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Will we ever see SLI and Crossfire support on all motherboards?

F

Fox5

Diamond Member
Right now, in order to run SLI or Crossfire, you need to buy a motherboard with official support. That adds an extra $50-$100 on to the price of the motherboard, which is enough to drive many potential buyers away. If nVidia and ATI enabled support on all motherboards, it's much more like that some of those people that balked at paying $50 more for a motherboard would instead pay an extra $200 for another graphics card later on.

Technically, is there any reason these two formats couldn't run on any motherboard with dual pci-e 16x slots? For that matter, is there any reason that they even need special cards (well, nvidia doesn't...)? Any idea if either company plans on opening up multi-gpu support on all motherboards? Besides that, ATI should either make all cards crossfire enabled (since they cost the same now anyway), or move the compositing chip onto the external cable crossfire uses. Well, that or adopt sli or a sli like system over the PCI-E bus, which appears to be superior anyway.
 
Judging from what happened with the AGP/PCIe war, probably not. The hardware makers of the world seem content on cornering the market.
 
I expect that we will get a modification to pci-e to allow it to support things like crossfire/sli. Then we won't need these special boards but only need dual graphics cards that support the feature.
 
I had hopes that it might happen on an Intel chipset, but now that AMD and ATI have become one, I doubt that Intel will do anything to help put money in its competitor's pocket. Then again, NVIDIA and AMD have a long relationship with each other... Perhaps they could convince NVIDIA to make it work in the AMD platform. Either way, if someone can work it out with good performance and reliability, they would make a killing. It would be the chipset to have.
 
It's all driver limitations. It has nothing to do with the hardware. Maby if Nvidia and ATI can come up with some kind of truce were the allow each other to run SLI/CF on their mobo's.
Or maby some hacker will find some hack in the driver.

Who knows?
 
Crossfire requires some PCI-E feature that is not implemented in all PCI-E equipped chipsets. That is the technical reason why the Intel 975 chipset supports it IIRC but not others. AFAIK, SLI is mostly a licensing issue and maybe BIOS support for boards that don't have an SLI switch.
 
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