Q&A with ATI on CrossFire

FiringSquad: With your upcoming merger with AMD expected to close at the end of this year, are you concerned that Intel may attempt to lockout the CrossFire platform on upcoming chipsets beyond today’s P965 and 975X?

Godfrey Cheng ATI: Pretty sneaky Brandon. Your question is really around open platforms. Certainly both ATI and AMD believe in open platforms and open competition and choice for the customer. Speaking for ATI, we want customers to pick the best CPU, GPU and Chipset – we welcome open competition. CrossFire has been an open platform from the beginning and it will continue to be an open platform even after our merger to AMD closes. CrossFire will continue to support Intel chipsets and Intel has given no indication that they will lock out ATI graphics in the future. Closed platforms, or platforms that tie GPUs and Chipsets together, are archaic and out-of-place in the modern PC. People should demand open platforms to give them greater choice.

FiringSquad: You’ve announced that the Radeon X1900 XT/XTX CrossFire is compatible with P965 CrossFire today with Catalyst 6.9 and that X1950 XTX CrossFire support is coming in Catalyst 6.10, but what about adding support for the Radeon X1800 XT CrossFire in a future release?

Godfrey Cheng ATI: Radeon X1800XT CrossFire works on the P965 platform today

FiringSquad: One of CrossFire’s chief advantages over SLI is your Super AA performance scaling. Considering this, have you considered adding additional AA/AF modes to CrossFire for even better image quality?

Godfrey Cheng ATI: Yes one of many advantages that CrossFire has over SLI is our image quality. We plan on introducing a new AA mode shortly even for single card PCs. Stand by.

FiringSquad: Up to this point we’ve basically been told that for best performance with dual-GPUs, it’s best for both graphics slots to run with an even number of PCI Express lanes (either 8x8 or 16x16), and that if you don’t there’s a slight performance penalty. So my question is, what tweaks are you planning to integrate into forthcoming Catalyst drivers to get around this?

Godfrey Cheng ATI: We maintain that a 16X16 or an 8X8 configuration is preferable to a 16X4 configuration. However, the hand that we were dealt with the P965 is 16X4 and we have really smart engineers who adapted our CrossFire architecture to support the P965’s 16X4 with minimal performance and compatibility impact.

FiringSquad: With the 975X and now P965 chipsets both supporting CrossFire, has this affected your plans for the RD600 chipset or are you still planning on going forward with this product? If yes, could you give us an ETA on when it will be available?

Godfrey Cheng ATI: As an open platform, in addition to supporting Intel’s chipset, we will of course support our own. There will be RD600 based motherboards released to the public this year. We are confident that the RD600 chipset will be very competitive versus Intel chipsets from both a performance and price perspective.

FiringSquad: At Computex you demonstrated ATI physics up and running in a three-slot RD600 system running CrossFire. Can you give us an update on how physics is progressing and how it will be tied into CrossFire?


Godfrey Cheng ATI: We are still extremely enthusiastic when it comes to physics in games. As discussed at Computex, we are just a cog in the equation to getting physics-enabled games to the customer. We are working with many developers and other key companies to bring physics to the market. Physics will be an integral part of our Crossfire strategy.

FiringSquad: It has been widely speculated that your upcoming RV570 GPU will feature TSMC’s 80-nm manufacturing process and more importantly, that you’re integrating the CrossFire compositing engine onto the GPU itself, so that all of these cards will support your CrossFire technology out-of-the-box without the need for a dedicated CrossFire master card SKU like you’ve done for the X1800/X1900/X1950 GPUs. Will these cards be compatible with P965 CrossFire?

Godfrey Cheng ATI: Brandon, if I spill the beans now, we should just eliminate all product launches and reviews. The only comment that I will provide here is that we have actively listened to gamers and will continue to do so to make CrossFire their platform of choice.

FiringSquad: While CrossFire supports a number of games, there are still even more titles out there that don’t have native CrossFire support. Considering this, have you thought about giving end users the option to force CrossFire rendering modes for specific games? One feature NVIDIA provides is SLI profiles, where you can tweak the SLI rendering mode depending on the game. Has ATI considered adding something similar to Catalyst Control Center for CrossFire?

Godfrey Cheng ATI: We have considered this feature along with many others. There are several things that we want to do for our customers which includes Vista support and the support of new GPUs that we have in the pipe. Game profiling is one of the priorities we’re working on. In the meantime, we encourage our customers to use the Catalyst AI Aggressive setting to force AFR on any game which will provide much of the benefits of game profiling.



On behalf of FiringSquad, we’d like to thank Godfrey for answering our questions about CrossFire, and look forward to ATI’s future CrossFire enhancements. We’d also like to thank ATI’s Korhan Erenben who’s responsible for Avivo and CrossFire marketing, for answering our questions on CrossFire earlier this week as well.

Now we want to see what kind of performance improvements, if any, ASUS’ C.G.I. feature brings.