are sounding extremely biased to me, nvidia came out with sli, ati being the non innovators that they are took from nvidia's idea and improved upon it, no nforce 4 is not the only chipset but it is the first. there are nvidia/intel sli versions of the original nforce 4 chipset that do not require a selector card.

[g2cris]

quicksiler, you are sounding extremely biased to me, nvidia came out with sli, ati being the non innovators that they are took from nvidia's idea and improved upon it, no nforce 4 is not the only chipset but it is the first. there are nvidia/intel sli versions of the original nforce 4 chipset that do not require a selector card.
Actually crossfire is old technology normally used in aircraft simulators in the US army. And its not exactly an improvement on SLI but another way of harnessing the power of two cards.

[quiksilver]

@BlaqMale
quiksilver...there isn't a c in the name.

me biased???!!! ati as being the non innovators??? did nVidia buld a dual gpu solution and release before ati???look back to the time before nVidia acquired 3dfx,they never had SLI. SLI was originally 3dfx's innovation(you should know this already).

According to info i read, ati had the multi-vpu technology already(exactly what g2cris said) but decided that it was to time to introduce it for gaming. did nvidia first come with super-tiling(one of crossfire's rendering modes)???
did nVidia come up 14xAA/supersampling???
and you talking about ATI as non innovators.

i know about the nvidia chipsets already. so don't try to make it look like i don't know ****.
i know there are high-end boards don't require a selector card for SLI (msi p4n diamond for example and others).

they are both good graphic chip/chipset companies. i'll give nVidia their credit when its due. besides the games seem to be optimized for nVidia. look at doom 3/ut 2003/ut 2004. you can't say that that isn't true.

*some ppl like to make it look like nVidia is the only solution. here's an example: was talking to someone about 4wks ago and asked them if they would buy an ATI card. the response i got was "can ati "do" SLI?" and a long bag of crap aftre that.*

all i'm saying is that i don't see anyone giving credit to ATI's recent efforts in chipsets(by just looking at some of the responses so far). Anyway this thread is about ATI's Crossfire Multi-VPU solution.