X1600 and X1300 don't need Master Cards

[Alexstarfire]

Yea, what's the point in showing that they can run without a master card if they don't allow the high end cards to run without them? I think they know that there is a performance hit when they do that and don't want people like us to know. If that's not the reason then ATI must be insane.

 

[blckgrffn]

6800GS to trounce these combos, that is my prediction.... lol, that card could come and go before we see the x1600xt at all, which is fairly hilarious.

Anandtech hasn't embraced low end SLI as an option, and it really doesn't make much sense unless you are pulling decent performance out of value parts like Avalon. Heck, I thought about buy two Jaton 6600's at NewEgg when they were $62 each... but since I don't have a SLI mobo, I didn't. My visa thanks me

Sounds neat but impractical unless a year from now you can get a pair for uber-cheap and get decent performance for the buck. Working in nf4 SLI boards has to be a must for that approach to really work at this point.

Nat

 

[M0RPH]

Originally posted by: Capt Caveman
Dumb question, it's good news that they can go without the mastercard on the x1300 and x1600 but why can't they with the x1800?

There are some answers in an ATI interview here.

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.

Maybe a hint that master cards won't be required in the future:

Post R520, do you think you?re gonna continue implementing CrossFire the way you have been doing? Because you have a completely new architecture to play with and maybe in some point of time the compositing engine might be built on the chip.

We do have a whole roadmap for CrossFire technology going forward and I cant really talk about that but yes we will be doing more advanced CrossFire implementations in the future.

 

[Avalon]

Originally posted by: blckgrffn
6800GS to trounce these combos, that is my prediction.... lol, that card could come and go before we see the x1600xt at all, which is fairly hilarious.

Anandtech hasn't embraced low end SLI as an option, and it really doesn't make much sense unless you are pulling decent performance out of value parts like Avalon. Heck, I thought about buy two Jaton 6600's at NewEgg when they were $62 each... but since I don't have a SLI mobo, I didn't. My visa thanks me

Sounds neat but impractical unless a year from now you can get a pair for uber-cheap and get decent performance for the buck. Working in nf4 SLI boards has to be a must for that approach to really work at this point.

Nat

I got my first one for $50, and finally found a second one for $40. I'm getting ~2700 3dmarks right now with a lone card, so I'm expecting around 5000 in SLI. Not bad for $90

 

[Alexstarfire]

Originally posted by: M0RPH

Originally posted by: Capt Caveman
Dumb question, it's good news that they can go without the mastercard on the x1300 and x1600 but why can't they with the x1800?

There are some answers in an ATI interview here.

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.

Maybe a hint that master cards won't be required in the future:

Post R520, do you think you?re gonna continue implementing CrossFire the way you have been doing? Because you have a completely new architecture to play with and maybe in some point of time the compositing engine might be built on the chip.

We do have a whole roadmap for CrossFire technology going forward and I cant really talk about that but yes we will be doing more advanced CrossFire implementations in the future.

Sounds like they could solve this problem with the 16x PCI-E motherboards.

 

[Nextman916]

Do they both take VISA?

 

[xtknight]

So why do the X1800s need them then? Speed of the bus?

 

[jiffylube1024]

Originally posted by: xtknight
So why do the X1800s need them then? Speed of the bus?

That's a good question - I'd like to know the answer too. If the X1300 and the X1600 don't need master/slave cards, external linking cables, etc, then why do the high end cards need them?

 

[KristopherKubicki]

Sounds like they could solve this problem with the 16x PCI-E motherboards.

Yep.

Kristopher

 

[jiffylube1024]

Originally posted by: KristopherKubicki

Sounds like they could solve this problem with the 16x PCI-E motherboards.

Yep.

Kristopher

Wow! You'd think if the solution was this simple, they'd have designed Crossfire boards from the start to have dual 16X PCI-e, and forget all of this master/slave card nonsense.

X800GTO2 Crossfire would be taking off if this were a possibilty!!!

Hopefully ATI gets their act in gear with simpler, more flexible Crossfire soon; more choices are always a positive for consumers .

 

[Rage187]

Too bad both those cards suck.

 

[fierydemise]

Originally posted by: Rage187
Too bad both those cards suck.

True but its an important stepping stone, if it can be done with low end cards then it means that it won't be long before it can be done with all cards.

 

[Alexstarfire]

Originally posted by: jiffylube1024

Originally posted by: KristopherKubicki

Sounds like they could solve this problem with the 16x PCI-E motherboards.

Yep.

Kristopher

Wow! You'd think if the solution was this simple, they'd have designed Crossfire boards from the start to have dual 16X PCI-e, and forget all of this master/slave card nonsense.

X800GTO2 Crossfire would be taking off if this were a possibilty!!!

Hopefully ATI gets their act in gear with simpler, more flexible Crossfire soon; more choices are always a positive for consumers .

Well, ATI doesn't seem to be the smartest of companies. You could say the same about nVidia, but ATI takes it that extra step.