Hexus.net posted the first details on ATI's dual-card technology, dubbed Multi Video Processing units (MVP). The first card that will take advantage of MVP will be the PCIe Radeon X850 XT, which Hexus speculates will be shipping in the near future. The neat thing behind ATI's MVP tech is that you don't have to pair cards of the same model. As long as the two cards are MVP compatible, they'll work together. For instance, you buy the X850 XT in a couple months. Then two years later you buy ATI's latest and greatest, the "X1050 XT." Don't throw out the old card, just set it as the slave to the X1050 XT and you're good to go with MVP!

Nothing kinky here folks, the "Master/Slave" reference tells you which card is in control of assembling the final image in its frame buffer. Just like NVIDIA SLi, the ATi MVP solution will require a compatible mainboard (first seen by HEXUS on the ASUSTeK booth at this years CeBIT exhibition) and so it will be interesting to see which core-logic technology ATi will be supporting with its MVP. ... Having developed military solutions based on up to 32 cards in the past, it appears that ATi has decided on a "tile" based rendering approach as the default technology and perhaps the judgement was that this method offers the most ideal balance of speed and image quality (minimum size 32 pixels square). However it's more than likely that the ATi MVP solution will be flexible to offer other rendering modes like AFR (Alternate Frame Rendering) as well.