How good ATI crossfire setup fare on nVidia chipset??

[jaykishankrk]

Hello all,

i was wondering how does the cross platform combination of ATI crossfire setup gel with nvidia chipsets??

in so many posts which i have gone through, i found that ATI Radeon X1900 series fare much better then nvidia geforce 7series, again i am not making a statement here so i do not wish to see any battles on this statement

i would like to ask the question to people in this forum, does this do much better than the conventional allout nVidia setup or Ati setup.

please make it as elaborate as possible!!

 

[Stumps]

IIRC it doesn't work....you need an ATI or Intel chipset with Crossfire support for it to work.

 

[jaykishankrk]

i have read a post from a guy saying, evga 680i mobo with ati radeon x1950 XTX card on it.

still this is not a crossfire setup... but an ATI card with nvidia chipset ??

 

[Roguestar]

ATi cards work fine on nVidia chipsets but for Crossfire to work you will need a chipset that supports in; no nVidia chipset will or has supported Crossfire. Much like no ATi chipset supports SLI.

 

[Stumps]

Originally posted by: jaykishankrk
i have read a post from a guy saying, evga 680i mobo with ati radeon x1950 XTX card on it.

still this is not a crossfire setup... but an ATI card with nvidia chipset ??

yep, plenty common....one of my PC's is a AXP 3000+ with a NF2 chipset and ATI 9700PRO on it, although today it got upgraded to a 6800NU...luckily I only paid AU$80 for the card..hardly worth the upgrade.

 

[Roguestar]

Ah, the 9700pro. Good times, good times.

 

[jaykishankrk]

i have seen an article about r600 card, i dont know where, its been on the air for lot of good reasons. Ha ha the site is Level5 or something like that. the pre release benchmark tests have even crossed the 8800 GTX in most of the cases. so i was wondering, if ever if there could be a support for crossfire on nvidia chipset, then how about going with R600 GPU from ATI radeon ??

 

[Roguestar]

Sorry but I really don't follow you at this point.

The R600 from ATI has been benchmarked, supposedly, by the company Level505 (if I recall correctly, there's an article on DailyTech about it) against the 8800 GTX but that doesn't mean they're compatible. To be honest I don't think there'll ever be support, officially, for crossfire on nVidia chipsets until a squadron of flying pigs lands on the blue moon.

I think you need to narrow your question down. Do you mean you need to choose a graphics card? Are you asking the difference between SLI and Crossfire? Are you asking if it's better to go with a new R600 than an 8800GTX (which we won't really know until it's out and properly reviewed) or are you asking what your upgrade options are with your 680i motherboard?

 

[jaykishankrk]

you have made my question simpler, if ever there is no support for crossfire and i know it wont happen anyway, so i was thinking if we can get best out of R600 GPU on nvidia chipset. as far as i know R600 GPU is directx 10 complaint which makes it a card to lookout for right??

and the pre matured results leaked on one of the sites indicates that it perfoms much better then 8800 GPU. so i was thinking how cool will be the performance of ATI R600 GPU on nvidia chipset with a good OCing C2D on it??

sorry if i have confused u but i am a novice as far as the chip dynamics is concerned and i am not talking of crossfire setup now..

 

[Roguestar]

Ah, no. I see what you mean now. I don't think you'll be able to run R600 crossfire on an nVidia chipset, ever, though if the R600 is indeed better than the 8800GTX then coupled with the 680i and a highly overclockable C2D you have indeed gotten yourself a rather spectacular system.

 

[jaykishankrk]

here comes the next question, how well the ATI GPU gell with nvidia chipset if coupled together, in terms of architecture they are different i believe??

so if i plan to go for R600 card in future instead of 8800 will it give me the best performance ever?? considering that R600 perfoms better then 8800 in benchmark tests.

 

[Roguestar]

Well we can't say yet which one is better but I imagine you'd have no problems running the R600 on an nVidia chipset. They haven't had any history of deliberately sabotaging the ATi cards or causing problems with them.

 

[Shimmishim]

there would be no problems with lets say your bfg nf680i mobo with a r600 video card. as others have said, you just won't be able to run CF on that board.

as for how good the performance would be say versus an r600 on something like the rd600 dfi board vs. an r600 on your nf680i board... that is a good and interesting question.

 

[Mr Fox]

Originally posted by: Roguestar
Ah, no. I see what you mean now. I don't think you'll be able to run R600 crossfire on an nVidia chipset, ever, though if the R600 is indeed better than the 8800GTX then coupled with the 680i and a highly overclockable C2D you have indeed gotten yourself a rather spectacular system.

In my thread over in Video....

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...atid=31&threadid=1979433&enterthread=y

ATI asserts that Crossfire is an Open Platform... Meaning that there is no Lock Out/Lock In by the drivers like there is with NV SLI...

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/ati_p965_crossfire_performance/page4.asp

 

[Roguestar]

I read the firingsquad link but after a bit only skimmed your thread in video because I think we're on different wavelengths here. I mean that ATi crossfire won't run on an SLi chipset. I know it runs on 965P and 975X, and that nVidia are stingy gits with regarding driver support (or lack thereof) for SLi on 2x PCI-E x16 graphics port motherboards other than their own nForce chipsets. My point was that he won't be able to run crossfire on an nVidia chipset and from what I've read in those links you and they don't disagree with me. Am I being too unobservant and missing something?

 

[jaykishankrk]

so here goes another question, why cant i run sli or for that matter crossfire with different GPU models, like

nvidia geforce 7950 GX2 with geforce 8800 GTX

or

ATI radeon X1950 XTX with ATI radeon r600

??

 

[Roguestar]

Generally in crossfire or SLi you need two models of card from the same GPU family because otherwise they'll have problems talking to each other. You can't run, for example, an x1800 and an x1900 in crossfire (correct me if I'm wrong, video gurus, please?) because of the differences in the GPUs. It's like how you can't put a pentium and a celeron in a motherboard that has two CPU slots, or how you can't plug a parallel cable into an IDE channel.

 

[jaykishankrk]

so can there be any improvement in the GPU design which in deed will make this a reality, because i think this is an enormous field development technically in terms of backward compatibility with respect to SLI or crossfire technology right.

people would not bother to buy a graphics card at any moment as they will know that it will work with the next generation cards once it gets OLD.

i dont know if i am wrong in any sense but let me tell you this will make a lot of customers happy

why i thought so is that i dont want to sell my geforce 7950 GT BFG card in order to upgrade to 8800 GTX in future. because i think that 7950 GT is a damn good card. so what you suggest??

 

[Mr Fox]

Originally posted by: Roguestar
I read the firingsquad link but after a bit only skimmed your thread in video because I think we're on different wavelengths here. I mean that ATi crossfire won't run on an SLi chipset. I know it runs on 965P and 975X, and that nVidia are stingy gits with regarding driver support (or lack thereof) for SLi on 2x PCI-E x16 graphics port motherboards other than their own nForce chipsets. My point was that he won't be able to run crossfire on an nVidia chipset and from what I've read in those links you and they don't disagree with me. Am I being too unobservant and missing something?

PCI/SIG PCI Express v1.0a compliance.

If it is a compliant MOBO it should work. and there are no lock outs in the drivers.

the interoperability specs are there for a reason.. ATI multi GPU is an Open Platform... so it should work.....