DailyTech - ATI CrossFire Bridge Sighted

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Hardware ATI CrossFire Bridge Sighted
Anh Tuan Huynh (Blog) - June 11, 2006 12:31 PM

28 comment(s) - last by Trisped.. on Jun 12 at 3:25 PM

Image courtesy VR-Zone.com

More RV560 and RV570 details

DailyTech previously reported ATI would be launching 80nm mainstream GPU parts in the near future. The new RV560 and RV570 80nm parts will launch in August and September of 2006 and integrate the CrossFire compositing logic onboard. This will allow dongle-less CrossFire compatibility with CrossFire capable motherboards. Dongle-less CrossFire will not move all data across the PCI Express bus however. Motherboard manufacturers told DailyTech a separate bridge would still be needed for dongle-less CrossFire.

VR-Zone may have snapped a few images of the required bridge shown behind closed doors to partners at Computex 2006. The new CrossFire bridge appears very similar to the NVIDIA SLI bridge. Never the less, there will be no need to find specific master or slave cards with the new RV560 and FV570 parts as all cards will have an onboard composite engine. The VR-Zone image shows two bridges connecting the two video cards.

Motherboard manufacturers have told DailyTech an ATI board will not be required for dongle-less CrossFire, however these same sources also originally claimed CrossFire on RV560 and RV570 wouldn't require a bridge like NVIDIA's SLI.

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Crossfire and nVidia

By Assimilator87 on 6/11/2006 2:52:51 PM , Rating: 2

Does Crossfire work on nVidia boards? I'm not sure if enabling dual graphics is in the platform drivers or the display drivers, but don't you just enable Crossfire in Catalyst?

RE: Crossfire and nVidia

By Tsuwamono on 6/11/2006 4:09:35 PM , Rating: 3

Do Pentium 4s go in Socket 939 mobos? (answer is the same)

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RE: Crossfire and nVidia

By Assimilator87 on 6/12/2006 3:14:20 PM , Rating: 2

"Do Pentium 4s go in Socket 939 mobos? (answer is the same)"

That's a horrible analogy. Those are two different sockets whereas all graphics cards use the same slot, but I see your point.

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RE: Crossfire and nVidia

By Mr Perfect on 6/11/2006 5:00:44 PM , Rating: 2

No. Nor does SLI work on Croosfire boards.

I think the only dual-card anouncment I could actually get excited about is if the industry would hammer out some sort of standard for this shit. But of course ATI an Nvidia won't allow that since they can get motherboard chipset sales through exclusivity.

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RE: Crossfire and nVidia

By Lord Evermore on 6/11/2006 7:51:24 PM , Rating: 2

Technically they can work on each others' chipsets, they just don't LET them work. All it is is data passed over the PCIe bus, nothing particularly special about it.

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RE: Crossfire and nVidia

By akugami on 6/12/2006 1:51:01 PM , Rating: 2

I believe someone had SLI up on an AMD board using ULI southbridge using the leaked drivers. It was slow compared to regular SLI but it worked.

SLI and Crossfire is not a mainstream product. It's based on the enthusiast market and the more money than brains market.

I know nVidia fanboys like to complain about the ATI external dongle but I must be in the minority when I say only the front and side of my computer case faces me on a daily basis and not the back. Of course, your computing habits may differ and the back of your computer case might be facing towards you. If anything, a more valid criticism would be Crossfire (until very recently) not being polished enough to be released at all.

SLI did not surprise ATI. What surprissed ATI was the positive reaction to SLI as they did not expect people to buy two video cards for a 30-60% increase in performance. And at the time of SLI's release, it was buggy and that was roughly best case scenario. Right now the performance boost and stability of SLI is much higher but still not as good as a single card solution. So ATI's kneejerk reaction was Crossfire which was more hot air than actual product for a long time.

ATI is trying to take it to the next level by getting you to buy three video cards, one for physics performance while nVidia is pushing quad SLI. I have money but I find dual video cards a waste of my money, I'm not getting suckered into three or four card solutions.

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ATI drops the ball

By irev210 on 6/11/2006 2:12:24 PM , Rating: 2

Honestly, what a waste. This should be on the current X1900XTX line.

The fact is that nvidia suprised the crap out of ati when they dropped the SLI bomb.

ATI, a year later, is finally catching up.

RE: ATI drops the ball

By gersson on 6/11/2006 2:52:04 PM , Rating: 4

Do you have a crossfire setup? Well, I do and the dongle is no bother. Of all the things I've heard people complain about, this has to be the stupidest.

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RE: ATI drops the ball

By Googer on 6/11/2006 8:11:51 PM , Rating: 2

I agree, ATi's dongle and crossfire solution is much more elegant than nVIDIA's SLi. Crossfire is much easier to setup, use, and live with. The Crossfire Cable takes up almost no space. So stop B*tching, because changing or moving that monitor cable is much easier than opening up the inside of your PC to change the SLi Bridge. Thumbs down to ATi for this.

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RE: ATI drops the ball

By irev210 on 6/11/2006 9:51:10 PM , Rating: 4

ATI is listening to OEM's who wont ship a computer to a customer where they need to install a dongle.

