Page 2 - ATI

Team RED - ATI Technologies

This year .. or actually each year ATI is not "really" present at the CeBIT with huge booths etc. They give the board partners the opportunity to do it their way. We however had a quick chat with Andrzej Bania who is Guru3D.com's personal liaison. A great and very energetic guy who is making sure Guru3D is fully supported by ATI when it comes to our articles.

Let me quote a little what I have written in last years CeBIT 2005 article:

Back to the meeting, pretty basic stuff we talked about SLI. We know for sure that their cores can handle it but after going a little deeper into the conversation I couldn't help feeling a rather antagonistic tone from Chris Hook regarding SLI and of course NVIDIA's approach (drivers/scalability) to it. Despite the rumors I'm really not confident that ATI will do some sort of SLI solution for the big market. The fact that they actually could do it is something else. No information was disclosed regarding the R520, which is what everybody is talking about, but I do expect that particular product in May. Other then that in the near future we'll see more and more All-in-Wonder products within the x800 line of the Radeons. I always loved the AIWs for sure.

Could I have been more wrong ? As you guys know ATI is still working on Crossfire really hard. They have a hard time getting it to be 100% accepted in the market though. It's not that the Crossfire solution is not good, it's just that NVIDIA has a years advantage.

Biggest complaints about Crossfire are related to a couple of things. If you want to place a Radeon X1800 XL 256MB in Crossfire mode you need to buy the expensive X1800 XT 512MB mastercard which will deactivate 256Mb and clock down towards the XL specification. That stuff is just not accepted by consumers. But there might be a solution.

We'll tell you in a moment.

Second issue for ATI is a silly little cable that is need to feed data to the compositing engine on the Crossfire master card... the dreaded Crossfire cable. Not one hardware related media website I think was able to understand as to why they opted the silly cable and yeah ATI is receiving a lot of criticism on that.

But hey now ...they listnen very well.  ATi had a private demo room where they have been showing off Crossfire without the cable. ATI was demo'ing a PC with two X1800 XL graphics card, not using the crossfire cable ! How does that work ? Simple .. they send the data over the PCI-Express slots instead of over that Crossfire cable. We knew it was already possible for the X1300 cards and maybe even X1600 cards. But now the X1800 XL cards will be able to do this also. Best thing yet .. you do not need a mastercard to do this. These are two very huge plusses !

You are bound tofor example a Radeon Xpress 3200 mainboard as it needs two fully capable 16x lane PCI-Express (PCX) ports as that a lot of traffic to move around. Crossfire is platform independant though, so Intels X975 solution might work well and I tend to believe you can even do this with an NVIDIA SLI mainboard.

My bet is also that ATI will instantly run into a another problem. Ask yourself this question: Why demonstrating this lovely setup with just a X1800 XL on Crossfire ? Could it be that the 2x X1300/X1600 can do it over (2x) PCX 8x slots and the X1800 XL can coop well on a (2x) PCX 16x slots but any faster product (I think) might run into a bottleneck with x2 16 lanes PCI-Express available ? I'm not yet sure just yet. Rest assure that once the drivers will become available we are going to test this.

It's a huge step forwards for ATI's Crossfire solution and I hope it works well. The dongle free X1800 XL card in Crossfire mode did fantastic numbers on 3DMark05 (which was demonstrated) with numbers close to 11-12k.

Of course at CeBIT time ATI launched the Radeon X1800 GTO also. We have a full in-depth article ready on that card which you can read here. The performance we see for this product really is fantastic for a mid range product.  It's an extremely fun card and an exceptionally good choice for those gamers who play their games at 1280x1024. Yeah, a good product, very decent performance, acceptable price and a heap of functionality. It's definitely a product worth considering if you are in the market for a sub 249 USD mid-range product.

ATI has a marvelous product line-up at the moment, especially in the mid-range to high-end segment. And better yet .. prices came down massively due to the fierce competition with NVIDIA. Have a look at one of our many ATI articles I'd say.

One last hint .. 1 GB cards are on the way people. Right some photo's. Cheers to Andrzej and Chris for the invite and information.

Crossfire setup - 2x X1800 XL 256MB

A little more closer. The mainboard is Express 3200 based.

And here's the proof .. no Crossfire cable.