Why no x1300 Crossfire reviews/previews/tech demos yet ?

[FrameBuffer]

With the recent introduction of the x1x00 series of GPUs by ATI it seems things have been decent as far as product availability, everyday x1800 XLs are showing up more and more places (both B&M and Online), however the 1300 series seems to be absent.

Im sure demand for a low level (performance wise) part isn't all that high, however imo the 1300 series brings the most to the plate as a whole to the industry in that it truly elevates the minimum standards. With exception of the ringbus memory, iirc the feature set of the entire 1x00 series is the same ?! Another area that is different is that the 1300 series allows SLI/Crossfire over the PCIe bus as opposed to the 1600/1800 needing a mastercard. Is this correct ?

If this is correct, then why has there been no reviews anywhere into the 1300's crossfire implementation ? Is it a driver issue where ATI has not enabled Crossfire at all yet unless you happen to have an X850 MC ? Is it a product availability issue ? Wasn't it just 10-12 days ago that crossfire setups were reviewed webwide ? wouldn't this mean that there are at least crossfire setups available to reviewers ?

Again I know the 1300 series is the least attractive for the enthusiast market however with a cheap enough price and availability (100-150 x2 + 150 for motherboard) it would seem that $300 - $450 is a decent price for someone on the edge of going such a multi-gpu platform while not going broke.
For example, as an AGP card user, if I was to go to a PCIe platform it would seem that the ATI solutions (albeit more expensive than an NV equal) is equal on performance and that multigpu might not be too bad a platform to build on. Moving from AGP to PCIe involves a new motherboard no matter who makes the chipset (an exception or two being available..), so spending a few bucks extra for the extra upgrade possibility (dual PEG vs single PCIe 16x) is a bit intriging. The x1300 series being the cheapest (ATI) multi-GPU product atm, may not bring about cheers of joy and thoughts of 1600x1200 @ 16X AAA and 8xAF however it does allow a cheap means of exploration into multi-GPU platform offered by ATI.

Are there plans for b3D (or another site) in the short future to address any of the concerns of the value (enthusiast) and look into Value crossfire. yes I am aware that everyone and their brother is interested in how dual x1800 XTs on a FX59 @ 4.5Gigasomethingorotherertz but only a few people actually will go out and purchase such a setup at once. How about for once a review that Joe gamer could look at and ponder its price/performace/upgradability ? As I said the motherboard is an expense that has to be taken no matter what choice of components is taken however the choice of graphics (also dependent upon choice of chipset, for the time being). So WHy oh WHY can we, the not so rich and working folk who dont upgrade with every new product launch for once get an article that will help US ?

 

[Skrying]

Uhh, value crossfire/SLI = dumb. Its pretty easy, often times the cost of buying two low ends is just as expensive as the bottom high range and the two low ranges actually perform slower.

Why do people want to go with Crossfire/SLI just to say they have it? I dont get it. "Yes, let me spend extra money for a slower performing system!"

 

[Geo]

Uhh, value crossfire/SLI = dumb. Its pretty easy, often times the cost of buying two low ends is just as expensive as the bottom high range and the two low ranges actually perform slower.

Why do people want to go with Crossfire/SLI just to say they have it? I dont get it. "Yes, let me spend extra money for a slower performing system!"

Umm, what pricing are you looking at? Two X1300 Pro are still $150 cheaper than an X1800XL.

I think a lot of it is just the enthusiast (without an enthusiast budget) desire to play with new tech. And wotthehell, so long as they don't need a master card sku to enable it, what exactly does it hurt the IHV to make this available? If exactly three people decide to do it, it is still all gravy. Frankly, I tend to think it comes down to "NV did it, so we need to match up".

 

[nutball]

Wouldn't value-Crossfire enable the use of the stupidly-high AA modes? (the review seems to suggest it would):

"We are told that the X1300 configuration supports the same types of Crossfire modes (SuperTiling, Scissor, AFR and Super AA) as the other Crossfire configurations...

So if you wanted to run at 14x AA never mind the frame-rates, dual-X1300 might be of interest.

 

[FrameBuffer]

Umm, what pricing are you looking at? Two X1300 Pro are still $150 cheaper than an X1800XL.

I think a lot of it is just the enthusiast (without an enthusiast budget) desire to play with new tech. And wotthehell, so long as they don't need a master card sku to enable it, what exactly does it hurt the IHV to make this available? If exactly three people decide to do it, it is still all gravy. Frankly, I tend to think it comes down to "NV did it, so we need to match up".

pretty much sums up my point. Im sure I'm not the only person (wife calls "geek") who is rather interested in ATI's implementation of Crossfire, however my pockets don't run deep (particularly this time of year as we head into the holiday season). The x1300 series use of Crossfire by means of the PCIe bus rather than the need for a special "Master Card" is a plus in my opinion. It would be nice to see a comparison of budget SLI/Crossfire products, such as 6600 SLI vs 1300 Xfire, and what each has to offer in performance/features and usability.

