Crossfire - should ATi make it an open standard?

[Lonyo]

OK, there is logic in this:
nVidia were early into the chipset game for AMD and have a large userbase with SLI motherboards. If ATi allowed Crossfire on SLI boards, then they would have a large number of users who could use Crossfire, ie: all the nForce 4 SLI users, plus their own chipset users.
This could in theory boost the adoption of Crossfire based systems, although it may hurt their own motherboard sales.

Obviously there are two things which could influence this:
Margins on motherboard chipsets
Margins on graphics cards (specifically high end).

This is not a thread about Crossfire being good/bad/late/better/worse than SLI etc etc, but more about the benefits for ATi of allowing Crossfire on other chipsets (beyond their own and the 975 from Intel).


For nVidia there is not such an issue because they have a fair dominance in the AMD desktop chipset market and so there are lots of SLI mobos being sold anyway, plus SLI is more easily available.
It does seem however that the adoption of Crossfire could be markedly sped up by allowing people to have Crossfire on SLI mobos as well as their own.


(It might also win ATi some fanboy favour, and bring them back to the good in the eyes of the public, possibly reducing the impact of all their paper launches, and they could use it as a nice marketing tool: The FIRST open PCIe dual graphics card standard! - Come get yours)

 

[fierydemise]

If SLI and Crossfire motherboards arn't compatable with each others systems then there is a market just waiting for someone to jump on

 

[nitromullet]

I think they should make it open, and I think they will if it's possible. There is the possibility that it's not ATI preventing Xfire from working on nForce boards.

This is an example from of a similar situation from a different time...

I had an nForce2 mobo and a 9700Pro, which I wanted to run under linux. Now, aside from ATI's poor linux drivers there was another issue. NV included the AGP_GART driver (a mobo driver for using AGP) along with thier video card driver, but not in a standalone package. Essentially, what this meant was that you had to be using a NV card along with the NV video driver to be able to enable anything higher than PCI speeds out of your AGP slot, which made any video card other than an NV card useless for anything 3D accelerated. This pretty much prevented anyone from using an ATI card with Linux on the nForce2 platform. Don't get me wrong, ATI's Linux drivers were abysmal on their own, but NV had packaged their drivers in a non-standard way simply to prevent other cards from being used on their platform. I don't imagine that they are going to be any more cooperative with ATI in regards to making Xfire work on SLI motherboards.

 

[Lonyo]

Originally posted by: nitromullet
I think they should make it open, and I think they will if it's possible. There is the possibility that it's not ATI preventing Xfire from working on nForce boards.

This is an example from of a similar situation from a different time...

I had an nForce2 mobo and a 9700Pro, which I wanted to run under linux. Now, aside from ATI's poor linux drivers there was another issue. NV included the AGP_GART driver (a mobo driver for using AGP) along with thier video card driver, but not in a standalone package. Essentially, what this meant was that you had to be using a NV card along with the NV video driver to be able to enable anything higher than PCI speeds out of your AGP slot, which made any video card other than an NV card useless for anything 3D accelerated. This pretty much prevented anyone from using an ATI card with Linux on the nForce2 platform. Don't get me wrong, ATI's Linux drivers were abysmal on their own, but NV had packaged their drivers in a non-standard way simply to prevent other cards from being used on their platform. I don't imagine that they are going to be any more cooperative with ATI in regards to making Xfire work on SLI motherboards.

I was basing it off this comment:

As seen on the ULi two-chip M1695, the M1697 fully supports x16 PCI Express video, which can also be configured as dual x8 PCIe slots. Of course, unlike NVIDIA or ATI, ULi is not a manufacturer of GPUs. Without this video card background, ULi is at the mercy of NVIDIA and ATI to add support for the ULi chipset to their video drivers. NVIDIA has been slow to support any other chipset with their SLI solution, but ATI has shown some willingness to open the Crossfire standard with their recent licensing of the Intel 975x chipset for Crossfire. Ideally, it would be best for users to be able to use their pair of video cards in any board that had the two PCIe video slots, but video card manufacturers have other ideas about what the consumer needs.

Link
Suggesting that the two major gfx card mfrs just need to add support in their drivers for other chipsets (which seems reasonable).
Of course, since it hasn't happened there's no way to tell for sure that it's possible to add support just with graphics drivers, as it may need some chipset drivers as well (someone may know if it's true or not).