- #Hybrid crossfirex compatible cards drivers
- #Hybrid crossfirex compatible cards driver
- #Hybrid crossfirex compatible cards series
Like its dual-GPU predecessor, CrossFire X works on a fairly broad range of motherboards, including those based on AMD 480, 580, and 7-series chipsets, as well as boards based on many of Intel’s more recent chipsets-among them: the 955, 965, 975, P35, G35, X38, and X48.ĬrossFire X’s performance and feature set will be more or less optimal depending on the chipset’s topology and the motherboard’s allocation of PCIe lanes. And, of course, that means the effective memory size for the entire GPU phalanx would effectively be 256MB, not 768MB, because memory isn’t shared between GPUs in CrossFire (or in SLI, for that matter). As a result, a Radeon HD 3870 X2 paired with a Radeon HD 3850 256MB would perform like a trio of Radeon HD 3850 256MB cards. The caveat here is that CrossFire X will settle on the lowest core GPU clock, memory clock, and video RAM size to determine the operative clock speeds and effective memory size. Getting to three or four GPUs can be achieved using a dizzying number of potential card combinations, which AMD has summarized in this helpful matrix:Ī Radeon HD 3870 matched up with a Radeon HD 3870 X2 on an Intel X38 chipset
#Hybrid crossfirex compatible cards series
The basic building block of CrossFire X is AMD’s RV670 GPU, which is present in all of the various incarnations of the Radeon HD 3800 series of graphics cards.
#Hybrid crossfirex compatible cards driver
The hardware to make such a thing possible has been on the market for some time now, and last week’s release of the Catalyst 8.3 driver revision finally enabled this feature in software, as well. Read on to see what we learned.ĬrossFire X is, quite simply, an extension of the CrossFire dual-GPU feature to three and four GPUs.
#Hybrid crossfirex compatible cards drivers
We’ve taken a quick look at AMD’s first drivers for CrossFire X, and we have some interesting things to report. Then again, AMD’s decision to rely on CrossFire X to round out the high end of its product lineup has surely helped to concentrate its attention on making the scheme work well. That’s a bold move, fraught with peril, because multi-GPU schemes can be rather fragile, with iffy compatibility and less-than-ideal performance scaling. The most intriguing bit of multi-GPU madness we’ve seen recently may be AMD’s CrossFire X, simply because in this generation, AMD opted to chain together three or four mid-range GPUs in place of creating a separate high-end graphics processor. We now have multiple GPUs on a single graphics card, hybrid multi-GPU implementations involving integrated graphics, and more-than-two-way incarnations of both SLI and CrossFire. We see the introduction of a new GPU seemingly every month, and multi-GPU schemes like SLI and CrossFire are omnipresent. GPUs, it seems, are everywhere, breeding like rabbits.