Understanding CrossFire

As the main competitor to nVidia, AMD/ATI can’t stay behind and see nVidia grab all the market share. In 2005, AMD/ATI introduced the CrossFire technology that uses a similar multi-GPUs technology to boost your gaming performance. The recently release CrossFireX (part of the AMD spider platform) enables the gamers to use up to four graphics cards in a single computer to improve graphics performance.

Advantages of CrossFireX have over nVidia’s SLI

• In CrossFire setting, user can use different AMD/ATI graphics cards, as long as all the GPUs belong to the same family. In SLI, you have to use the same GPUs for all the graphics card.
• AMD/ATI has opened the CrossFireX architecture to Intel, allowing CrossFire to be enabled on certain Intel chipsets which boast two 16x PCI-E slots. SLI, however, requires a motherboard which is SLI certified (usually based on nForce chipset, such as the nForce 590 SLI and nForce 680i SLI).
• The CrossFireX, with Spider platform allows the users to use multiple displays and maintain CrossFire functionality while SLI are limited to one display only regardless of the number of graphics card used.