Introduction

For a little over a year now, GeForce card owners have been able to double their gaming pleasure thanks to NVIDIA’s SLI technology. While ATI initially scoffed at NVIDIA SLI, deeming it too expensive – particularly in an industry where next-gen products are introduced so rapidly – ultimately the bean counters at ATI realized the added revenue potential they’d reap from gamers and hardware enthusiasts, and ATI quickly began working on a dual graphics card solution of their own dubbed “CrossFire”.

Unfortunately for ATI, CrossFire, like many of ATI’s products that were introduced in 2005, suffered from lengthy delays. ATI had initially hoped to have CrossFire ready in time for the annual CeBIT tradeshow in March, in fact the show floor was abuzz with rumors and sightings of ATI’s dual-graphics technology, but ultimately ATI wasn’t ready to announce anything until the Computex tradeshow three months later in Taiwan.

CrossFire made quite a splash at Computex, ATI was quick to promote the virtues of their dual-graphics technology, claiming their CrossFire solution was more flexible than NVIDIA SLI: not only could you mix and match board vendors with CrossFire, the graphics card’s BIOS didn’t matter either. ATI also stated that CrossFire motherboards didn’t require selector cards or jumpers, unlike the SLI motherboards at that time. CrossFire also boasted a special “Super AA” mode sporting 8x, 10x, 12x, and 14x AA modes, enabling AA levels never seen before on the PC. And of course, you can’t forget ATI’s claim that CrossFire was compatible with practically all games (although when questioned they were quick to admit that this claim applies to Super AA and not performance improvements directly).

The Radeon X1800 XT CrossFire card

Unfortunately for ATI, while three months may not seem like a very long time, in the 3D graphics industry, those three months between CeBIT and Computex were critical. By the time ATI was ready to announce their CrossFire technology, NVIDIA was just weeks away from hard launching their next-generation GeForce 7800 GTX GPU. Another problem CrossFire faced was availability, while ATI had announced that the first CrossFire products would hit shelves sometime in July, ultimately CrossFire wasn’t ready for another 3+ months. With retail shelves brimming with NVIDIA’s next-gen GeForce 7 hardware, CrossFire was quickly forgotten. By the time first-generation CrossFire hardware finally did hit shelves, ATI’s Radeon X1K launch was right around the corner. In addition, first-gen CrossFire X850 boards were limited to a max resolution of 1600x1200 at 60Hz. This limitation was a huge oversight on ATI’s part, as CrossFire doesn’t really begin to shine until you crank up the screen resolution.

Old CrossFire (X850) meets new (X1800 xT)

Notice the difference in connectors between both CrossFire cards

Further adding insult to injury was the fact that by the time CrossFire was finally ready, most of CrossFire’s advantages over NVIDIA SLI had been nullified. NVIDIA took every one of ATI’s bullet points favoring CrossFire and addressed them in future driver releases. First NVIDIA introduced two new SLI AA modes in ForceWare 77.76, then NVIDIA added mixed card vendor support in ForceWare release 80. In addition, NVIDIA’s motherboard partners began shipping their second generation of nForce4 SLI motherboards, most of which didn’t require a selector card to enable SLI.

Just like that, all of CrossFire’s key selling points were suddenly gone, and CrossFire hardware cost considerably more than equivalent SLI hardware.

ATI needed an answer to the SLI juggernaut, and today it has finally arrived in the form of the Radeon X1800 CrossFire. Let’s see what improvements ATI has incorporated into their latest CrossFire solution.