Question on ATI crossfire hybrid

Good luck finding a card that supports hybrid crossfire, because IGPs are so weak compared to a decent discrete card only a few of the very low end units supported it. According to the crossfire compatibility chart from AMD it looks like the 3470 was the strongest unit to support hybrid crossfire, so its not really worth the effort when you can grab a significantly stronger 5570 for not too much.

Hybrid Crossfire was never particularly useful. Just forget about it.

lol ok yea i was hoping to pair it with a 5770 but guess not..... is ATI better the sli right now?

SLI is using two Nvidia cards at once... not sure how to answer that question.

Sry i ment crossfire vs sli or ATI vs Nvidia basically. ive heard the ATI has surpassed nvidia. it has a lower fail rate, and has better ban for the buck is this true?

SLI scales better than crossfire, and both have pretty even GPUs in the high end, but for any budget below $200 you are better off going with an ATI card. $200 and up it gets a bit trickier.

It depends on how much you have to spend. For $120 or below there are reasonable choices from either side. For $150 the HD5770 is the way to go. For $200-250 the GTX 460 is the best card for the money. At $300 either the HD5850 or GTX 470 are good choices.
In terms of multi-card setups SLI tends to scale better than crossfire.

if i do use crossfire do the 2 graphics card have to be the exact same ones?

No, there are certain other combinations that will work but it is definitely for the best. Rarely is mixed crossfire better than just using 2 of the weaker card.

Look at the crossfire chart above, crossfire is quite a bit more lienent than SLI, you can crossfire a 5970 with a 5830 if you wanted or a 5770 with a 5750, it wont scale well if you do that but you can do that. They do not need to be the same brand or model number, as long as they are in the same family(eg 58xx/59xx or 57xx) it will work.