SLI is also evolving
ATI About CrossFire's capabilities in our news we could mention a number of small things, which show that the company did not spend a year idle between the two technologies, so in a number of small things - at least on paper - it was more efficient and better. Well, of course NVIDIA doesn't let that happen either, let's see what we can expect from SLI in the future!
Anyone who may not have done so far should quickly read the news mentioned above to be aware of the features of CrossFire. Since then, we can add no small thing to our writing at the time: unlike previous information, ATI CrossFire works on some nForce4 SLI-equipped motherboards, not necessarily Radeon Xpress 200 CrossFire Edition. One example is one of the DFI motherboards, which achieved 9945 3DMark05 points on the base clock signal using an Athlon 64 4000+ and two Radeon X850 XT PEs. Unfortunately, we’ve not had plenty of really usable test results since then, so we have to get by with the pretty nonsensical 3DMark.
ATI CrossFire NVIDIA nForce4 with SLI-equipped DFI motherboard
Let’s turn to the main topic of our current news, which is what’s new in SLI. At first, one of the biggest problems was that the manufacturer had to create a separate profile for each game, the user could not comment on when which SLI mode would work. The latest ForceWares already allow the user to have a say in the decision, though factory values still override them, but not very surprisingly only if they exist. That is, from now on, we can also enable SLI in games that ForceWare did not initially know about.
ATI is proud to announce that CrossFire has been designed to improve image quality with much more than a simple performance-enhancing process, such as the introduction of SuperAA and 32 × anisotropic filtering. Well, starting in July, SLI-bound NVIDIA systems will also be able to 16 × edge smoothing, which means using 4 × SuperSampling and 4 × MultiSampling together. In contrast, ATI’s Super AA, dubbed 10 × and 14 ×, blends 2 × SuperSampling with 4 × and 6 × MultiSampling, respectively. Based on these, NVIDIA's solution, if properly implemented, can definitely result in a more beautiful picture. However, it has not yet been decided whether to take the image at 4 × SuperSampling 4 × resolution and return it to the desired value, or to take the original resolution image four times, slightly shifted, and averaged.
