[H]ardNews - CrossFire Confusion

CrossFire Confusion:

Don't be confused into thinking that ATI's "CrossFire" dual video card configuration can be achieved with two "slave" cards as some might have you think.

DFI has been showing two slave cards running in a dual configuration at Computex as seen above, and they have in fact been showing 3DMark 2005 scores that increase by nearly 80% when they turn on "CrossFire" in the driver. Well to make a long story short, the two slave cards are sharing the workload and nearly doubling the 3D Mark2005 score, but you are only seeing every other frame supplied by one of the cards. So keep in mind that rendering double the frames is pretty "easy," but putting them back together again is not just going to happen by accident.

Anyway, chalk the confusion up to pre-release hardware and drivers. Kudos to DFI for finding something cool to share, but don't ever think you are going to reap the rewards of CrossFire rendering without a CrossFire hardware compositing engine to put all the frame or tiles back together again.

And just for the record, DOOM 3 showed absolutely no benefit from the configuration as you might guess.

Check here for yesterday’s Computex Pictures featuring dual 6800 video cards and dual interface video cards spanning PCIe and AGP.