With the recent announcement of the ability of the new Radeon videocards to be mixed and matched in CrossFire, this got me thinking on some possibilities.
First, if the ability to mix and match across completely different generations exists, this will give consumers quite a bit of flexibility when it comes to upgrading videocards. For example: Say I buy a Radeon 3870 now. If when the R700 comes out, I can stick the R700 in and run the 3870 and the R700 in CrossFire for even more performance, this will be great because I can keep using old parts rather than throwing them away or selling them.
The other thing is that this means that there is the potential for vastly improved CrossFire support in the drivers. One of the weaknesses of CrossFire and SLI is that the drivers can be somewhat flakey. However, if different videocards are able to be mixed and matched over CrossFire, this means that there has to be some kind of common platform between the different cards. A common platform is much better than having different platforms for different cards (ie, I can only match my Radeon 2900 with another Radeon 2900, and my 1950 Pro with another 1950 Pro). Obviously there was some commonality in CrossFire for the old cards, but it seems that the differences have been eliminated now that we are able to mix and match different cards going forward with the 3000 series.
Or maybe I'm just reading too much into this, either way I think it's quite interesting.
First, if the ability to mix and match across completely different generations exists, this will give consumers quite a bit of flexibility when it comes to upgrading videocards. For example: Say I buy a Radeon 3870 now. If when the R700 comes out, I can stick the R700 in and run the 3870 and the R700 in CrossFire for even more performance, this will be great because I can keep using old parts rather than throwing them away or selling them.
The other thing is that this means that there is the potential for vastly improved CrossFire support in the drivers. One of the weaknesses of CrossFire and SLI is that the drivers can be somewhat flakey. However, if different videocards are able to be mixed and matched over CrossFire, this means that there has to be some kind of common platform between the different cards. A common platform is much better than having different platforms for different cards (ie, I can only match my Radeon 2900 with another Radeon 2900, and my 1950 Pro with another 1950 Pro). Obviously there was some commonality in CrossFire for the old cards, but it seems that the differences have been eliminated now that we are able to mix and match different cards going forward with the 3000 series.
Or maybe I'm just reading too much into this, either way I think it's quite interesting.
Facebook
Twitter