David Nalasco (ATI) Interview

[NFS4]

Interesting way of going about things as far as CrossFire is concerned...at least compared to NVIDIA's SLI solution which is enabled in just about every card:

So for these new R520s, is the composite engine built on the chip or is it still a separate chip.

No its still a separate chip

How come you made that decision?

The compositing engine is really only necessary on a master board. Its only necessary if you want to use CrossFire. Other wise you have additional costs associated which would have to be on all the chips whether or not you?re interested in CrossFire. The fact is that percentage of people that will use a CrossFire solution is very very small.

So basically this was something that increases the costs and you didn?t want that.

Yeah. Going forward, we may be integrating some of the stuff but for this generation- its still very new technology.

Is there any way to have two cards work together without a compositing engine?

Yes- in fact the x1300 does just that.

So if the x1300 doesn?t have a compositing engine and you can have both of them work together, that means the link between the two cards isn?t necessarily required except with the PCI Express. Does the PCI Express bus doesn?t have the bandwidth to support higher-end cards at the moment?

Yes exactly, because basically after you draw each frame you have to transfer the results- either half of the frame or the whole frame using AFR to the other card. But if your total frame rate is not that high then that?s less frames to transfer. Even on the x1300 we have to do some special things in our driver to minimize the amount of data that goes over the bus otherwise its not (very) usable on an 8X PCI Express.

On an x1800, if you plug them in and not have a link and we were to enable a software crossfire mode over PCI Express, we could still get games to work but they?d be 20-30% faster with the second card which is not really that interesting. You?d want 2x or 80% (gains) and to get those we obviously need an interlink. With the x1300 we could get that 80% in games with PCI Express using some optimizations.

http://www.tbreak.com/reviews/article.php?cat=edit&id=408&pagenumber=1

 

[Gamingphreek]

So they didn't incorporate the composite engine in every card due to costs?

Well, i think people may have wanted it built in anyways. Many of the people that buy an X850 or X1800 or something, are going to want to do Crossfire.

Interesting nonetheless.

-Kevin

 

[rbV5]

So, is the compositing chip the same? Couldn't X800 dual link cards be offered as an option for higher refresh for CRT even with the same X850 Crossfire edition card currently available?

 

[Drayvn]

Originally posted by: Gamingphreek
So they didn't incorporate the composite engine in every card due to costs?

Well, i think people may have wanted it built in anyways. Many of the people that buy an X850 or X1800 or something, are going to want to do Crossfire.

Interesting nonetheless.

-Kevin

What i think is that more ppl who buy the high end stuff will just buy the 1 card while there will be a less of that amount of ppl who will use it for Crossfire use.

So if it saves ppl $10 or more then thats great!

 

[NFS4]

Originally posted by: Drayvn

Originally posted by: Gamingphreek
So they didn't incorporate the composite engine in every card due to costs?

Well, i think people may have wanted it built in anyways. Many of the people that buy an X850 or X1800 or something, are going to want to do Crossfire.

Interesting nonetheless.

-Kevin

What i think is that more ppl who buy the high end stuff will just buy the 1 card while there will be a less of that amount of ppl who will use it for Crossfire use.

So if it saves ppl $10 or more then thats great!

$10 at the retail level on a card that costs $500 is peanuts.

I just think that NVIDIA's solution is more elegant and simply easier for the consumer to deal with. All of their mainstream and high-end cards come SLI enabled with the bridge connector so there is no confusion on the matter. That coupled with the fact that SLI boards are all over the place, it's gonna take another generation or two IMHO for CrossFire to be as well thought out and available in such a diversified range of motherboards.

I counted 24 nForce4 SLI motherboards on NewEgg ranging from $100 to $245.

The cheapest CrossFire board I've seen is $240 @ NewEgg (and it's not even in stock from what I can see):

http://promotions.newegg.com/ATI/101105/index.html

 

[rbV5]

The cheapest CrossFire board I've seen is $230 @ NewEgg (and it's not even in stock from what I can see):

Nice find, I was just looking at Newegg for a Crossfire Motherboard and it didn't show up in searches (still doesn't)

Hopefully, there will be some Crossfire Motherboards hitting the market finally.

 

[nRollo]

Originally posted by: NFS4

Originally posted by: Drayvn

Originally posted by: Gamingphreek
So they didn't incorporate the composite engine in every card due to costs?

Well, i think people may have wanted it built in anyways. Many of the people that buy an X850 or X1800 or something, are going to want to do Crossfire.

Interesting nonetheless.

-Kevin

What i think is that more ppl who buy the high end stuff will just buy the 1 card while there will be a less of that amount of ppl who will use it for Crossfire use.

So if it saves ppl $10 or more then thats great!

$10 at the retail level on a card that costs $500 is peanuts.

I just think that NVIDIA's solution is more elegant and simply easier for the consumer to deal with. All of their mainstream and high-end cards come SLI enabled with the bridge connector so there is no confusion on the matter. That coupled with the fact that SLI boards are all over the place, it's gonna take another generation or two IMHO for CrossFire to be as well thought out and available in such a diversified range of motherboards.

I counted 24 nForce4 SLI motherboards on NewEgg ranging from $100 to $145.

The cheapest CrossFire board I've seen is $230 @ NewEgg (and it's not even in stock from what I can see):

http://promotions.newegg.com/ATI/101105/index.html

Nice post, and interesting position for ATI to take regarding the integration.

Personally, I think they bolted Crossfire capability onto these cards because nVidia caught them by surprise with SLI.

The whole composite chip/master and slave/and dongle thing is definitely less preferable, for now I guess dual card users will likely go SLI.

 

[SickBeast]

Is it possible to run two "master cards" in SLI mode?