News CrossFire to come in August

[Tim S]

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2005/07..._availability/

[Malfoleo]

Yay, more ludicrously expensive stuff that companies are trying to get me excited about (to the extreme, mind you) is coming into an open market that isn't all that excited about it. I feel so charged about this release that I'm going to go out right now and start saving for this by putting five cents into a jar, then tap my heals together three times and say "There’s nothing like crossfire, there’s nothing like crossfire, there’s..." [/sarcastic]


Anyway, I thought that in a previous announcement ATI stated that you wouldn't need a new motherboard? How come now they're stating that you will need a new one? What’s so different about this technology, since as far as I know it relies upon a DVI port, not PCI-Express transport on the mobo?

[MrBadidea]

You still need a motherboard that can support two PCI-E graphics cards.

[Tim S]

you need an ATI CrossFire motherboard for the time being... I got the impression that they were trying to expand support across NForce 4 SLI, VIA K8T890 Pro and other chipsets with two PCI-Express X16 slots.

[Malfoleo]

Originally Posted by bigz

you need an ATI CrossFire motherboard for the time being... I got the impression that they were trying to expand support across NForce 4 SLI, VIA K8T890 Pro and other chipsets with two PCI-Express X16 slots.

Well the crossfire motherboard I got, but in the article that is written it gives the distinct impression that you will need a brand new main board in your system for it to work.

But from what you just wrote, I'm assuming that not all boards support dual PCI-Express 16x slots (that have dual PCI-Express slots that is)? I've never really paid that much attention to SLI before, so excuse my noobishness.

[Tim S]

basically there are a few chipsets with 2 PCI-Express x16 interconnects, and at the moment the only chipset that will support CrossFire is the Radeon Xpress 200 CrossFire Edition chipset.

For CrossFire, you will need the following:

1x ATI CrossFire Edition video card (X800, X850)
1x 'normal' PCI-Express ATI video card (X800, X800 Pro, X800 XL, X800 XT, X800 XT PE, X850 Pro, X850 XT, X850 XT PE)
1x Radeon Xpress 200 CrossFire Edition motherboard (or mainboard)

[infered101]

IM guessing it is just like sli. Where you need an sli motherboard and 2 sli cards. Im guessing though they not going to do what they said before which was where any pci express ati card could get a bios update to crossfire. BUt from what im reading now you have to have special crossfire cards which i read were like 400$ a pop.

[Tim S]

Originally Posted by infered101

IM guessing it is just like sli. Where you need an sli motherboard and 2 sli cards. Im guessing though they not going to do what they said before which was where any pci express ati card could get a bios update to crossfire. BUt from what im reading now you have to have special crossfire cards which i read were like 400$ a pop.

You can use any 'normal' PCI-Express based ATI Radeon X800 (or higher) video card.

However, you cannot use cards from different generations together. For example, you couldn't use an R520 CrossFire Edition card with a Radeon X850 XT PE, because the technological capabilities of each GPU will be different... that needs to be the same.

[Kipman725]

lol ati is rearly getting a bashing because nvidia did a launch well. Every artical mentioning ati since the g70 release has mentioned paper launches!

[Tim S]

Originally Posted by Kipman725

lol ati is rearly getting a bashing because nvidia did a launch well. Every artical mentioning ati since the g70 release has mentioned paper launches!

Well, they've got a lot to live up to. If they can't manage a launch like NVIDIA did then you could say they're 'behind'.... I'm sure consumers don't want to go through what happened last year.

[Da Dego]

Uhhh, ok. A little rumor debunking please, bigz?

1) I heard originally that ATI was supposedly making crossfire available for ALL X series gpu's, that part of the benefit would be that it wouldn't be limited to only certain ones.

2) Originally, it was supposed to make any other ATI card work with one of the control cards, so you could buy one in one generation, then buy the other one later and it would all work.

3) It was supposed to be able to, after a bios update, work on any mobo with 2x 16x PCIe lanes.

Which ones of these are true, and how true are they, and for how long? What are they still working on?

I was seriously considering the move forward once ATI releases their next gen, because I think it will be best. But I want 2 16x PCIe slots that I can put 2 video cards in. No matter what brand.

[Tim S]

Originally Posted by Da Dego

Uhhh, ok. A little rumor debunking please, bigz?

1) I heard originally that ATI was supposedly making crossfire available for ALL X series gpu's, that part of the benefit would be that it wouldn't be limited to only certain ones.

I am under the impression that (at least from the press documents), you will only be able to achieve 'flawless' CrossFire capabilities with X800 and above. You can run two cards together, but you will be forced to use Alternate Frame Rendering, and you will only render half of the frames (from the card in the primary slot) because there is no compositing engine on non-CrossFire Edition video cards.

2) Originally, it was supposed to make any other ATI card work with one of the control cards, so you could buy one in one generation, then buy the other one later and it would all work.

No, from what I understand you cannot use cards from different generations, only from the same generation. You can't run a Shader Model 3.0 card with a Shader Model 2.0 card... or, if you can, you will not be able to use any of the Shader Model 3.0 card's capabilities and it will be clocked/strangled back to the configuration of the slowest card. I doubt this is the case though, I really doubt they'll get an SM3.0 part working with an SM2.0 part...

3) It was supposed to be able to, after a bios update, work on any mobo with 2x 16x PCIe lanes.

Myth AFAIK... unless you can provide me with a link of where you heard this from?

[Da Dego]

Thanks, Biggles. I'll look for the link for the 2 PCIe lanes. I appear to not be the only one with that understanding, though, from the looks of some of these posts.

[Kipman725]

I hered the same rumors bigz.

I also hered that nvidia would be allowing every vendor who has 2xpci-e 16 slots to run sli abit slower for the ones without a fancey connector.

[Tim S]

there was some benchmarks on HKEPC, not read the text though... they got Multi VPU (not CrossFire) running on the slower cards.

[Tim S]

Originally Posted by Kipman725

I also hered that nvidia would be allowing every vendor who has 2xpci-e 16 slots to run sli abit slower for the ones without a fancey connector.

I doubt it, unless they join the SLI certification program, or, unless NVIDIA drop that certification program - the latter is very very unlikely.

[Firehed]

Not to mention the SLI bridge ("fancy connector") actually serves a purpose. It makes AFR work - I've accidentally run without it in place, and every game set to run in any SLI mode goes to SFR (I can tell by the load balancing bar), and the two halves of the game are slightly out of sync. The only way it could run slower to run without that would be to run all that data through either the chipset or all the way back through the CPU, and not only was it not designed to run that way, it would chew through bandwidth like no tomorrow.

The good thing is you CAN now buy that connector seperately, although only for "single-spaced" connectors, like on the DFI and Gigabyte boards. The Asus boards with two slots between don't have a connector you can buy seprately (yet), and I believe there are a couple less-heard-of boards out there with that layout as well.