ATI has announced that its CrossFire dual graphics solution will work on Intel 955X chipset boards, as well as its own RD480 boards.
Intel has been shipping 955X boards with dual graphics slots for a while now and this is official confirmation that CrossFire won't require an ATI chipset motherboard, opening up the opportunity for system builders to continue to use chipsets they're already familiar with.
Regardless, it's good that Intel gamers now have a wide choice of chipsets available for their gaming pleasure, with Nforce 4 for Intel, CrossFire on Intel and 955X all supporting dual graphics. It will be interesting to see which is fastest...
The 955X has a slightly less sophisticated allocation of lanes to the cards, however, with the primary slot being 16x and the secondary slot being 4x. Intel is adamant that, at least with the current generation of cards, the 4x will not be a bottleneck in the system. This seems a little at odds with Nvidia's view of the bus, given that the green machine has just upped its chipsets to enable support for dual 16x graphics slots on SLI.
CrossFire is due to be launched in the middle of next month with ATI's current generation of cards. Despite the fact that we're not sure why people would want one card without Shader Model 3.0, let alone two, the boys in red seem adamant that they will ship a load of Master Cards (and new motherboards, too) to existing ATI owners, and isn't going to wait for its next generation R520 (SM3) cards to launch CrossFire.
We snapped a couple of pictures of X850s running CrossFire on 955X here at IDF, which are below, for your viewing pleasure.
Thoughts on CrossFire? We want to know them!
Intel has been shipping 955X boards with dual graphics slots for a while now and this is official confirmation that CrossFire won't require an ATI chipset motherboard, opening up the opportunity for system builders to continue to use chipsets they're already familiar with.
Regardless, it's good that Intel gamers now have a wide choice of chipsets available for their gaming pleasure, with Nforce 4 for Intel, CrossFire on Intel and 955X all supporting dual graphics. It will be interesting to see which is fastest...
The 955X has a slightly less sophisticated allocation of lanes to the cards, however, with the primary slot being 16x and the secondary slot being 4x. Intel is adamant that, at least with the current generation of cards, the 4x will not be a bottleneck in the system. This seems a little at odds with Nvidia's view of the bus, given that the green machine has just upped its chipsets to enable support for dual 16x graphics slots on SLI.
CrossFire is due to be launched in the middle of next month with ATI's current generation of cards. Despite the fact that we're not sure why people would want one card without Shader Model 3.0, let alone two, the boys in red seem adamant that they will ship a load of Master Cards (and new motherboards, too) to existing ATI owners, and isn't going to wait for its next generation R520 (SM3) cards to launch CrossFire.
We snapped a couple of pictures of X850s running CrossFire on 955X here at IDF, which are below, for your viewing pleasure.
Thoughts on CrossFire? We want to know them!
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