Ati Crossfire

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4. Questions - Got a question about Ati Crossfire then search the Forums, FAQ's, Blogs etc. Don't be afraid to ask .....

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6. Returns - still worried that even after all of the above your Ati Crossfire wont be what you want? Check out the returns policy. There is so much competition now that someone, somewhere is bound to offer the terms that you are comfortable with.

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8. Security - check for the yellow padlock on the Ati Crossfire site before you buy, and the s after http:/ /i.e. https:// = a secure site

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10. Payment - ready to pay for your Ati Crossfire, then use your credit card or PayPal! Be aware of companies that don't accept them, there may be genuine reasons but given the huge amount of choice you have when buying online there is no reason at all not to buy via credit card or PayPal.

CrossFire is a brand name for ATI Technologies' multi-Graphics processing unit solution, which competes with its rival nVidia Scalable Link Interface (SLI). The technology allows a pair of graphics cards to be used in a single computer to improve graphics performance. Although only recently announced for consumer level hardware, similar technology known as ATI Multi Rendering has been used for some time in professional grade cards for flight simulators and similar applications available from Evans & Sutherland, ATI had also previously released a similar dual RAGE 128 consumer card called the ATI Rage#Alternate Frame Rendering.

History, infrastructures and criticisms CrossFire was first made available to the public on September 27, 2005.

The system requires a CrossFire-compliant motherboard with a pair of PCI Express (PCIe) graphics cards, which can be enabled via either hardware or software. Radeon x800s, x850s, x1800s and x1900s come in a 'CrossFire Edition' that has 'master' capability built into the hardware. One must buy a Master card, and pair it with a normal card from the same series. Radeon x1300s and x1600s have no 'CrossFire Edition' but are enabled via software. ATI currently has not created the infrastructure to allow FireGL cards to be set up in a CrossFire configuration. Another point to note is that the 'slave' graphics card needs to be from the same family as the 'master', regardless of whether the 'master' is designated by the hardware or by software.

An example of a past limitation in regards to a Master-card configuration would be the CrossFire implementation in the Radeon X850 XT Master Card using a compositing chip from Silicon Image (SiI 163B TMDS) which limits a X850 CrossFire setup to a resolution of 1600×1200 @60 Hz or 1920×1440 @52 Hz and was a problem for some Cathode ray tube owners wishing to use CrossFire to play games at high resolutions. As many people would find a 60 Hz refresh rate with a CRT to strain ones eyes, the practical limit becomes 1280×1024, which did not push CrossFire enough to justify the cost.

However, with ATI's release of "CrossFire Xpress 3200" motherboard chipset, the 'master' card is no longer required for every "CrossFire Ready" card (with the exception of the Radeon X1900 series). With the CrossFire Xpress 3200, two normal cards can be run in a Crossfire setup. This move is viewed as an overall improvement in market strategy due to the fact that Crossfire Master cards are expensive, in very high demand, and largely unavailable at the retail level.

Although the CrossFire Xpress 3200 chipset is indeed capable of CrossFire through the PCI-e bus for every Radeon series below the X1900s, the driver accommodations for this CrossFire method has not yet materialized for the X1800 series. ATI has said that future revisions of the Catalyst driver suite will contain what is required for X1800 dongleless CrossFire, but has not yet mentioned a specific date.

With the release of the Radeon X1950 Pro (Radeon R520 GPU), ATI has revised CrossFire's connection infrastructure to further eliminate the need for past Y-dongle/Master card and slave card configurations for CrossFire to operate. ATI's CrossFire connector is now a ribbon like connector attached to the top of each graphics adapter, similar to nVidia's Scalable Link Interface bridges, but different in physical and logical natures.

Advantages over NVIDIA SLI

ATi has opened the Crossfire architecture to Intel, allowing CrossFire to be enabled on certain Intel chipsets which boast two 16x PCI-E slots. Scalable Link Interface, however, requires a motherboard which is SLI certified (usually based on nForce chipset, such as the NForce 500 and nForce 600).
The new ATI CrossFire bridge has a higher bit width than SLI, while clocked a little slower. The connection is split into two 12 bit parallel channels, while both connectors are not technically needed for hardware CrossFire operation, software does not currently permit CrossFire to be run on a single CrossFire bridge. Newer SLI implementations, only seen on the GeForce 8800GTX, also have two connectors, although the second is currently not being used. This new bridge also allows for easier introduction of multi-GPU configurations beyond pairs.
The ATi CrossFire Xpress 3200 chipset has integrated 40 PCI Express lanes in the northbridge, which means that both the PCIe x16 slot get full 16 lanes bandwidth electrically connected to a single hub, where as in a full 32-lane supportive NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI chipset, from the two PCI Express x16 slots, one is routed to the northbridge (computing) while the other is routed to the southbridge (computing) thus 16+16 lane ATi Crossfire has lower latencies for inter-GPU transfer when rendering tiled frames or alternate frames compared to 16x+16x lane NVIDIA SLI.

Disadvantages compared to SLI

If an OpenGL game does not have a Crossfire profile, the Catalyst AI system will set the rendering mode to Scissor by default, with no way to change it to a more suitable or faster mode, such as Alternate Frame Rendering. However SLI allows the rendering mode to be set for each application manually, even for games which do not have an existing profile. It should be noted that setting Catalyst AI to 'Advanced' allows manual mode setting for Direct 3D games, but not OpenGL games, to AFR.
The first generation CrossFire implementations (the Radeon X1800 and X1900 series) require an external y-cable/dongle to operate in CrossFire mode due to the PCI-e bus not being able to provide enough bandwidth to run CrossFire without losing a significant amount of performance. This is a disadvantage due to the Y-Dongle's stiff and rigid properties as well as that from a technical standpoint the dongle might create some latency, which would lower the scaling effectiveness of such a CrossFire setup. This disadvantage does not occur as lower to mid-range CrossFire solutions do not require a Master card, instead allowing the user to use two identical 'standard' cards.
As of September 2007, CrossFire is not available for notebooks, while nVidia's SLI is. It was reported that future notebook GPUs based on the Radeon R700 will feature CrossFire, and AMD 700 chipset series#PowerXpress capabilities.