Crossfire Info

If it was guaranteed that all SLI-ready cards on the market today would be available in quantity a year or two down the line, then the "needs an identical card" issue would be for practical purposes irrelevant - you'd buy the best card on the market today, and you'd pick up a pair in a year's time.
The reason why it is a big issue is that it's very possible that you'll buy a card today and then, a year later, find a pair isn't available. Then you're screwed.

By contrast, the ATI solution only has two possible cards you could want, and these cards will probably be in circulation for a good long time as they're "Made by ATI" cards and thus will keep coming until ATI decides to stop, which one would imagine will be at least a year and a half, probably two or more, and by that point there'll be enough in circulation that finding one shouldn't be a huge deal. That's why it's relevant.

 

The only sensible thing to do in this case would be to tell A it can keep rendering however many frames it can in the same amount of time as card B can render one frame. That way there would be no loss, only gain. Albeit a small gain with this particular setup. Of course this would only work with some modes like AFR, but not supertiling.

 

That's either going to result in out-of-order frames or bursts of frames every few milliseconds.

 

It's a great way for offline single player games to experience "jump back" lag effects tho!

 

Gee, I wonder what else such logic could apply to.

 

I was, of course, not serious when I said X850+X300. A much more practical combination would be X850XT+X800XTPE or some such thing that is currently "not allowed" for some reason or another.

 

That's theoretical of course. I never claimed it to be easy, or even possible.

 

Discussions about PDF's and their creation move here.

 

This mode is neing enabled for SLI systems in some upcoming drivers.

 

Now this is the kind of "King of the Hill" competition that I can support. . .

 

http://www.hkepc.com/hwdb/ati-crossfire-5.htm

 

I sense a "we scale better!" chest-beating coming on from the NV camp. . .

 

And ATi has the excuse of CrossFire beta-drivers.

 

You mean for those who prefer the unproven possibility of future improvements from buggy, immature technology rather than enjoying proven, mature solutions powering thousands of happy gamers systems?

 

Expect a call from DP offering you a job

 

Oh, I doubt it --my ability to spin is limited by the truth.

 

Almost whole year of driver-tuning, bug-fixing, cheating and SLI systems still provide only 6% better scalability, than ATi's new, buggy and immature technology?