ATIs Multi-VPU-Technologie heißt CrossFire

uhm... imho is 14 fach AA schon overkill :P

Zitat

Crossfire will be based on two chipsets - one Pentium 775 read powered with RD400 Northbridge and ATI's SB450 Southbridge. In Crossfire ATI cards works as dual 8X PCIe cards. This board is codenamed Stingray.

The second board is based on Athlon 64 / FX socket for AMD CPUs and using RD480 Northbridge and SB450 Southbridge with dual 8X PCIe cards.

tja damit kann man sich sli boards in den wind schießen wenn ma ati crossfire haben will. :P

ATI's Multi-Chip Solution

Zitat

Had enough yet? Our initial performance test on prerelease hardware and drivers shows roughly 50 to 85 percent improved performance under Doom 3 from CrossFire. This indicates that we could see very good performance from CrossFire when it is finally released. Our initial tests aren't enough to draw any firm conclusions, especially in comparison to SLI performance, but we are looking forward to running a full suite of tests on the hardware.

The down sides of CrossFire mainly stem from the motherboard chipset. Either adding cost through the selector ICs or limiting convenience with a terminator card or SLI Style selector card is a tough call for vendors. Supporting two x8 electrical PCI Express slots does limit potential bandwidth and therefore possibilities open to software developers. This isn't any better than what NVIDIA has to offer, so ATI need not worry much here. With vendors either using a ULi southbridge, or the (currently) buggy ATI southbridge, we may want to pay close attention to whose hardware is on the board. As far as the CrossFire card itself, we would prefer to see the 16 pipe CrossFire card not drop to 12 pipes when paired with a 12 pipe card (at least in split frame rendering). ATI's thinking is that the 16 pipe card would always be waiting on the 12 pipe, but in split frame rendering, giving more work to the 16 pipe card would help balance the performance. We just believe in people getting what they pay for.

Introduction to ATI CrossFire

Zitat

It also appears to be the case that each individual graphics chip may not be able to composite the images together of their own accord, which is why ATI have included a separate composting chip on the board. Although ATI's hardware since R300 has had specific capabilities for supporting multi-chip rendering it is quite normal for high end visualisation systems to have separate composing and display capabilities so it would not be an expected function of the graphics chip itself - although they would be able to support AFR without the engine, and possibly the scissor mode, the more advanced Supertiling and Super AA may not have been capable without the compositing device. Although it may be the case that ATI just didn't consider these applications for the X800 series when they set their design in stone, which would have been something in the order of at least two years ago now, its not necessarily a given that they will be supported natively in future chips as, for every chip sold, there will need to be an area of the die dedicated to this processing which is an additional cost with only a very small percentage of users actually using it.

Another potential issue is the need for carrying two ranges of graphics boards, especially since the CrossFire versions are going to be very low volume SKU's. We'll have to wait and see exactly how availability of these come about, especially in regions outside of the US which are solely reliant on partner boards and don't have ATI branded boards available. When we consider that ATI's next generation graphics chip, R520, has been seen as operable it would also suggest that these is gearing up for a launch within the next few months which would also put a question mark over the need for these boards - how many are likely to purchase a second $549 Shader Model 2 board now, which probably won't yield a 2x performance increase in many cases, when R520 looks to be available soon, must be on ATI and their vendors minds.

damit fallen sicher 17k im 3dmark05 mit den boards find ich es trotzdem blöd, kein nforce, wenn man zwei ati karten verwenden will

hm? erinnert doch an die gute alte sli-zeit von 3dfx

http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/60167

Wies ausschaut ist Crossfire doch nicht nur auf ATI Chipsätze beschränkt, damit wird diese Technik nochmal interessanter.

Also Crossfire wird ne interessante Alternative, wobei wohl nur für x800 (nonpro/pro/xl/xt/xt-pe) besitzer. Ich finde mal 249 für eine x800 mastercard ist noch aktzeptabel.... 549 für eine x850 mastercard ist mal bissel extrem pervers wenn man den minimalen performance vorsprung bedenkt.
Was mich jetzt einfach interessiert ist die "wachsende" Performance. Wenn die crossfire Karten ihre Daseinsberechtigung wie Nvidias Sli Karten nur durch gute Performance bei zugeschaltetem AA & AF erhalten, wirds für mich uninteressant. Von SLI bin ich ja schon etwas enttäuscht da die meisten Spiele in "normalen" Settings keinen deut schneller laufen. Nur wenn man mit extrem "Bildqualität" zockt dann sehen die Frames gut aus. Für mich keine Anschaffung einer 2ten Karte wert, da ich Wette das wenn demnächst die neuen von Nvidia und ATI mit 24 pipes erscheinen, die ganzen jetzigen Multi-GPU teile vollkommen hinterherhinken.

mfg Raptor