![]() ![]() Two dongles can be used per card these were put to full use with the release of CrossFire X. As such, Master Cards no longer exist, and are not required for maximum performance. ATI's CrossFire connector is now a ribbon-like connector attached to the top of each graphics adapter, similar to nVidia's SLI bridges, but different in physical and logical natures. With the release of the Radeon X1950 Pro (RV570 GPU), ATI has completely revised CrossFire's connection infrastructure to further eliminate the need for past Y-dongle/Master card and slave card configurations for CrossFire to operate. While performance was impacted, this move was viewed as an overall improvement in market strategy, due to the fact that Crossfire Master cards were expensive, in very high demand, and largely unavailable at the retail level. This is similar to X1300 CrossFire, which also uses PCI Express, except that the Xpress 3200 had been built for low-latency and high-speed communication between graphics cards. With the CrossFire Xpress 3200, two normal cards can be run in a Crossfire setup, using the PCI-E bus for communications. When used with ATI's "CrossFire Xpress 3200" motherboard chipset, the 'master' card is no longer required for every "CrossFire Ready" card (with the exception of the Radeon X1900 series). When the slave card is done, it sends its output to the master card, which combines the two images to form one and then outputs the final render to the monitor. As an example, the master card works on the top half of the scene while the slave card works on the bottom half. Both cards are given the same part of the 3D scene to render, but effectively half of the work load is sent to the slave card through a connector called the SLI Bridge. Ideally, two identical graphics cards are installed in a motherboard that contains two PCI-Express x16 slots, set up in a master-slave configuration. The basic idea of SLI is to allow two or more graphics processing units (GPUs) to share the work load when rendering a 3D scene. Wikipedia Article on Scalable Link Interface ![]()
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