Crossfire X @ Tech Report
Sunday 16th March 2008, 05:05:00 PM, written by Rys
Time to get back on the horse and sort this front page out, starting
with a link to TR's analysis of Crossfire X, how it works, how it can
scale and what platforms make for attractive Crossfire X systems.
Crossfire X extends the basic Crossfire idea to more than 2 GPUs, letting you get access to multi GPU rendering on pretty much as many GPUs as you can cram into a system.
We've discussed here in the past that Crossfire forms an integral part of the future of performance graphics acceleration at AMD, and Crossfire X debuting just now is the fruit of some serious labour there over the last year or so.
From TR:
"CrossFire X's performance and feature set will be more or less optimal depending on the chipset's topology and the motherboard's allocation of PCIe lanes. AMD cites its own 790FX chipset as the most optimal possible config, where the motherboard could dedicate eight lanes of PCIe 2.0 bandwidth to each of four PCIe x16 slots. On the other hand, Intel's P35 chipset would be less than ideal, since it has 16 lanes of PCIe 1.1 connectivity feeding a single PCIe x16 slot off of the north bridge chip, while the second PCIe x16 slot hangs off of the south bridge and has only four lanes connected. The P35's lower bandwidth will impose some limitations on CrossFire X: image compositing must be done in hardware (so you'll definitely need to have those CrossFire bridge connectors attached) and OpenGL support won't be possible."
Scott's article goes in depth about what's possible on Intel and AMD platforms, showing off a new 32x Super AA mode in the process, made possible by the combination of GPUs in the system.
You can find the full article here, and it's a recommended read.
Crossfire X extends the basic Crossfire idea to more than 2 GPUs, letting you get access to multi GPU rendering on pretty much as many GPUs as you can cram into a system.
We've discussed here in the past that Crossfire forms an integral part of the future of performance graphics acceleration at AMD, and Crossfire X debuting just now is the fruit of some serious labour there over the last year or so.
From TR:
"CrossFire X's performance and feature set will be more or less optimal depending on the chipset's topology and the motherboard's allocation of PCIe lanes. AMD cites its own 790FX chipset as the most optimal possible config, where the motherboard could dedicate eight lanes of PCIe 2.0 bandwidth to each of four PCIe x16 slots. On the other hand, Intel's P35 chipset would be less than ideal, since it has 16 lanes of PCIe 1.1 connectivity feeding a single PCIe x16 slot off of the north bridge chip, while the second PCIe x16 slot hangs off of the south bridge and has only four lanes connected. The P35's lower bandwidth will impose some limitations on CrossFire X: image compositing must be done in hardware (so you'll definitely need to have those CrossFire bridge connectors attached) and OpenGL support won't be possible."
Scott's article goes in depth about what's possible on Intel and AMD platforms, showing off a new 32x Super AA mode in the process, made possible by the combination of GPUs in the system.
You can find the full article here, and it's a recommended read.
Tagging
ati ± radeon, crossfirex, hd, rv670, techreport
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