Graphic Cards Ati's CrossFire - How it works

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FiringSquad said:
For starters, the most basic difference between ATI Crossfire and NVIDIA SLI is that ATI has a dedicated CrossFire card designed just for linking to your existing ATI X800/X850 series graphics card. For now, ATI provides two different CrossFire boards, a RADEON X800 Crossfire Edition and a RADEON X850 Crossfire Edition
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[RANK="www.firingsquad.com/features/computex_2005_ati_crossfire_technology/page2.asp"]Read More[/RANK]
 
Yes there will be a seprate mobo for Crossfire setup, it will not work on the SLI setups, and I doubt if Nvidia will support it too.
 
Another preview :
http://www.techreport.com/etc/2005q2/ati-crossfire/index.x?pg=1

Some new rendering modes apart from SLI and AFR :
rendering modes are:

* Supertiling — This is the tiling mode built into the original R300 VPU and used by ATI partner Evans & Sutherland in its high-end visualization systems. The screen is split up into 32x32 tiles and the workload is distributed according to a checkerboard-style pattern, with one card taking what would be the black squares and the other the squares that would be red. Splitting up the workload in such relatively small tiles should result in a distribution of the load that's very close to an even split, and it should allow two cards to produce markedly higher fill rates and pixel shader throughputs than a single card. The vertex processing load will be duplicated on each card, however, so that a CrossFire system with supertiling won't likely achieve any higher geometry throughput than a single card. Supertiling will be the default CrossFire mode for all Direct3D applications, but will not work in OpenGL.

* Scissor mode — This mode will be familiar from SLI, where NVIDIA calls it split-frame rendering. Scissor mode divides the screen horizontally, giving the top portion of the screen to card A and the bottom portion to card B. The exact proportion of the split is adjusted on the fly as workloads change. This will be CrossFire's default mode for OpenGL and will also work in Direct3D.
Super antialiasing — Uniquely, CrossFire rigs may provide image quality benefits even in games where fill rate and geometry throughput isn't normally at a premium via its Super AA capability. Super AA comes courtesy of the CrossFire compositing chip, which can combine images with different sample patterns produced by the two cards. CrossFire AA offers several new antialiasing modes from 8X up to 14X. 8X and 12X AA modes double up on 4X and 6X multisampling, respectively. 10X and 14X AA modes, on the other hand, combine 2X supersampling with 8X and 12X multisampling, respectively.

Interestingly, you won't be locked into an ATI chipset if you want to run CrossFire. ATI will allow CrossFire to work with Intel chipsets, and is also in talks with NVIDIA to get CrossFire to cooperate with the nForce platform. Compatibility with VIA chipsets isn't a priority for ATI, although it may be more likely than a cross-compatibility agreement with NVIDIA.
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heres a preview of crossfire from hardware zone

[RANK="www.hardwarezone.com/articles/view.php?id=1543&cid=3&pg=1"]link[/RANK]
 
Crossfire looks promising than SLI for sure :) ....but its a lot confusing too
3 modes of rendering :S ............:rofl: i still dnt get why ??

nd even the not so optional cards eh??
 
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