Following months of talk, ATI has finally unveiled their answer to NVIDIA's SLI solution to pair up videocards: Crossfire. ATI's solution allows you to buy a Crossfire edition of an X800 or X850 powered videocard, and mix that with any regular card with the same chipset from whatever manufacturer. Instead of bridging the two videocards, ATI relies on a special composing chip found on Crossfire compatible motherboards, which will mix the images. Also, while NVIDIA's solution depends on game specific profiles, ATI promises Crossfire will work with pretty much any Direct3D or OpenGL game though in most cases optimized driver profiles will help further improve performance. You can find a pair of ATI Crossfire previews at HardOCP and Tech Report (there are no benchmarks at this time though). Expect to see cards appearing in July.

We talked in the introduction about the fact that CrossFire does not rely on gaming profiles. What this means is that ATI does not have to wait for driver updates to support their multiple video card advantage in new and even old games. CrossFire is a feature that you simply enable and it just works, with no fuss or worry about what mode a game uses or if it has a driver profile or not. This is a good thing for gamers out there because we all don't just play the latest and greatest games. Some people still pop in an old game occasionally. With ATI's CrossFire, even that old game you decide to play will supposedly just work in multiple VPU mode. With those old games and these new AA settings, you should be able to crank up those old games to resolutions and AA settings to heights never seen before. Imagine putting in that old game that had many alpha textures where aliasing was a problem and being able to run with the 14XAA MS / 2XAA SS combination at a high resolution.