ATI multiple VPU up and runningCeBIT 2005 SLI it with two different cardsBy Fuad Abazovic in Hannover: Friday 11 March 2005, 12:38NVIDIA LIKES TO bring out the fact that it is the leader and ATI is the follower especially when it comes to using the multiple cards in one PC but we have strong reason to believe that ATI is actually adding more to the marchitecture. But yes, ATI is jumping on bandwagon and stealing some of Nvidia's thunder no question about it.We know that ATI is showing of its Multiple VPU marchitecture at its enormously big booth in hall 27 at Cebit, the one that had to cost some serious money. There is a small room where you have to sign your NDA way in to be able to see this multiple rendering stuff in action. I don't even think that everyone with NDA can get inside.Anyway ATI has its marchitecture ready and we learned that you will be able to do ATI Multiple VPU with two different cards. You will be able to plug one X800 and one X850 cards together and faster card will downscale to the slower and will work simultaiously with it.ATI is showing of its motherboard supporting ATI Multiple VPU powered with two Radeon X850 XT PE cards or should we use R480 codenames. This ough to be faster than two times 6800 Ultra than Nvidia has to offer and upcomming R520 times two might be a very fast solution. I guess ATI is readier with its Multiple VPU than many would have thought. µ
with Nvidia u need to buy BOTH cards at the same time
I think it's good that ATi is bring an SLi type product to the market but i can't help but remeber when they tried a similar stunt on a single card a few yrs ago. It was a mess! At least NVidia has some technical know how to bring it to the table since they bought out 3DFX who, if my memory serves me correctly, pioneered this type of technology.
ATI Multi Rendering exposedSimilar to Evans and Sutherland approachBy Fuad Abazovic in the Bosnian wilds: Thursday 24 March 2005, 08:40BELIEVE IT OR NOT ATI has had multi rendering for three years now. Until it presents it to the wide crowd of gamers, it was reserved for big military and commercial flight simulators. Now it will render your games as well and will give Nvidia's SLI a run for its money.ATI's Multi VPU is how the company calls its ability to have two or more cards working together in a mode called Super Tiling. It has been used by Evans and Sutherland and for commercial flight simulators for three years now.Multi VPU will divide your screen into several tiles. Imagine a chess board - one card will render all the black fields while the second card will render white fields. This is how ATI's marchitecture should work.One graphic card will act as a master while the second one will act as a slave and both card will be connected to an interface and than to the display. The interface or interconnect device is supposed to be plugged into both cards' DVI ports. This approach should be very good for load balancing and at least in theory could mean that a picture can be rendered twice as fast. I would be very sceptical about actual performance as this is theoretical.ATI claims that its Multi VPU will work with all 3D applications, both Direct3D and OpenGL, and ATI has dedicated hardware support for super tiling. We wrote once about military systems using dozens of R300 cards to simulate a plane using some insane levels of FSAA. If I remember correctly, they used 34 Radeon cards based on the R300 chip and that is the maximum number of chips used for rendering that we know of.ATI claims that it's worked for three years with this marchitecture but we have to add that all military systems built by Evans and Sutherlands or CAE civil flight simulators are using OpenGL only, and I really wonder about ATI's Direct3D part of the driver. Let's wait and see.ATI plans to ship its Multi VPU this summer and we strongly suspect that this will happen just after the R520 \"Fudo\" launch. The R520 is expected to perform very well and imagine what two of those cards can do together. We will keep our ears open. µ
