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ATI's CrossFire Takes Aim at Nvidia's SLI
Posted by: Tweaker
Date added: 09:16, 28th September 2005 GMT
Source: Extreme Tech
Using two graphics cards in tandem to beef up your gaming is really nothing new. In consumer graphics, it goes back to the SLI (that's Scan Line Interleave) days of the Voodoo 2. It effectively went away for a long while when the AGP bus replaced the PCI bus for graphics, because adding two AGP ports in a single desktop system was nearly impossible. Some very narrow markets like military simulation have used multiple graphics cards, but the reign of AGP effectively killed multiple graphics cards on the desktop.
With PCI Express, dual graphics has made a resurgence. Since PCIe scales nicely, you can have multiple PCIe x16 slots in a system. The limitation is the number of PCI Express lanes supported by the available chipsets. Current chipsets have only 20 lanes, so two PCIe x16 slots are seen by the system as two x8 ports when two graphics cards are installed. We've already seen dual x16 slot solutions that offer 32 total lanes in some workstation class products, and we'll see true dual x16 slots on high-end desktop PC motherboards in the near future. Whether or not they'll make any real difference with today's software is open to question.
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