CrossFire (also CrossFire X after release of the Spider desktop platform on November 19, 2007) is a brand name for ATI Technologies' multi-GPU solution, which competes with its rival nVidia's 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 AMR 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 Fury MAXX. Image File history File links ATI_CrossFire_Logo. ... “ATI” redirects here. ... “GPU” redirects here. ... NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ: NVDA) (pronounced IPA: ) is a U.S. corporation specializing in the manufacture of graphics processor technologies for workstations, desktop computers, and handhelds. ... For other meanings of SLI, please see SLI. NVIDIA SLI Logo Scalable Link Interface (SLI) is a brand name for a multi-GPU solution developed by NVIDIA for linking two (or more) video cards together to produce a single output. ... A graphics/video/display card/board/adapter is a computer component designed to convert the logical representation of visual information into a signal that can be used as input for a display medium. ... For other uses, see Hardware (disambiguation). ... AMR (ATi Multi-Rendering) is a three year old (as of 2005) technology which enables a single computer to use more than one video processor. ... Evans & Sutherland is a computer firm involved in the computer graphics field. ... The ATI Rage is a series of graphics chipsets offering 2D GUI acceleration, video acceleration, and 3D acceleration. ...

History, infrastructures and criticisms

CrossFire was first made available to the public on September 27, 2005.^[1] is the 270th day of the year (271st in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 2005 (MMV) was a common year starting on Saturday (link displays full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ...

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 CrossFire enabled card OR 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. A motherboard is the central or primary circuit board making up a complex electronic system, such as a modern computer. ... PCI Express (formerly known as 3GIO for 3rd Generation I/O, not to be mistaken with PCI-X) is an implementation of the PCI computer bus that uses existing PCI programming concepts and communications standards, but bases it on a much faster serial communications system. ...

An example of a past limitation in regard 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 CRT 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. Cathode ray tube employing electromagnetic focus and deflection Cutaway rendering of a color CRT: 1. ...

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. The Xpress 3200 is a new revision of the Xpress 200 computer chipset released by ATI. The chipset supports AMD64 processors of the Socket 939 and also of the Socket AM2. ...

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. Chained parallel port copy prevention dongles. ...

With the release of the Radeon X1950 Pro (RV570 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 SLi bridges, but different in physical and logical natures.^[2] ATI Radeon is a brand of graphics processing units (GPU) that has been manufactured by ATI Technologies since 2000 and the successor to their Rage line. ... ATIs R520 core (codenamed Fudo) is the foundation for a line of DirectX 9. ... Chained parallel port copy prevention dongles. ... For other meanings of SLI, please see SLI. NVIDIA SLI Logo Scalable Link Interface (SLI) is a brand name for a multi-GPU solution developed by NVIDIA for linking two (or more) video cards together to produce a single output. ...

Since the release of the codenamed Spider desktop platform from AMD on November 19, 2007, the CrossFire setup sees update with the maximum four video card support with the 790FX chipset, the CrossFire branding was then changed to "ATI CrossFire X". The setup, according to AMD's internal testing, will bring at least 3.2x performance increase in several games and applications which required massive graphics capabilities of the computer system, the setup is targeted to the enthusiast market. Later developments include a dual GPU solution to be released early 2008, the "ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2", featuring a CrossFire bridge directly included on the PCB circuitry, with one CrossFire connector for dual card, four GPU scalability. MSI and AMD have acknowledged that the Radeon HD 3870 X2 will support four card CrossFire, to reach octagonal GPU scalability. ^[3] Image File history File links No higher resolution available. ... The AMD 700 chipset series (also called as AMD 7-Series Chipsets) is a set of upcoming chipsets designed by ATI to be sold under the AMD brand and is scheduled to launch between the end of 2007 to the first half of 2008. ...

