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Using the multiple GPUs in a CrossFire or SLi system properly can make a big difference to your benchmarking scores. Now we are hearing something at KitGuru about new technology in this area.
With the 6800 cards Nvidia brought SLi to market hard and fast. ATI engineering was looking to make faster and faster clocks at that time but Nvidia went a different direction. Sure some early efforts were poor but when this new setup worked well it was impossible for ATI to catch Nvidia's scores. The single X850 Platinum Edition was no match for two 6800GTs (when they worked).
After much work ATI brought its spaghetti setup to the market and was pushing journalists to say this external cable configuration was better than SLi bridge which it surely wasn't. If you are a journalist old enough to remember the need to have a master card, then for sure you are now smiling.
In 2008 the madness was finally over and AMD (as it was now called) brought the familiar bridge to market.
It is no longer a tricky road to upgrade graphics on your system and it does not really matter which setup you choose, they all pretty much work. In most cases the CrossFire system will work well as soon as you turn it on and the Catalyst drivers give a strong boost these days. So if everything is so happy in CrossFire land then what can AMD engineers be bringing to the party next?
The speed of your GPU cores and GDDR memory have been changing all the time and the same for Catalyst improvements. So what does that leave? We are hearing that the interface between the cards can now be improved.
Could this be true? Well AMD has always prided itself on the high speed interconnection system called HyperTransport and they have been working on motherboard chipsets longer than ATI engineers. So the question changes to Will AMD be able to create a Bulldozer system which runs graphics faster than any other combination of graphics, processor and motherboard with a similar price?
KitGuru says: Creating new kinds of motherboards with a faster interface between your Radeon cards would be a genius idea. AMD would not be forced to make such an advantage available to competitors so there is pressure to stay 100% with AMD products.
Comment below or in the KitGuru forum.
When reading originally the specifications and testing results for Crossfire there was no difference if the bus was slow or fast really. Has so much changed that better motherboard makes better scores?
I heard a rumor that they are doing something cool with the CPU architecture to help boost bandwidth between the cards
wonder if they can manage a 3 or 4 way 16x bandwidth+ configuration……..
Where’s the news in this article?
For me the story is that Bulldozer will work faster with Radeon cards than any other setup, am I reading this right?