What is Crossfire technology

What is Corssfire?

Crossfire Brief Introduction CF, Chinese name Crossfire, short fire, is ati a multiple GPU technology, allows multiple display card simultaneously on a computer side to use, increase operational efficiency, and Nvidia's SLI technology competition. Crossfire Technology was officially released on June 1, 2005 in Computex Taipei 2005, a year later than SLI. To the first public so far, Crossfire has undergone a revision.

Crossfire is the ATI company introduced a dual-card interconnection technology, this technology can achieve a Radeon level drawing processor with another piece of Radeon Crossfire version of the drawing card, for the game players with the performance of the previous aspect of the upgrade. Crossfire technology requires two graphics cards and two video cards are cabled (just outside the chassis rather than inside). Since the previous ATI display card does not like NVIDIA, the cooperative operation is reserved. So the composting engine and DMS Cable were used in the first generation of Crossfire,ati to emulate Nvidia's Mio interface.

One of the advantages of the ATi Crossfire platform is that it has very high game compatibility. ATI's unique multiple-drawing processor mode allows crossfire to automatically perform each game, regardless of whether the new or old games have to use a special game setup file or an upgrade of the move program.

To use this technique, the motherboard must support crossfire, as well as a display card requiring two ATIPCI express interfaces, to the same level, and may need to purchase a Master card. For example: If the user has a piece of Radoen x850xt PE display card, must purchase an additional Radeon X850 Crossfire Edition, in order to achieve crossfire. But for X1600, just buy two identical cards, you can achieve crossfire.

What are the benefits of Corssfire technology to us?

Corssfire Technology as a dual-card interconnection technology, it is obvious that it brings us a direct benefit of the 3D performance improvement. and the use of external cable mode, for the user installation and disassembly provides a convenient.

Corssfire is ATI's own dual-card interconnection technology, there are many unique aspects of design, but at present the drive and connection are not mature, in the performance improvement is more limited, here is recommended for the top users to buy, and the midrange entry level left two graphics card money to buy a strong performance of a single card.

Amd-ati video card Fire Fighting technology

The three-way and four-way GPU parallel technology proposed by AMD CrossFireX finally became a reality, but also began the difficult road similar to the original Crossfire/sli. To achieve three, four GPU work at the same time, AMD uses the Windows Vista associated display adapter (LDA) technology, so that more than one physical GPU in the system as a single virtual device. This increases the flexibility of the graphics configuration, but there are some drawbacks.

AMD's CrossFireX technology advantage lies in its great flexibility, it can use any RV670 or R680 graphics card to carry on any collocation, the combination becomes 3 GPU or 4 GPU exchange of Fire plan. You can use two HD 3850 plus one HD 3870 or an HD 3870 X2 plus a HD 3850 to make a three-way firefight, you can also use two HD 3850 plus two HD 3870, or two HD 3870 X2 to form a four-way firefight. In the AMD presentation, there are more than 30 combinations of solutions.

For the entire AMD graphics product line undoubtedly has the extremely important significance. For the first time, he has provided formal support for two of the latest and most graphic core Synergy technologies, including CrossFireX and mixed-fire hybrid crossfire.

CrossFireX also supports a variety of motherboard platforms, with the exception of AMD's own chipset to provide the perfect support for a variety of Intel chipsets.

According to AMD, the maximum number of CrossFireX Crossfire can bring about 3.2 times times the performance of a single card upgrade. In building CrossFireX platform type, the problem needing attention is the limitation of video memory. The multi-channel video memory for each GPU is subject to the GPU with the least memory in the platform. If you use two HD 3850 512MB plus one HD 3850 256MB, three graphics cards can only use 256MB. Similarly, when the video card frequency in the system is not the same, there will be similar restrictions appear.