Hardware Secrets looked at the new Native CrossFire Technology from ATI

CrossFire is a technology released by ATI to compete with nVidia’s SLI, allowing you to connect two video cards in parallel in order to increase 3D performance. First we thought that CrossFire technology would be the greatest vaporware of all times. But it has finally reached the market one year ago, one year behind the competing technology from nVidia, SLI. Even though CrossFire is better than SLI in the way that you can hook two completely different video cards together (SLI requires that both cards to be exactly the same), it has two major drawbacks: you need a “master” (a.k.a. “CrossFire Edition”) video card to control CrossFire (“master” cards were hard to find when CrossFire was released) and the connection between the two cards are done thru a cable outside the PC. ATI is now fixing these two problems with a new CrossFire version, called “Native CrossFire”. Let’s take a look on it.

New Native CrossFire Technology from ATI