Crossfire display resolution limit?

altazi

Distinguished
Jan 23, 2007
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Greetings, All.

I couldn't get any traction on this topic in Motherboards, so I'll give it a go here...

I was looking at the user manual for the ASUS M2R32-MVP mobo, which is based on the 580X Crossfire (Crossfire Xpress 3200) chipset, and noticed that it said the maximum resolution in Crossfire was 1600 x 1200 when using the DVI output. This isn't good news to me, as I want to display 1920 x 1200 on DVI. This information isn't listed under "specifications" - it was buried on p.149 of the 160 page manual.

I couldn't find any chipset documentation, so I ask here: Is this a hardware limitation of the 580X chip, a limitation of BIOS (which could be upgraded!), or what?

Thanks in advance for your kind assistance!

Altazi

 

darkstar782

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Dec 24, 2005
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Depends on the graphics cards.

Unlike SLI, which was done in the GPU from the very first 6000 series cards, Crossfire is done on an external compositing chip, which is only present on the "Crossfire Master cards". (This does not apply to the newer cards that have hardware compositing onboard like the x1900GT, although the x1900XT and up do not have this)

On the x850 and x800 cards, and all cards of that generation, this external chip had a max of 1600x1200@60Hz.

This limit is raised alot higher on the newer cards tho.