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Trouble for ATI? |
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R520 Issues |
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by Josh Walrath |
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CrossFire Last week ATI finally unveiled their multi-VPU platform, CrossFire. This is ATI’s answer to NVIDIA’s SLI, and it looks to be a solid system. While it differs from NVIDIA’s SLI, it may not necessarily be inferior at all. It is at once both more flexible than SLI, yet less consumer friendly. While a consumer can buy two identical NVIDIA boards and put them in SLI, the CrossFire solution requires the use of a “Master” card, or a “CrossFire Edition”. Currently there appears to be two cards that will be offered in CrossFire form. The X850 XT and the X800 (256 MB and 128 MB versions). While consumers will have to choose between those two cards to enable MVP, they can utilize a wide variety of X800 and X850 cards to work with the CrossFire Edition card. The secret to getting it all to work together is the separate compositing engine that is used to combine the digital outputs of both cards into one frame (or series of frames). The technology is actually quite interesting, and the compositing engine can do a few extra things that can improve the overall visual quality of the final frame (such as the higher levels of multi-sample and super-sample AA). While the technology looks fine (though a bit more cobbled together as compared to NVIDIA’s SLI), I am a bit leery of the claims that ATI is making about their product. It is well known that many older titles do not work as well on NVIDIA’s SLI, and the current driver from NVIDIA only enables automatic SLI profiles for around 70 applications. ATI is claiming that they won’t have that problem, and that nearly every game out there can take advantage of MVP. That is a rather bold claim for them to make, especially considering the issues that NVIDIA has run up against with compatibility. Still, it would be impressive to see if ATI in fact can offer that kind of support. I think that it is quite telling though that ATI is expecting products featuring CrossFire to be on sale in July, but were unable to provide reviewers with actual hardware for testing. If you look at NVIDIA’s timeline for SLI, they released their previews of the technology at the same time the nForce 4 chipset was introduced in early Fall of 2004, and about 2 months before SLI products could be bought by the average user, NVIDIA had SLI test rigs in reviewers’ hands. I am not implying that ATI's CrossFire is going to be a inferior product, but it is far from being tried and true. Once reviewers actually receive samples, we will then know how CrossFire stacks up to SLI. While none of this information is directly from ATI, we can put together the pieces and see that ATI may not have an easy go of it over the next few months, and possibly through the rest of the year. ATI did a great job of capturing marketshare and mindshare with its outstanding Radeon 9700 Pro and later models, but in an industry such as this, it is hard to keep the momentum going. Just ask NVIDIA, one major slipup can cause the entire graphics landscape to change dramatically. Hopefully ATI can get over these issues in a short period of time, and we can continue experiencing the excellent competition that we have enjoyed for the past year.
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