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. SLI, however, requires a motherboard which is SLI certified (usually based on nForce chipset, such as the nForce 590 SLI and nForce 680i SLI).
• 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.^[2]
• 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 while the other is routed to the southbridge 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.
• Industry first triple and quadraple video card solution, ahead of rival NVIDIA SLI's triple video card solution (named "triple SLI"), which the SLI setup needed a special bridge while CrossFire setup requires three normal CrossFire connectors to complete a quadraple video card setup, supporting maximum of eight monitors, while SLI can only support one monitor output which is restricted by software/driver.
• Comparing with NVIDIA's triple SLI setup which requires ultra high-end video cards (currently GeForce 8800 GTX/Ultra) with two MIO connectors, all ATI video cards with the CrossFire option have two CrossFire connector (except for Radeon HD 3870 X2, which is a dual GPU solution), which means CrossFire is enabled on hardware level, which makes CrossFire setups more affordable and easier to popularize.

Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC, SEHK: 4335), founded in 1968 as Integrated Electronics Corporation, is an American multinational corporation that is best known for designing and manufacturing microprocessors and specialized integrated circuits. ... Diagram of a motherboard chipset A chipset is a group of integrated circuits, or chips, that are designed to work together, and are usually marketed as a single product. ... PCI Express (formerly known as 3GIO for 3rd Generation I/O, not to be mistaken with PCI-X) is an implementation of the PCI computer bus that uses existing PCI programming concepts and communications standards, but bases it on a much faster serial communications system. ... For other meanings of SLI, please see SLI. NVIDIA SLI Logo Scalable Link Interface (SLI) is a brand name for a multi-GPU solution developed by NVIDIA for linking two (or more) video cards together to produce a single output. ... A motherboard is the central or primary circuit board making up a complex electronic system, such as a modern computer. ... The nForce is a computer motherboard chipset created by NVIDIA for AMD Athlon and Duron microprocessors. ... The nForce 500 computer chipset series, successor to the nForce4, was revealed by NVIDIA on 2006-03-07. ... The nForce 600 chipset was released in the first half of November 2006, coinciding with the GeForce 8 series launch on November 8, 2006. ... PCI Express (formerly known as 3GIO for 3rd Generation I/O, not to be mistaken with PCI-X) is an implementation of the PCI computer bus that uses existing PCI programming concepts and communications standards, but bases it on a much faster serial communications system. ... This article or section does not cite any references or sources. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... For other meanings of SLI, please see SLI. NVIDIA SLI Logo Scalable Link Interface (SLI) is a brand name for a multi-GPU solution developed by NVIDIA for linking two (or more) video cards together to produce a single output. ...

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 AFR. 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,^{[citation needed]} 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 PowerXpress capabilities.
• CrossFire performances depends heavily on the CPU and the device drivers. In the case that insufficient optimizations were made, a CrossFire setup may only poses a mere 10% performance increase, or even a drop in performance in 3D rendering. It is also true for initial versions of drivers for just-released video cards may not show immediate performance increase over a single GPU setup or a dramatic increase in performance.

Alternate Frame Rendering (AFR) is a parallel graphics rendering architecture, which combines the renderings of two or more graphics cards into a single monitor, in order to improve or accelerate the video rendering performance. ... Chained parallel port copy prevention dongles. ... Chained parallel port copy prevention dongles. ... Chained parallel port copy prevention dongles. ... The Radeon R700 is the engineering codename for an upcoming Graphics Processing Unit series which is in development by AMD, to be sold under the ATI brand. ... The AMD 700 chipset series (also called as AMD 7-Series Chipsets) is a set of upcoming chipsets designed by ATI to be sold under the AMD brand and is scheduled to launch between the end of 2007 to the first half of 2008. ...

See also

• Scalable Link Interface
• Comparison of ATI chipsets
• Comparison of AMD chipsets

For other meanings of SLI, please see SLI. NVIDIA SLI Logo Scalable Link Interface (SLI) is a brand name for a multi-GPU solution developed by NVIDIA for linking two (or more) video cards together to produce a single output. ... This is a comparison of chipsets, manufactured by ATI Technologies. ... This is a comparison of chipsets sold under the brand AMD, manufactured before May 2004 by the company itself, before the adoption of open platform approach as well as chipsets manufactured by ATI Technologies (ATI) after July 2006 as the completion of the ATI acquisition. ...

References

1. ^ Slashdot.
2. ^ ^{a b} AnandTech.
3. ^ Fudzilla report, retrieved November 27, 2007

External links

• ATI's CrossFire official site
• ATI CrossFireX Technology Information Site
• Hardocp.com's CrossFire preview
• Slashdot coverage on the release of the system