Greetings and salutations earthlings, welcome to yet another all-embracing Guru of 3D article. Today we will be talking about ATI's latest Crossfire solution based on the Radeon X1800 XT. Since this is actually our first Crossfire article, we will have to explain a bit about what it actually is, won't we?

You are a Guru3D.com visitor, thus you have probably read many of our articles. NVIDIA's SLI has been the best marketing solution in 2004 and ATI simply had to offer a competitive answer. Their answer is of course Crossfire. Why two graphics cards you ask ? Pretty much everybody is getting a little annoyed by the fact that you constantly have to upgrade your graphics card each year. Technology is moving so fast plus, well, let's face it .. the graphics chip/card manufacturers really love the fact that you need to buy a card each year.

A good alternative without spending too much money is to add a second similar generation graphics card to the one you already have in your PC and effectively double your brute rendering gaming performance. This is the concept that is SLI and now for ATI Crossfire. You take two graphics cards that you connect to each other and double up that horsepower in your PC. The idea is not new at all though .. if you are familiar with the hardware developments over the past couple of years you'll remember that 3dfx had a very familiar concept with the Voodoo 2 graphics cards series. There are multiple ways to manage two cards rendering one frame, think of Supertiling, it's most simple form. Each card will render a frame (even/uneven) or simply the upper or the lower part of the frame. Now that sounds more easy than it is though because you need to have everything right on your PC.

There are some disadvantages .. the biggest one being your wallet. You need a Crossfire ready mainboard, you need a serious processor to be able to handle that brute force, you need a power supply that can handle all these components and you need to invest in two graphics cards. So all in all that is a rather expensive crusade. It, however, is an extremely fun crusade though.

cross·fire ( P ) Pronunciation Key (krôsfr, krs-)

1. Lines of fire from two or more positions crossing each other at a single point: soldiers caught in crossfire.
2. A confrontational situation in which opposing factions, forces, views, or opinions converge: “caught in the crossfire in a battle over Internet site names” (Denise Caruso).
3. Rapid, heated discussion.

What we'll be doing today is this: we took a Crossfire mainboard (ASUS A8R-MVP) and started to configure it precisely the same as our main SLI graphics cards test PC to get you guys a nice overview of what Crossfire can do. ATI supplied us with two cards for this test. Of course it's their Radeon X1800 XT 512MB standard and one master X1800 XT 512MB Crossfire graphics card.

Let the games commence !