Crissfire - 8X, 16X...

[Gamer Guy]

Interesting. So why does CCC report 16x for primary and 8x for secondary? I thought that's what I was getting since I started cross firing a few months back.

P.S.

Since getting my RMA'd 5870 back today it does indeed say 8x by 8x in CCC. I swear before the RMA it was 16x by 8x but I am known to be a little confused at times.

[KaptCrunch]

• ATI has opened the CrossFire architecture to Intel, allowing CrossFire to be enabled on many Intel chipsets which feature two x16 PCI-E slots. SLI, however, requires a motherboard which is SLI certified, which includes all nForce chipsets (such as the nForce 590 SLI, nForce 680i SLI, and nForce 790i), and most Intel X58 and Intel P55 based motherboards.

Disadvantages

• If an OpenGL game does not have a CrossFire profile, the Catalyst AI system will set the rendering mode to Scissor by default, with no way to change it to a more suitable or faster mode, such as AFR (More information can be found at the following link: [1]). However, SLI allows the rendering mode to be set for each application manually, even for games which do not have an existing profile. Setting Catalyst AI to 'Advanced' allows manual mode setting for Direct 3D games, but not OpenGL games, to AFR.

AFR (Alternate Frame Rendering), where each GPU processes an entire frame, but while one GPU is processing the current frame, the other GPU is already rendering the next frame, so when the first frame is delivered, the second frame is already rendered (ideally) or almost rendering. This is the mode used by three-way SLI.