ATi Visited Voodoo City Yesterday...

Well blow me down! ATi visited Voodoo City yesterday and they brought gifts. It was a very good meeting, they have certainly realized they made mistakes at the launch and they are trying to get things back in order.

We finally received our Crossfire samples and we're currently evaluating X1800XT and X1800XL video boards. We're also testing Crossfire so it could be an interesting December. I believe the X1800XT has a ton of potential, simply because ATi is getting some decent yields. They lowered the clock speeds in order to produce volume, which means that you can probably overclock the heck out the card. I am only speculating here, but I assume once our testing is finished and our NDA is lifted I’ll be able to offer an official opinion.

Looking at Crossfire, one needs to realize that it's a two part solution. Essentially ATi has 3 parts, the X1800XT, X1800XL, and the X1800CF edition. You'll need to purchase one of the first two then one Crossfire edition card in order to get them to work in Crossfire. The thing is, the cost of the Crossfire component is likely to be the same or similar to the X1800XT card, therefore most people should consider doing Crossfire with the highest end component.

Now, even though this may seem like a drawback, it's not. The thing about this hardware solution of "master/slave" is it allows ATi Crossfire to accelerate all DirectX compatible games, that is, every new game out there. So instead of worrying about driver compatibility or which game supports multi GPU and which doesn't, ATi Crossfire should accelerate pretty much every game you can play.

That's the theory, and if it works as such it will be a pretty compelling product. At the same time, ATi will release Crossfire on the X1600 and X1300 series, but these will not require a CF card. They will support Crossfire in software mode, which doesn't excite me because you lose about 25% performance by accelerating through software rather than hardware. I probably won’t jump out and buy the X1300 Crossfire, but the X1600 might find a place in the market.

The biggest challenge that ATi had with Crossfire is getting their motherboards out there. Well, I guess that’s not a problem seeing as Crossfire supports almost any motherboard with two PCI Express slots. Therefore ATi Crossfire will work on nForce4 and Intel chipsets.

The last thing and probably the most exciting for me is the X1800XL support of odd HDTV resolutions. This is truly one of the best quality components for HDTV, and thus we’ll be using it and recommending it in our ARIA system as an option. Ultimately we have some competition in certain segments of the market and this is fantastic news for everyone.