Looks like crossfire is losing the dongle

[Corporate Thug]

http://www.guru3d.com/article/article/328/2/

 

[aggressor]

Now they just need to get rid of the whole master card deal and they will have caught up to nVidia in that department. I considered that way more bothersome than a dongle.

 

[RobertR1]

Did you read this part:

"But now the X1800 XL cards will be able to do this also. Best thing yet .. you do not need a mastercard to do this. These are two very huge plusses !"

 

[aggressor]

Oh, no, I did not I pretty much just skimmed through the article as it's pretty poorly written. I figured something like that would be mentioned in the root post considering how big of a deal it is.

 

[darkswordsman17]

Originally posted by: aggressor
Now they just need to get rid of the whole master card deal and they will have caught up to nVidia in that department. I considered that way more bothersome than a dongle.

They did. This new solution, which they showed with X1800XL cards got rid of both the master card and the dongle.

The article says they don't know if higher end cards will be able to do it because of bandwidth issues. Perhaps they'll come up with something like the SLI bridge.

 

[CaiNaM]

as much as i dislike the master card, it's the reason that ati's "super aa" offers more performance than "sli aa".. wonder how that will be effected?

 

[v8envy]

The thing that worries me about ATI's masterless setups is: what's doing the compositing for cards originally designed for dedicated silicon to do the task? Are these bad boys downloading their data to the CPU to composite and then upload the finished frames? If so, you'd get some impressive benchmark results, but not so good real gameplay.

 

[Peter]

S3 (yes S3) have already demonstrated how to push the 2nd card's rendering results through PCIE rather than round the outside.

ATI's current solution is limiting them to a 165 megapixel per second push rate (since they're going through a DVI channel for it), or maybe 300 if it's a dual channel link (which I'm somewhat sure it's not). PCIE, even if it's 8x, has plenty of bandwidth to spare to allow that much through, or even more.

Way to go.

 

[Wreckage]

They need to be able to do this with the X1900s. Seems a little late for the X1800s.

 

[moonboy403]

they're just gearing toward R600 anyway

anything right now is kinda of like beta testing to me

in fact, it seems as if the x1800 series was a beta tester for the x1900 series

 

[Skott]

No dongle and no master card? So basically its SLI for ATI cards only? Its a shame the two companies couldnt be nice enough to work together and make one standard and then let us consumers pick and choose the card flavors. Or would it need to be the mobo manufacturers that would need to make the standard? or is it AMD and Intel? Dangit! Why do these people make our lives hell! ::chuckle::

 

[Cooler]

Originally posted by: Skott
No dongle and no master card? So basically its SLI for ATI cards only? Its a shame the two companies couldnt be nice enough to work together and make one standard and then let us consumers pick and choose the card flavors. Or would it need to be the mobo manufacturers that would need to make the standard? or is it AMD and Intel? Dangit! Why do these people make our lives hell! ::chuckle::

right but you will not need an sli brige so its difffernt,

 

[moonboy403]

heh...how about both company working together to develop...

*drum rolls*...... sli-fire!.....pairing a 7900 gtx and an x1900 xtx

you're getting the best of both worlds here guys!

 

[5150Joker]

Originally posted by: Corporate Thug
http://www.guru3d.com/article/article/328/2/

Ack now it's going to be all feminine and dongleless like nVidia's SLI.

 

[kpb]

Gotta wait to see benchmarks. Nvidia can do bridgeless sli on all thier products now but the performance suffers noticably on 7800+ cards. Now it's definitely possibly ati optmized thier implimentation to be more efficient since nvidia only really intends this to be used on low end cards that lack the sli connector entirely. Still I'd like to see some benchmarks of this going on and how well it actually performs.

As far as the bandwidth for the crossfire dongle the x800 series use a single link and yeah it does kinda suck limiting them to 1600x1200. The x1x00 series uses dual link and doesn't have that limitation.

 

[darkswordsman17]

Originally posted by: moonboy403
heh...how about both company working together to develop...

*drum rolls*...... sli-fire!.....pairing a 7900 gtx and an x1900 xtx

you're getting the best of both worlds here guys!

Thats not a half-bad idea. They could play to each other's strengths. One card could be the raw processing card (nVidia currently) and the other be the one that takes care of the extra stuff (ATi now). So we could get the raw processing that 24 pipes allows, but then get the higher image quality and shading performance (as well as AA+HDR).

Its too bad that so many markets are the way they are, as some cooperation between companies could help consumers quite a bit.

 

[Paratus]

Originally posted by: Peter
S3 (yes S3) have already demonstrated how to push the 2nd card's rendering results through PCIE rather than round the outside.

ATI's current solution is limiting them to a 165 megapixel per second push rate (since they're going through a DVI channel for it), or maybe 300 if it's a dual channel link (which I'm somewhat sure it's not). PCIE, even if it's 8x, has plenty of bandwidth to spare to allow that much through, or even more.

Way to go.

All X1000 series cards have at least 1 Dual Link DVI channel.


posted via Palm Life Drive

 

[Peter]

... and are they using it for Crossfire, or do they leave it as the resulting output?