14 DAY TRIAL // With the official launch day (June 1) approaching, ATI Technologies thought it would be a good idea to showcase the new Radeon Xpress 200 CrossFire edition at Computex 2005.
Nvidia had already launched its SLI (Scalable Link Interface) technology, and ATI fans were anxiously looking for a response from the Canadian company.
ATI will produce both Intel and AMD versions and the employed chipsets will be manufactured by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) using at first 100nm process technology; sources close to the company say that the next step will be switching to 100nm.
The CrossFire technology is able to connect two PCI Express graphics cards similarly to Nvidia's SLI (Scalable Link Interface).
If we compare the two technologies, ATI has a clear advantage over Nvidia. The Canadians' solution doesn't require a connector between the two cards, and users don't have to buy two CrossFire cards, only one such card being necessary; for now, the company offers two families of cards for the CrossFire connection: X800 or X850.
ATI's technology is even more permissive than we had expected, the two cards not even requiring the same amount of memory.
CrossFire will support three types of rendering modes, called SuperTiling, Scissor and Alternate Frame Rendering, all of them being, according to ATI, 'software-transparent', meaning they do not require special support from game developers.
ATI's partners: Asustek, Gigabyte, MSI, ECS, DFI, Sapphire and Tul, will produce motherboards compatible with this technology and CrossFire edition graphics cards.