Elite Bastards takes a look at ATI's CrossFire
When NVIDIA announced their SLI solution almost a year ago, allowing you to use two identical GeForce 6800 or 6600 boards together to effectively double your rendering power, there was understandable excitement in the enthusiast community, although this was tempered with the obvious issues of cost, compatibility and the like. With this in mind, it seems fair to say that nobody expected SLI to take off in just the manner it did, with both video cards and nForce4 SLI motherboards flying off the shelves. Nobody was taken more by surprise than NVIDIA's arch-rival, ATI, who had themselves shrugged off the need for a multiple GPU solution in their product range. The commercial success of SLI guaranteed a quick change in thinking from the Canadian firm, and the results of this are what you see before you today, in the form of a launch of what ATI hope will be an SLI-killer - CrossFire. While reviewers don't have samples of this system in their hands yet, we do have all the details of its implementation, and it is this which we will be looking at today.CrossFire in the crosshairs - ATI's multi-GPU solution