AMR arrives

According to what I've read on Anandtech, Slashdot, ATi.com and others, that ATi has announced their commercial level AMR (ATi Multi Rendering) called Crossfire. It has many advantages over SLi, such as the ability to use existing X800 and X850 cards in the setup (you can combine an X800 or X850 with a crossfire X800 or X850 to get that dual card wonderness) as well, a new (for the commercial market) display separation scheme called SuperTiling, in Crossfire, this separates the screen into 32 evenly sized portions, in a checkerboard pattern, ensuring that each card has about the same amount of work to do.

The biggest and best part of Crossfire over SLi is that all games receive a graphical boost, not just those that have a "profile." SLi requires this profile to tell the drivers what to do with the extra card, however, ATi has eliminated this need, which gains it more performance, not only in the dual card enabled games, but in your ordinary games as well.

"Compared with two 6800 Ultra SLI, ATI's Crossfire should end up about 10 per cent faster in 3Dmark05 benchmark, about 30 percent in Splinter Cell C.T and more than 60 percent in Need For Speed Underground 2."

Quite some promising numbers there, I, for one, cannot wait to see full benchmarks, and to get my hands on these cards.

--the_sidewinder

(Song of the day: Technologic by Daft Punk on the album "Human After All")