By Fuad Abazovic: Wednesday 13 April 2005, 09:28
ONE OF THE HUGE advantages of ATI Multi VPU might be its ability to let you use two different ATI based cards. As we said before, ATI Multi VPU don't use any card interconnector although Nvidia does.
In Nvidia's case you cannot even use two 6600GT or 6800 GT cards from two companies since there may be incompatibilities. It is a problem even if you use different BIOSes on the cards. Two different cards simply won't work in this case.
ATI will let you use two different cards as its Multi VPU works in a different way. It tiles your screen like a chess board and each board can take care of different "chess fields". You will literally be able to take an R520 and plug it side by side with R423, X800 or R480, X850 board and make them render simultaneously. Faster boards could, for example, take on more tasks than slower board, rending more fields.
Sounds good to me, but let's just see the drivers and performance of that Multi VPU marchitecture first. We heard a while ago that ATI has this marchitecture ready but it wants to wait with it and than surprise everyone. It will possibly materialise this marchitecture after the R520 "Fudo" launch. µ
Sounds pretty awesome, but as everyone probably is thinking, the drivers will make or break this plan. It's going to be interesting to see what kind of feedback it gets
I hear that the ATI version can use up to 32 graphics cards while the nVidia version can do do. I'm not sure if that's true, but that's what i hear. Gigabyte is working on a SLI board that can have four GPUs crunching away at the same time.
When can you get the R520? Is it better to get one of the new R520 cards and then a old X800 card? And they would both work fine because theres the master card and the slave card. And can you have a R520 or R420 as a mater or slave card?
Ati is doing a thing ( might of expired already ) where you prove you bought a crossfire compatible card, and if u buy the same card, you get a 100$ rebate from ati. I posted it on this site before, but i'll need to find the link.