1) A customer doesnt realize they need a dongle, then calls customer service

2) A customer loses the dongle, then calls customer service

3) A customer doesnt know even know what a dongle is, and throws it out, then calls customer serivce

4) A customer steps on their dongle, and then calls customer service

5) A customer feeds the dongle to their dog, then calls customer serivce.

6) A customer pushes their computer into a wall, destroying their dongle and their video cards, then calls customer service.

The idea of an external dongle just never sat well with system integrators. For people like us, the idea works fine... but not for mass market, which dual-GPU is turning into.

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Wow!

By sxr7171 on 6/11/2006 12:43:42 PM , Rating: 1

What a novel idea! We've never seen this before. Good job ATI!

RE: Wow!

By shadowzz on 6/11/2006 1:15:57 PM , Rating: 4

No kidding. I'm so dissapointed with this I don't even know where to start trolling. No, wait. I could always troll a bit on Dailytech. Here we go:

#############################################
# Welcome to ATI's R&D Department Mainframe
#
# Please enter choice!
#############################################

[ ] Buy low brow Taiwanese chipset provider
- [ ] SiS
- [ ] VIA
[x] Release dual analog tuner one month after competition
[x] Avivo
- [x] Don't enable 2/3 of the functions to compete with PureVideo
[ ] Quad SLI^H^H^H CrossFire
- [ ] Dongle Free
- [ ] Announced Quad CrossFire, then don't support it officially
[x] Intel and AMD chipset with auto-overclocking features
[x] Announce physics platform without middleware support
- [ ] Announce relatitory competitive announcement
- [ ] Claim exclusivity and 100x performance gains

Seriously, you can't make this stuff up.

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RE: Wow!

By rqle on 6/11/2006 2:28:33 PM , Rating: 2

WOW, its like an organize army of you guys in here. joint operation attack and the first 5 post too. impressive fans.

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RE: Wow!

By PT2006 on 6/11/2006 8:15:49 PM , Rating: 2

I think it's like Apple -- the people who love ATI the most are the people who slam them the most.

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who actually uses sli? other than for bragging rights

By 8steve8 on 6/11/2006 8:19:10 PM , Rating: 2

who cares,
sli hasnt really been interesting since voodoo2 sli...

that was back when we desperately needed the performance.

no one needs sli with two modern high end video cards.

period.

RE: who actually uses sli? other than for bragging rights

By JarredWalton on 6/11/2006 8:40:08 PM , Rating: 2

Ever tried running a 30" LCD at native resolution? Even 24" LCDs can use SLI/CF. So people that want to spend $1000+ on displays probably like getting $1000+ GPU setups.

BTW, CrossFire does work without a dongle on lower end models (X1300, X1600). However, I tested X1600 Pro CF and found it to be totally underwhelming. It about matched the performance of a single 6600GT, and boosted performance a maximum of about 50% over a single card. Apparently, the extra BW *is* needed - X16 PCIe isn't sufficient... or the drivers need work.

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RE: who actually uses sli? other than for bragging rights

By baddog121390 on 6/11/2006 8:52:55 PM , Rating: 4

SLI also works without a bridge at a small performance hit

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Slot Spacing

By Goty on 6/11/2006 7:05:05 PM , Rating: 2

Is it just me, or does anyone else see problems coming up from people buying these cards to go on a crossfire mobo that has a three slot spacing between x16 slots instead of the ordinary two?

RE: Slot Spacing

By Lord Evermore on 6/11/2006 7:57:41 PM , Rating: 1

Same problem would occur with any SLI bridge if the cable was made too short, so if you've seen complaints about that, you'll see them here too. But card makers could just make a flexible longer cable for that the same as some did with SLI. Most people buying cards for SLI research them a little more than the average consumer so they'd find out about things like that hopefully, and most likely will affect only a few people anyway.

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RE: Slot Spacing

By Missing Ghost on 6/12/2006 12:20:22 AM , Rating: 2

usually the SLI connector comes with the motherboard, so I suppose that ATI could do the same thing and say to the motherboard brands they need to ship their own to release crossfire branded mobos.

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RE: Slot Spacing

By Trisped on 6/12/2006 3:23:51 PM , Rating: 2

If you look at the picture the bridge seems to be made out of flexible material, so it shouldn't be a problem (unless you have 4 slots between cards, which I don't think is likely) Besides, aren't most ATI boards set up with 3 spaces between cards?

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Double Vision?

By Aquila76 on 6/11/2006 5:55:19 PM , Rating: 2

Is it just me, or does the ATI solution appear to require TWO bridges in that picture? Is an nVidia-style bridge not wide enough to handle the data?

RE: Double Vision?

By Missing Ghost on 6/12/2006 12:18:29 AM , Rating: 2

It's their own proprietary interface. They can decide how much pins it require, it's not the sli interface and it's not following any standard. However they could just use the pcie interface since it has a huge amount of unused bandwidth, I know they can do this since the X1600 can do crossfire with no dongle/bridge.

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