14 DAY TRIAL // Maybe AMD didn't do the right thing with the ATI acquisition. The new Radeon HD X2000 family can hardly compete with the 6 months old NVIDIA 8800 cards, but now the Canadians are trying to come up with some ace up their sleeves. In a nutshell, ATI wants to give new meaning to the word 'multi'.
And how are the Canadians supposed to do this? It surely has something to do with their graphics cards, right? Well, not necessarily. Keep in mind that ATI also designs motherboard chipstes. OK. So what's the connection between new graphics cards and motherboard chipsets, after all? RD790 is the name, "QuadFire" is the game.
Just before the Computex show, leaked details about the new RD790 chipset have started to emerge. Motherboards that come equipped with this new core logic will allow for four-way Crossfire setups among the X1000 and the latest and future X2000 series cards. In other words, all RD790-powered motherboards integrate four full-length PCI-Express slots that run in 4x8 lanes configurations (re-configurable to 2x16 lanes in case there are only two cards). If we take into consideration the fact that each graphics card has a dual-link DVI connector, this means that with four cards users may be able to connect up to 8 displays. But, as far as programming goes, the performance gains yielded by a "QuadFire" setup are minimal at the moment.
However, things tend to get complicated when ATI confirms that it can easily make dual GPU RV670 cards, as the power consumption is very low for the upcoming 65nm GPUs. ATI designers reckon that such a card will clearly end up faster than the 8800 Ultra and it is not that complex to build. For now, it's not sure whether the dual GPUs will be able to use the more advanced R670 core or the R650 one. Either way, ATI's dual-GPU cards may end up as the successor of NVIDIA's 7950GX2.