GTX460 SLi overclocked, mated and put in context

Multi-GPU will get better, that's a must for AMD

While nVidia will carry on working on its hardware and drivers to improve SLi, it’s more of a business imperative for AMD with CrossFire.

Having gone to town with ‘The Future is Fusion’ over the past 3 years, the end of 2010 will see the waiting over and the future will need to be delivered. It will need to be 100% working and available in sensible production volumes. Tweaktown's video suggests that this is likely – at least for the basic processors – but Fusion has been promising much more than that.

While gamers might be forgiving when the ‘performance output does not match the financial investment' for additional cards etc, Wall Street itself will be looking for something very much stronger from CrossFire.

AMD’s Fusion has been sold as ‘any number of CPUs and any number of GPUs on a single chip’.

Fine, but that means as soon as you add a second graphics processor, it MUST engage in CrossFire mode and it MUST deliver a benefit.

We can only begin to imagine the amount of overtime that the Radeon driver team is clocking right now in order to make this promise a reality.

Silicon can always be made smaller (Intel has written a law about this you know). That means you can (a) sell for less and/or (b) add more functionality.

If the on-chip implementation of CrossFire works effectively for 2 GPUs, then it will scale to 4 and beyond. Each time a process shrinks, more GPUs can be added. KitGuru predicts that a successful AMD Fusion project will kill the low end of the graphics market and a new world order will arrive. There. That’s KitGuru’s ‘marker in the ground' for where the future will take the market.

We'll meet you all back here in 2 years and see if we were right. For now, let’s see just how well the gorgeous Ben Berraondo and his buddies have managed to implement SLi with the GTX460 series of cards.

Just before we do that revelation, let's put KitGuru regulars out of their misery by revealing the true nature of the weird shaped egg boxes:-

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