ATI's Hybrid Crossfire, under the Scope

ATI previewed today the Hybrid Crossfire specifications in an early test regarding the hardware that is alleged to power the non-professional gaming sector. The hybrid technology refers to pairing an integrated graphics processor with a discrete one, to achieve higher performance at lower costs.

Integrated GPUs are known for their increased latency when gaming or executing video-intensive jobs. It would be impossible for the user to play more than a game that is low in system requirements and ATI is trying to make the situation less bitter. The ATI 690G was minor, yet an improvement, while the upcoming 780G promises to be much faster.

The 780G chip is pretty solid and can be compared with a standalone ATI RV610, and in addition to it, an RV620 will dramatically boost the video performance. Today's demo targeted Radeon HD 3450s and 3470s on a 780G board. The company used Call of Duty 4 as reference software, and the 34xx series chips could deliver about 30 frames per second. With Hybrid Crossfire enabled, the chips went up the ceiling and reached a nice average of 60FPS at a 1024 * 768 resolution, which is extremely comfortable for gaming.

The new solution can't beat the 3870 video cards, but this is a nice bonus if considering that a low-end motherboard, priced somewhere between $70 and $120 will integrate a $50 video card. Of course, performance is a little too much a word, but it is much better than the built-in video cards. Moreover, there are some nice additions to the Hybrid Crossfire technology. When adding two GPU's, the card to hold the monitor acts like a master. If there is no need for heavy computing, the slave gets powered off to save power.

ATI has succeeded in creating an integrated GPU that can handle gaming pretty well for the price. This might be a great advantage on the graphics battlefield and might sharpen the company's dormant competition senses.


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