14 DAY TRIAL // While this may come as a mild to serious shock to some people, the fact is that NVIDIA just posted a blog entry which reveals that a certain technology of its making is now available on AMD platforms.
It is no mystery that NVIDIA and Advanced Micro Devices have been trying to outdo one another ever since the latter bought ATI.
While not as full of lawsuits and the like, their relationship is quite similar to the rivalry between AMD and Intel.
Either way, each company has its own technologies that work only on their own products, this being part of their strategy to boost product appeal.
Then, there are things like CrossFireX and SLI, the multi-GPU technologies of each, which also work on Intel platforms, what with Intel CPUs and, thus, compatible motherboards dominating the market.
What some users have been yearning for, however, was support for SLI on motherboards powered by AMD chipsets.
Now, NVIDIA posted a blog post in which it announced that platforms using the 990FX, 990X and 970 chipsets (in other words, Bulldozer mainboards with the AM3+ chipset ) will be ready to let users set up NVIDIA multi-GPU configurations.
This is probably a consequence of NVIDIA no longer making chipsets, at least as far as x86 processors go.
MSI, ASRock, Gigabyte, ASUS and other companies are expected to deliver motherboards with support for this new feature soon, although no specific date has been given.
“AMD’s stature as the preferred gaming CPU fell by the wayside and Intel CPUs have been the gamers’ choice,” wrote NVIDIA's Tom Petersen in the official blog post located here.
“For this reason, we’ve only licensed SLI for motherboards with Intel chipsets. However, we’ve been recently hearing chants of “SLI for AMD CPUs”, and figured that now is a great time to do it.”