ATI ‘Crossfire’ Targets Nvidia’s SLI

ATI is firing back at Nvidia with their new 'Crossfire' graphics cards. According to ATI, their new Crossfire cards offer SLI like performance without special drivers.

The gaming setup is very similar to Nvidia’s. You need two video cards (one of them a new Crossfire ATI card) and a new motherboard with two video card slots. The two cards work in conjunction to offer better performance in your games and graphics applications. ATI claims that the advantage they have is that their Crossfire systems do not need updated drivers or application updates, they work with every program.

You will need a motherboard based on the ATI Radeon Xpress 200 Crossfire chipset. ASUS, DFI, ECS, GIGABYTE, MSI, PC Partner, Sapphire and TUL should all have new motherboards available shortly.

The Radeon X850 CrossFire Edition cards, with 256MB of graphics memory can be paired with any standard Radeon X850 based graphics card. The Radeon X800 CrossFire Edition graphics cards, which come with either 128 MB or 256 MB of graphics memory, can be paired with any Radeon X800 series graphics card. The standard Radeon X800 and Radeon X850 cards can be purchased new or can be ones the customer already has.

The standard and CrossFire Edition cards will be available from ATI and ATI graphics partners including ABIT, ASUS, Connect3D, Diamond, GeCube, GIGABYTE, HIS, MSI, Pailt, Sapphire, TUL or VisionTek.

System builders such as ABS, Alienware, Cyberpower, Falcon Northwest, Hypersonic, Ibuypower, Monarch PC, PC Club, Polywell, Velocity Micro, VoodooPC, and ZT Group will also carry CrossFire systems for gamers wanting pre-built systems.

The ATI FAQ page does a pretty god job of explaining what you need to get one of their new Crossfire systems up and running.

ATI CrossFire preview at the Tech Report

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