Not the typical crossfire vs. sli question, i swear!
I was doing some reading about ATI's crossfire setup, and i noticed it has some pretty cool features that aren't possible with SLI.
It has both the rendering modes that SLI has, which are of course alternate frame rendering, as well as frame splitting (with the horizontal split between cards)
But ATI's crossfire ALSO has some crazy feature where the frame can be split up like a checkerboard, with 50% of the tiny squares being rendered by one card, and the other half by the 2nd card.
It also has a rendering mode for games that aren't even optimized for crossfire/SLI compatability, where both cards render the same picture, but it splits the actual elements of the picture, and then overlays the two frames over top of each other!
And the thing i was most blown away by is that the crossfire setup is capable of using a THIRD GPU that does nothing but process logic, leaving the GPU's of the primary cards only having to render the frames, with the logic already calculated and provided for them!
Anyone know if nvidia has any plans to do some sort of SLI 2.0 to adopt some of these features? Because honestly, it sounds like once ATI comes out with a 8800 competitor, things may definitely shift toward ATI's advantage.
The dedicated logic processor is an impressive idea! As is the overlay frames to accelerate games that aren't configured for SLI.
Only downfall is that the crossfire requires not only the internal bridge, like SLI, but an oldschool external DVI loopback cable between the two cards.
Do you guys think these features will give ATI an advantage, come their dx10 compatable GPU's?
Just wanted some opinions. Seems like ATI is more in the game than people give them credit for. That's some scary smart technology.
I was doing some reading about ATI's crossfire setup, and i noticed it has some pretty cool features that aren't possible with SLI.
It has both the rendering modes that SLI has, which are of course alternate frame rendering, as well as frame splitting (with the horizontal split between cards)
But ATI's crossfire ALSO has some crazy feature where the frame can be split up like a checkerboard, with 50% of the tiny squares being rendered by one card, and the other half by the 2nd card.
It also has a rendering mode for games that aren't even optimized for crossfire/SLI compatability, where both cards render the same picture, but it splits the actual elements of the picture, and then overlays the two frames over top of each other!
And the thing i was most blown away by is that the crossfire setup is capable of using a THIRD GPU that does nothing but process logic, leaving the GPU's of the primary cards only having to render the frames, with the logic already calculated and provided for them!
Anyone know if nvidia has any plans to do some sort of SLI 2.0 to adopt some of these features? Because honestly, it sounds like once ATI comes out with a 8800 competitor, things may definitely shift toward ATI's advantage.
The dedicated logic processor is an impressive idea! As is the overlay frames to accelerate games that aren't configured for SLI.
Only downfall is that the crossfire requires not only the internal bridge, like SLI, but an oldschool external DVI loopback cable between the two cards.
Do you guys think these features will give ATI an advantage, come their dx10 compatable GPU's?
Just wanted some opinions. Seems like ATI is more in the game than people give them credit for. That's some scary smart technology.
