CrossFire™ - FAQs
1. What is the difference
between ATI’s CrossFire™ platform
and the competitor’s solutions?
2. What graphics cards work with CrossFire?
3. What is the difference
between CrossFire Ready graphics cards and CrossFire Edition
graphics cards?
4. When will CrossFire graphics cards be available?
5. What motherboard is required
for a CrossFire system?
6. When will CrossFire Ready
motherboards be available?
7. What happens if customers
have the wrong combination of products?
8. What happens when you
pair a 12-pipe CrossFire Edition card with a 16-pipe
CrossFire Ready card?
9. What happens when your CrossFire Edition card and and a compatible standard Radeon (CrossFire Ready) graphics card have different clock speeds?
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1.
What is the difference between ATI’s CrossFire
platform and the competitor’s solution?
A. The principal
differences between the competitor’s multi-GPU
solutions and ATI’s CrossFire are:
- CrossFire can enable multi-GPU rendering on all applications.
- CrossFire supports more rendering modes. Supertiling
evenly distributes the workload between the two GPUs
to improve performance. CrossFire can use multiple GPUs
to improve image quality rather than performance
with Super antialiasing (AA) modes. Supertiling and
SuperAA modes are only supported on the CrossFire
platform.
- CrossFire is an open platform that supports multiple
components and graphics cards that can be mixed and
matched in a single system. Competitive multi-GPU
solutions are
constrained to supporting identical graphics cards.
2.
What graphics cards work with CrossFire?
A.CrossFire requires a CrossFire Edition graphics card
and a compatible standard Radeon (CrossFire Ready) graphics
card from the same series.
The Radeon™ X850 CrossFire Edition card can be paired
with any PCI Express Radeon X850 graphics card (Radeon
X850 PRO, Radeon X850 XT or Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition)
from ATI or any of its partners including cards previously
sold.
The Radeon X800 CrossFire Edition cards can be paired
with any PCI Express Radeon X800 graphics card (Radeon
X800, Radeon X800 PRO, Radeon X800 XL, Radeon X800
XT or Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition) from ATI or any
of
its partners.
Because of the backwards compatibility of the platform,
there are already almost a million people who are
CrossFire Ready.
3. What is the difference
between CrossFire Ready graphics cards and CrossFire
Edition graphics cards?
A. CrossFire Edition graphics cards include a “compositing
engine” chip on-board. This chip takes the partially
rendered image from the CrossFire Ready graphics card,
and merges it with the partially rendered image from
the CrossFire Edition graphics card. The result is a
complete frame rendered at up to twice the performance
of a single graphics card. The CrossFire compositing
engine is a programmable chip that offers flexible support
of different graphics cards, allows a superior feature
set (advanced compositing modes), and enables further
enhancements to be quickly implemented on next generation
products. The CrossFire compositing engine also offers
a performance benefit over combining the final image
on the GPU.
4.
When will CrossFire graphics cards be available?
A. Radeon X850 CrossFire Edition
cards will be in production at the end of June and available
mid-July. Radeon X800 CrossFire Edition cards will be
available early in August.
5.
What motherboard is required for a CrossFire system?
A. A Radeon Xpress 200 CrossFire edition motherboard
is the optimal platform for CrossFire. More components
will be announced as CrossFire Ready when they are available
.
6.
When will CrossFire Ready motherboards be available?
A. Radeon Xpress 200 CrossFire edition motherboards
will be available from our partners beginning in June.
7.
What happens if customers have the wrong combination of products?
A.
If a customer incorrectly configures their system they
will not see the performance benefits of CrossFire. All
three CrossFire components, a CrossFire Ready graphics
card, a CrossFire Ready motherboard and a CrossFire Edition
co-processor graphics card, must be installed correctly
to benefit from the CrossFire multi-GPU platform.
8.
What happens when you pair a 12-pipe CrossFire Edition card with a 16-pipe card?
A. In this scenario both cards will operate as 12-pipe
cards while in CrossFire mode.
9.
What happens when your CrossFire Edition card and and a compatible standard Radeon (CrossFire Ready) graphics card have different clock speeds?
A. Both cards will continue to operate at their individual
clock speeds.
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