the only cards that ever effectively pulled off sli as something useful imo, was the voodoo series.
and even they knew that dual chips were better than 2 cards in the end, e.g. the voodoo5.
the technology should have died with 3dfx.
not that theres anything wrong with sli, but its just not needed anymore.
when newer cards come out they usually are faster than sli on the old ones, so there is no reason to ever buy a sli system especially since you usually have to buy a sli certified board with it, and when most non-sli boards have better performance and features you sacrifice way too much in the end for buying SLI.
not to mention the 60hz limit and double the noise, heat, and power.

the only thing good about this is that ati now has a response to nvidia's sli and it seems to be faster and has better IQ than the 6800 sli.
of course, the 7800 sli slams it face down in the mud, so nobody will be buying crossfire anytime soon.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=26586

Available at launch day? lol

Crossfire is limited to displaying at most 60Hz at 1600x1200, but the benchmarks show frame rates of 80+ Hz.

Does this mean the drivers are rendering frames and then dropping them, undisplayed, because it can't get them out to the monitor fast enough?

Is there some way of measuring the true frame rate of the cards, ie, the number of unique, independent frames, sent to the monitor per second? That'd be very interesting.. I have no idea what results you would measure. It'd be very interesting to see for for SLI and single cards too. What's really happening when you have 120 fps rendering but your monitor is only at 100Hz? Dropped frames I guess..

60hz on a CRT would hurt my eyes =/

the other thing which has annoyed me ever since SLI became nvidias love child, all of the optimizations in driver updates are focused around SLI and not single cards, that sucks because the majority of gamers are using single card setups. At least with crossfire that shouldn't be an issue.

Either way, both SLI and Crossfire have their flaws. It's a pity they put so much emphasis on dual cards, I think many would be reluctant to accept dual cards as a mainstream way for graphics. There must be more elegant solutions than this.

Everyone seems to have got the jist:

Paper launch
Desperate last bid (60Hz JOKE) to match nVidia's SLI

The only reason I can POSSIBLY imagine that ATi would want to release this now is so that they can bugfix Crossfire by using consumers as guinea-pigs so that it's trouble-free in time for the r520 launch.

--

Hello everybody, I'm rich, ign'ant and mighty dumb so I'm off to buy Crossfire for r4xx. See my joy as I pay through the nose to help ATi develop their proper solution.

Tomorrow, I'm going to buy a big $500,000, unreliable prototype supercar and then potter into town to do the shopping. A Toyota would do the job better and for less, but I like the fact that everyone knows I'm so amazingly rich and thinks the world of me for having these incredible toys

ATI argues that higher resolutions simply won't matter to most gamers

First ATI proves that they have no idea WTF they are talking about, and/or are so busy talking out both sides of their mouth that they aren't even bothering with consistency.....

Then we see Crossfire X850s getting brutally mauled by the cheaper 7800GT SLI pairing, and often the aged last-gen 6800 Ultra SLI setup....

And then all but the most devoted ATI fanboys realize that 7800GTX performance and dual DVI can be done already, at just over half the price, with just one PCIe 16X slot, and it's called a 7800GTX.

Two days late, five dollars short. Game, set, match Nvidia.

Let's just hope that R520 is exciting enough to make up for this lackluster flop.

I liked that the FEAR demo and Guild Wars got benchmarked. The more games you benchmark the better overall picture you get.

I'm downloading COD2 demo right now and Quake 4 is almost here. It's going to be a good Fall for gaming.

[ shakes magic eight-ball ]

magic eight-ball wrote: ATI is not in your future.

Of course, no graphics solution that costs above $250 will ever be in my future.

it was an interesting read. i feel that ati's crossfire is too much in response to nvidia sli. the product feels rushed and seems like the bugs werent worked out becuase they were more interested in bringing it to market.

for those who wrote the review, you said that you tested the nvidia nic with activearmor turned on. i was under the impression that when it as set to "offload-able" all downloads would be corrupted. has this been fixed?

Given the size of graphics cards, wouldn't it seem logical to everyone that just putting 2 (or more) cores on ONE card and the card behaving as if it's one (for ease of drivers, games) but getting the chips to split up the work INTERNALLY would be much more effective than two cards, cross-connect cables etc etc. ?

CPU manufacturers are doing 'dual core' CPUs .. why not graphics processors too?

/doesn't get the need for SLI

I dont get why people would buy SLI or CrossFire in the first place. Unless you do it with the most expensive and biggest cards it´s not even worth it. And even then you can wait a half a year or a year and it can be replaced by 1 single card again. And don´t tell me about the cheap upgrade path. That don´t hold water either unless you calculate all the costs you have with energy etc.

Also how many games do you play in a resolution that is needed to exploit the game 100%? I have an x800XL combined with a Pentium-M desktop. I use a 17" LCD for gaming that is at a 1280*1024 resulotion. And thats surely no problem. So if you have a 7800GTX today, when do you need the extra SLI or Crossfire power?

This is such a mixed bag. It seems like whatever crossfire path you take you would be hindered somewhere along the line.

Crossfire 2 has a lot of potential. What ati got right here they really got right.

For starters though they MUST open up the drivers more. Niche stuff like this has to be easy to work with. Nvidia seems to understand this with all the control they give the users and how open they are with developers.

ATI will accomplish nothing if they keep this stuff locked up.

Great review Scott. I see you had some fun with it playing GW ;)

20 pages? can we please, please, please get a printable page option?

All the SLI implementations will look so silly in 1-2 years, methinks. They just seem like hacks.

What happened here? This is the first article where the front page blurb isn't culled from the actual article.

ATI should have saved up Crossfire for R5xx generation. It would have give them more time to iron out bugs and quarks. R4xx Crossfire stuff is merely a last-minute afterthought that occur when NV4x SLI had no performance counterpart. At the same token this segement is a very tiny miniority so why bother to rush spend R&D resources on making R4xx Crossfire capable?

It seems that folks at ATI are going to lose the performance segement due to the lack of focus and long-term innovation.

so I played through another five sessions with on the CrossFire rig, just to be sure

haha.... addict!

why not just get a 7800GT? jeeze ATI, talk about late.

Hmmm I'll continue with my bastardized ATI video-on-Nvidia SLI chipset.

I checked newegg and the ATI store.......So far I am calling it a paper launch.

This article makes me very impressed with the 7800GTX...

In before the Slashdot!!!

an external composting engine?
I have one of those in my back yard...

uh...oh...RED team is in red alert ...!!! poor ATI !

Obviously ATI was caught off guard with SLI and rush this out as soon as humanly possible. Too bad for them.