X1950Pro Crossfire

[ryanmah]

Ok, I'm kinda confused again with ATI's lingo.

It is stated on http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/radeon_x1950_pro_crossfire/

"Fortunately the Radeon X1950 Pro is ATI’s first GPU with built-in support for CrossFire. No special CrossFire master card is necessary, as the technology is integrated into the GPU itself, so every Radeon X1950 Pro card supports the technology out-of-the-box."

Since the X1600 and X1300 cards also support Crossfire with no master card, don't the X1600 and X1300's have built-in support for Crossfire? Or do the X1600 and X1300's rely on a different technology?

 

[SciFiMan]

So, did you want to get one of these cards or are you just interested in the marketing of them?

 

[Slobogob]

Ok, I'm kinda confused again with ATI's lingo.

It is stated on http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/radeon_x1950_pro_crossfire/

"Fortunately the Radeon X1950 Pro is ATI’s first GPU with built-in support for CrossFire. No special CrossFire master card is necessary, as the technology is integrated into the GPU itself, so every Radeon X1950 Pro card supports the technology out-of-the-box."

Since the X1600 and X1300 cards also support Crossfire with no master card, don't the X1600 and X1300's have built-in support for Crossfire? Or do the X1600 and X1300's rely on a different technology?

The x1600 and x1300 use the Mainboards PCIe lanes to crossfire. The older X*** series and the X1900 series used cable loops. The new 1950 Pro works just like SLI with a connector.

 

[sailer]

Yes, you are confused, and the author of the article didn't do anything to help. Dongles have been used for years for various reasons. The old VooDoo cards by 3DFX used them with its SLI. There is really not any functional difference between a dongle and the cable that Nvidia uses, except that one is external and the other internal. They both allow communication between the separate cards. The bigger, more important difference is that with Crossfire, both cards work together all the time, while with Nvidia's SLI, they have to be tied together with software and only work for selected applications. At other times, one of the SLI cards has to be turned off.

The author made mention that the X1950 was the third generation of Crossfire cards; the first being, as you note, the old X1300 and X1600 cards, followed by the X1800 and X1900 cards, and the third, the present X1950 cards. In my opinion, the author unfairly labels Crossfire as "less Elegant", "cheaper", "far from ideal", and "greatly compromised". Examination of the graphics card comparisons show both the X1900 XTX and X1950 XTX Crossfire solution to be consistently faster than Nvidia's SLI. How can better performance be honestly labeled as far from ideal and greatly compromised? The author merely shows his biasd with such comments.

In my opinion, it doesn't matter if the cards are tied together through PCIe lanes, external dongles or internal cables, software or hardware. I just care that it works.