ATI Crossfire Takes On Nvidia SLI

Who said I was going to buy TWO X800s?

I'd said I buy A Radeon X800 and wait until the next cycle to buy a second card. I personally don't want to blow off money on two of the same card ... If I wanted to do that, I might as well build a second machine.

well you can as well buy a singe next gen card then, which will be twice as fast.

I can't get to the link from here at the office, so sorry if this question is addressed in the article.....

Is crossfire compatible with all ATI cards, or is it like SLI, where only SLI specific cards can be used?

As long as you have a crossfire master-card it'll work with any other ATi card as slave.

To a certain extent anyway.

You can't use cards with Different sized frame buffers or number of pixel piplines. Other than that you can use anything

Here's the little chart they had for compatible cards...



A master x800 128 card is over $249? You can get 2 6600gt 256 for around $200 each, which will pretty much outperform a stock low-end x800 128 which is around the same price. More card for your money. The crossfire seems more expensive for what you are actually getting...

X850 crossfire master card: $549, x850 pro $349
Twin 6800 gt's: $360 each. Once more... a lot less expensive than the crossfire solution with the same performance.

Its a new technology. YOu can't really compare its current price to SLI's after how long it has been out. SLI was a ridiculus price to pay when it was released.

All the geforce6 card have only gone down maybe $20-30 in the past half-year. That's not much and still cheaper.

BooGiTyBoY said:

A master x800 128 card is over $249? You can get 2 6600gt 256 for around $200 each, which will pretty much outperform a stock low-end x800 128 which is around the same price. More card for your money. The crossfire seems more expensive for what you are actually getting...

X850 crossfire master card: $549, x850 pro $349
Twin 6800 gt's: $360 each. Once more... a lot less expensive than the crossfire solution with the same performance.

Click to expand...

I dont trust your numbers. You either made a simple mistake or are trying to play a favorite to NV.

You can get an 800xl 256mb for about $260 here in the states and one 800xl 256 mb is still faster than 2 6600s in SLI on average (of course ATI's doom3 scroes and other opengl scores are slower).

And why are you comparing ATIs top end 850 vrs the 6800GTs? I mean if you comparing top end cards then let use the 6800 Ultras as thats NV high end which go for $489 per card. If you compared top end to top end or mid end to mid end your gonna to find NV is a bit more money. And there is no way your going to pull that two 6800 GTs would be faster that two x850s...

If your going to ding ATI on this there are several other areas to do that on crossfire...just the ones you posted....

Renegade Retard said:

THAT is kickass!

Having to have identical cards is the one drawback of SLI.

I'd imagine, though, that having two cards that were not the same "strength" would cripple the faster card, making it to run only as fast as the lesser card. Is this correct? or does Crossfire use the full resources of both cards? (I haven't been able to look further into this yet)

If the stronger of the two different cards was handicapped to the level of the weaker card, then there's really no advantage other than convenience.

Click to expand...

If your to believe ATIs marketing then the in the ARF you get to use both of the vertex engines on each card. Thus your over all vertex strenght would additive. Of course if we dont know if thats true or not

The other advantage you get is better AA modes. Even though the 2nd card may not be as fast you still can have it help to do the higher or super AA modes. For example ATI users on PC have been with out an SS form of AA. So all those alpha texures (for example stair case railings in Count Strike) are not AA'd. Here with cross fire you get to blend them given a better AA'd image then any single card can give you today (well at a playable frame rate).

Again we have to wait to see if this is the case

Sir_Brizz said:

The problem with that is that chances are two "X800s" won't outperform a single card of the next gen stuff.

Click to expand...

Pretty much spot on. However its highly un-likely that you can get a next gen single card to give you the same IQ settings for AA and AF when compared to the "super AA" modes that cross fire is supposed to do.

For example any mixed mode of AA where use both MSAA and SSAA on todays cards will always kill your frame rate as to get SSAA on a single card you have to upsample that image to a higher res and that means more pixels which impacts not only the pixel fill rate and memory bandwidth of that card. With this super AA ATI gets away from the very expenisve task of upsampling the image.

of course if it works out that way we will just have to wait and see..

The_Head said:

To a certain extent anyway.

You can't use cards with Different sized frame buffers or number of pixel piplines. Other than that you can use anything

Click to expand...

One more thing to add. Its very very unlikely that you will be able to mix and match the current generation of vrs ATIs next generation parts based on the R520 core.

Consider why.... ATIs next gen will be a true 32bit core that uses PS3.0a (sigh here we go again with all the extra shader models). How are they going to be able to operate when one card (the new R520 core) is using all 32bit PS3.0 operations where as the older core is using all 24bit PS2.0. You can not have 1/2 the screen in 32 bit PS3.0 and the other half in 24bit PS2.0

What makes cross fire neat is for those that arlready have an PCIe x800+ from ati. Then for a "modest" investment they can upgrade to xfire and get the not only higher frame rates but better IQ that any single card can curretnly give. And those looking to get a system they can keep this in mind. Of course there is always something bigger and better. NV next gen part is right around the corner.

And not that I am trying to praise X-fire. I think it has some really neat things. But I want to see it reviewed and tested before I would spend a penny on it. I have been burned before by PR from companys... So while its neat stuff you have to take an wait and see approach. Besides todays NV SLI is better as you actually get one