Úlfhednar said:
The benefit of Crossfire is that you get two graphics cards working together (obviously), and the benefit of Crossfire over Nvidia's SLI technology are that a.) it's done entirely on the hardware and works in all games, whereas SLI will not work properly (or at all) in a game without a software SLI profile and b.) it offers a larger range of rendering methods that SLI does not.
Yes, you would need a motherboard with a Crossfire chipset (just like you would need an SLI chipset for Nvidia's version.) Most of the big companies make Crossfire motherboards, including Asrock, Asus, DFI, and I have also heard good things about Sapphire boards.
I hope this clears up some confusion.
Úlfhednar, that reads like a marketing page straight from ATi, I'm not saying that is what you have done but can I ask you, do you really think Crossfire is that good?
There has just been a "world tour" multi review of SLI vs Crossfire and SLI slaughtered Crossfire from what I read! It was performed by major sites from everywhere including Rage3D, NVNews.
People running crossfire are moaning their heads off at ATi to get profiles done with a bit more haste so the "It just works" (which is what ATi promised pre-launch) is just plain wrong.
Personally and this is unqualified because I've not tried SLI or Crossfire is that both have issues and are not worth the trouble, for me I would advise anyone to go for a single very powerful card, X1900XT, better yet with an extra X! or 7900GTX.
The world tour started here...
http://www.penstarsys.com/reviews/video/multigpu/pss/index.html
The following are a couple of comments from Rage3D, an ATi fansite...
"I remember last year as ATI was announcing Crossfire all the hype they were making about not needing to use game profiles and that every game “just worked”. A shot at NVIDIA and their SLI profile system, clearly. Turns out ATI uses profiles in much the same way as NVIDIA. The only difference is that ATI has far fewer of them (so far fewer games actually work with Crossfire compared to SLI), and they are closed up in an encrypted .DLL or some silliness so users can’t modify it and add their own profiles (NVIDIA’s are in a plain text .XML file, easily modifiable). With ATI’s software designers all neatly tied up with Vista right now, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for user customizable profiles for Win XP."
and
"So, what was apparently so easily cut and dry a few pages ago now has a little caveat attached to it: speed or IQ. I suppose, though, that since you’re reading this you’re probably interested in a Multi-GPU system, and even with the image quality advantages ATI has, it is nothing near enough to make up for the vast stability and usability disadvantages Crossfire has compared to SLI."
both quotes from above were from the Rage3D issue of the "world tour", last page, link below...
http://www.rage3d.com/articles/mgpuworldtour_p8/index.php?p=7
to add my pennies worth and I'm the proud owner of an X1800XT 256MB from OCuk, ATi I think clearly wins image quality, ignoring the HDR + AA the angle independent AF really is quality from a quality company but as far as multi GPUs go, nVidia has it...
regards,
J.