I don't doubt that in the long run the 1800 would be a better buy however the move from AGP to PCIe requires more than a simple card swap and if such a task is to be undertaken it would be nice for the consumer to see ALL available options, even those typically delegated to the realm of "Enthusiast Market". With current x1800 XLs running approx $450 USD (obviously prices will fall as time passes) it would seem to me that an investment in a crossfire/sli platform (ie motherboard + PEG) might actually add a bit of longevitiy to a product.

Just as the original Voodoo/Voodoo2 SLI cards added the option of buy one now, then another later (when prices are cheaper), it would seem that Crossfire/SLI offers much the same. The difference being that when 3Dfx brought to market their SLI, the platform for which it was based on (PCI) was already firmly planted within the market. Surely as time passes PCIe will to continue to grow and at some point be the dominant choice (of course by then a new and improved "interface" will surely be just around the corner). The cheapman's SLI/crossfire looks to becoming more and more affordable. What I find most exciting is not the (lack of) performance of the x1300 however it raises the bar for the "minimum" features and offers just as diverse a feature set as its higher performing (higher costing) brethren, the x1800/x1600.

Hell if I was in a position that I could easily drop 1K USD I would entertain the idea of buying a nF4 SLI + 6600 x2 and Xpress200 XF + 1300 x2 and do it myself, unfortunately I can't. That is where we, the little people, look towards sites as B3D to review such setups and look at the plethora of information provided and draw our conclusions as to whether a purchase of such would be worth it given the buyers wants/needs.

/drops to knees ..

PLEASE, Oh wise B3D. Hear US out,.. PLEASE for the little guys down here who don't have access to "Operation Deep Pockets",.. how about a budget SLI/Crossfire preview/review/demo (call it what you will) ...

/grovel

Oh one last thing .. i B3D ;-)

 

[Moloch]

Wouldn't value-Crossfire enable the use of the stupidly-high AA modes? (the review seems to suggest it would):


So if you wanted to run at 14x AA never mind the frame-rates, dual-X1300 might be of interest.

I'd set my sights at 8x supperaa at best with those parts at a decent res

 

[nutball]

I'd set my sights at 8x supperaa at best with those parts at a decent res

Depends what you're playing, some games only need 20-30fps.

 

[Moloch]

Depends what you're playing, some games only need 20-30fps.

what? rts's?

 

[FrameBuffer]

Was reading an Interview over at T-Break (see: http://www.tbreak.com/reviews/article.php?cat=edit&id=408&pagenumber=1 ), and I noticed that David Nalasco spoke a bit about SLI/Xfire "over the PCIe" bus and touches upon the 1300 series Xfire w/o a composite chip.

(see: http://www.tbreak.com/reviews/article.php?cat=edit&id=408&pagenumber=2 )

So if the x1300 doesn’t have a compositing engine and you can have both of them work together, that means the link between the two cards isn’t necessarily required except with the PCI Express. Does the PCI Express bus doesn’t have the bandwidth to support higher-end cards at the moment?

Yes exactly, because basically after you draw each frame you have to transfer the results- either half of the frame or the whole frame using AFR to the other card. But if your total frame rate is not that high then that’s less frames to transfer. Even on the x1300 we have to do some special things in our driver to minimize the amount of data that goes over the bus otherwise its not (very) usable on an 8X PCI Express.

On an x1800, if you plug them in and not have a link and we were to enable a software crossfire mode over PCI Express, we could still get games to work but they’d be 20-30% faster with the second card which is not really that interesting. You’d want 2x or 80% (gains) and to get those we obviously need an interlink. With the x1300 we could get that 80% in games with PCI Express using some optimizations.

Im not very mathematically inclined (always hated math but loved science .. go figure), if the x1300 series uses AFR that means that one full scene is sent over the PCIe bus correct ? How much data does a scene at 1280x1024 @ 32bit take ? Would the PCIe bus at 8x offer enough bandwidth at say 85% efficiency (I guess 85% although numbers may actually be higher/lower, simply because I don't think it would be possible to use 100% of the bus effeftively. Future driver optimizations may adress this ,.. yes ? I guess what I need to know is PCIe's effective bandwith per "lane" then multiply that by 8 to give me the available bus bandwidth. From what I understand PCIe is bi-directional, in that it can send and/or receive info in the same cycle where as older PCI bus was able to send or receive.

From there I guess the option arises of using future motherboards that offer 2 16x PEG slots and using this PCIe bus style SLI/Crossfire to allow higher level gpus (such as x1600s) to do so. What about R400 series of GPUs ? what exactly does it take to do Crossfire/SLI over the PCIe bus, being that there is no composting chip to add/blend the scenes or would AFR being the only available technique ?


Edit: ok did a little homework and found that PCIe allows upto 250MB/s (per "lane"), so an 8X PCIe slot would have about 2GB/s (which oddly enough is right about where AGP 8X sits about IIRC). Then of course doubling that in the form of the newer dual 16x (nForce32 SLI) would acheive approx. up to 4GB/s.