Ati's Crossfire Dilemma

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Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.videocards.ati,comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action (More info?)

At the Computex 2005 show (just ended) Ati were saying that they were
looking at ways of making boards with chipsets other than the X200
Crossfire Edition work with Crossfire video cards, so that they would
have a ready-made base to begin to drop Crossfire into.

However, there are immediate problems with that approach.

About 1 million nForce4-SLI chip-sets have already been shipped and
are continuing to ship at a hot pace. If Ati could develop a driver
that would make their Crossfire system work with nForce4-SLI boards,
they would have an instant vast number of slots into which they could
potentially sell Crossfire cards. However, then why would
anybody ever buy an ATi Crossfire motherboard, if they could buy
a (SLI) motherboard that could then be used with BOTH
dual-video-card systems, Crossfire and SLI ??

DILEMMA....More motherboard chip-set business for nVidia to sell more
Crossfire cards ?

If Ati's management was sensible, they would instantly go the route of
engineering a driver to fake Crossfire on nForce4, since there is a
lot more profit to be made on the video GPUs than on mother-board
chip-sets,. There is no obvious reason why such a driver could not be
written for nForce4-SLI. And nVidia is about to cut the price of the
SLI chipset. However, I suspect that politics at ATi will prevail over
common-sense. We shall have the proof very soon.....

So, second thought, make the Crossfire system work with only Intel
chips. The 955X or a variant thereof can indeed support 2 x16 video
slots in a x8/x8 configuration, but Intel has not yet provided a
driver ( the delay is probably part of the Intel nVidia agreement )
However, this premium (and currently low-volume) board is also
extremely expensive. Anyway, with time slipping away, Ati does not
have a volume Intel chip-set board to hook Crossfire to either.
DILEMMA again.....

So, how many people are really going to committ to an ATi Crossfire
motherboard to enable ATi Crossfire video , especially when Ati is
stupidly also insisting that the motherboard vendors use the
known-to-be-flaky Ati Southbridge on Crossfire motherboards
instead of the equivalent-function but not-flaky ULi one ?

Seems as if Crossfire may be heading rather quickly for the Recycle
Bin of great ideas screwed up by poor implementation and/or
business politics.

Maybe ATi should concentrate on putting 2 GPUs on one board,
and forget Crossfire, or turn more resources on to speeding the R520
release. Howeve, I suspect that the needed resources for the latter
are currently being fully diverted to the panic-station called the
Xbox360 GPU/Memory Controller.

John Lewis

 

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Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.videocards.ati,comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action (More info?)

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John Lewis wrote:

<snip>

in a previous post you stated working in "IT" so i guess that
would justify why you talk so much about high end systems

but like i've been telling in previous posts for me high end
systems with "sli", "crossfire", "dual core" "64 bits" are
not what pc games need at this moment
any kind of systems with these technologies are tremendously
expensive and i can't image a regular pc gamer having the
money to buy it

in pc games we need to focus much less in high end hardware
like all those dual graphic card systems and instead focus on
having quality titles done for the current technologies
pc games need better fight against piracy, more buying of pc
game titles and developers coding for current technologies

--
post made in a steam-free computer
i said "NO" to valve and steam

to check authenticity of the real "steamKILLER" reassure that
the post came from a google server and that the email address
is "sayNO2steam@yahoo.com"

 

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Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.videocards.ati,comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action (More info?)

From his diversionary reply in this thread, it seems as if our (er)
friend (er) s***K****R is only a casual gamer and is totally out of
his depth in these newsgroups. Fairly obvious that he is limited to
being an excellent parrot with near-zero PC gaming experience
and near-zero money to invest in the pastime. His mommy probably
buys him one game every Christmas to run on his 386 peecee.

By the way, like any troll, he survives and grows by being fed
with replies. You may notice that this posting is a response in my
original thread... I have not replied to directly (nor quoted)
s***K****R's rantings.

It seems as if many are still not following the excellent advice
given by Wally and Sailor..... Don't feed the troll.... It will get
worse if you do..............

John Lewis