ATI's Multi-GPU Solution: CrossFire
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson on May 30, 2005 9:00 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Pricing and Availability
What ATI has here at Computex is a very early sample of what CrossFire can do. Much like NVIDIA has had, ATI will encounter growing pains of their own with CrossFire. Most motherboard manufacturers are telling us to expect CrossFire motherboards by the end of July at the earliest, but more realistically, we can expect retail availability sometime in August.The price point will be competitive with nForce4 Ultra (not SLI) motherboards, thanks to more aggressive chipset pricing on behalf of ATI. Also note that not all manufacturers will be producing both AMD and Intel CrossFire solutions. For example, MSI is producing an AMD CrossFire motherboard, while ASUS is currently only producing an Intel CrossFire solution. The problem is that most CrossFire manufacturers are also nForce4 SLI manufacturers and they have to be careful not to confuse their customers by offering two products that compete with one another. Choice is a good thing, but from a sales standpoint, it can sometimes be a difficult pill to swallow.
Despite the strong showing at Computex, most motherboard manufacturers have stated that they don't expect ATI's CrossFire chipsets to really make a dent in this year's shipments. ATI's high-end chipset market share will still remain very low in comparison to NVIDIA, but the long term outlooks are definitely positive. Much like they have done in the graphics industry, ATI will provide good balance to NVIDIA in the chipset business now that NVIDIA is king of the high-end AMD market.
The pricing of CrossFire X800 and X850 cards is listed in the following chart along with the existing products that each CrossFire part supports.
On the high end, we are definitely looking at an expensive upgrade. Those who want the ultimate in performance can be expected to shell out the cash. The X800 versions CrossFire are a little more compelling in terms of affordability.
It will be interesting to see how these CrossFire parts move in price as they are very targeted in application as opposed to NVIDIA's parts, which are marketed as standalone graphics cards that could be used in SLI.
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Panndor - Monday, June 13, 2005 - link
Lets hope that this endevor by ATI doesn't end up in the same situation at the RAGE Fury Maxx they came up with. The last time they tried this they screwed it up and then cut support for the card like it never existed.Looks promising, but I could see problems if they allow different hardware to run in a combined mode as well.
Competition is good so maybe this will bring down the price of the boards and the cards now.
vision33r - Wednesday, June 1, 2005 - link
Those 2 X850XT PE cards add up to $1000+ alone while price of 6800U are going down.I think the biggest prob is not if this works or not, is if the mainboard performance is sacrificed due to the ATI north-bridge. I don't gave 90% of the time on my system, I can't sacrifice losing system performance for gaming perf.
xsilver - Wednesday, June 1, 2005 - link
what's funny is that a few months after the xfire is released, nvidia will probably announce SLI v2.0 and then everyone will talk about how that's so coolWesley Fink - Wednesday, June 1, 2005 - link
#49 & #50 - The Uli 1573 we've seen paired with Crossfire DOES suport NCQ. this was confirmed this afternoon with engineers here at Computex. The upcoming ULI 1575 southtridge supports both Sata 2 and NCQ.We also saw demos of Splinter Cell on Crossfire with the 2.0 Shader. The demos were at 1280x1024 with all eye candy enabled. Frame rates in the various demos were 118 to 120. Since we did not have reference benches for Splinter Cell, it didn't make much sense to publish these results in the launch article. What we have seen is very promising, but we need more "hands-on" benchmarking before we can say much more.
Wesley Fink
mkruer - Wednesday, June 1, 2005 - link
#51 That is the real question to be answered. My guess is that ATI will work on a SLI board and visa versa unless there is something specifically in hard coded that prevents the second slot from being used by anything other the chipsets manufactures video card, which is highly unlikely. From the BIOS and driver standpoint the MB is either has 1x16 PCIex slot or 2x8 PCIex slots.elecrzy - Tuesday, May 31, 2005 - link
its possible to have Crossfire work on the NF4/945/955. Its just that ATI won't support them through the drivers. Sigh...kmmatney - Tuesday, May 31, 2005 - link
Does the ULi southbridge have NCQ support?weblizard - Tuesday, May 31, 2005 - link
No Sata II or NCQ support. That's all I need to know to NOT want a crossfire system.bob661 - Tuesday, May 31, 2005 - link
#47I had the Abit board with the AMD chipset on it. Worked flawlessly. I gave it to a friend when I upgraded that box and it was running until last year when he upgraded his box.
sprockkets - Tuesday, May 31, 2005 - link
26# That was the 760MPX or the dual processor chipset. Don't recall any irongate issues (that was 750, 760 was the DDR version, right?)