BELIEVE 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

Le désavantege sera que le lien entre les 2 cartes se fait via le port DVI....

C'est un désavantage? Pourtant ça marchais super bien dans le temps (même si c'étais pas la même affaire).

C'est un désavantage? Pourtant ça marchais super bien dans le temps (même si c'étais pas la même affaire).

Oh yeah, ma bonne vieille Monster 3D !

exact, le ATi supertiling est a on, depuis des lustres, pour toutes cartes ayant 8 pipes ou plus. comme tout VPU ATi fonctionne par "quads" de quatre ppipe. On pourrait avoir une X700pro avec une x850XT pour un total de 24 pipes!!!!!


Le désavantege sera que le lien entre les 2 cartes se fait via le port DVI....

Est-ce que ça va être réservé au PCI-Express ou y'a quelque chose à faire avec ma "vieille" Radeon 9800?

Nothing kinky here folks, the ‘Master/Slave’ reference tells you which card is in control of assembling the final image in its frame buffer. Just like NVIDIA SLi, the ATi MVP solution will require a compatible mainboard (first seen by HEXUS on the ASUSTeK booth at this years CeBIT exhibition) and so it will be interesting to see which core-logic technology ATi will be supporting with its MVP.

WE managed to get a few more details about ATI's soon to be released Multi VPU marchitecture. We heard it might be branded as Crossfire but we are still not sure if this is its final name.

We confirmed that ATI will use a master-slave concept where all available cards on the market based on X800 and X850 chips could be your slave cards while you will have to go out and buy a new card called the master card. The master card will be little bit different from the existing card as it will have a place to connect this external connector necessary to make this marchitecture work. You do need to connect two cards externally out of your case.

The ATI partners are afraid that those master cards could be in short supply and very hard to find, at least for the time being. ATI is getting ready to reveal this marchitecture at Computex but will have NDA events in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, Montenegro and London for the press. This will take place in exactly a week from now.

The other sources are suggesting that motherboard manufacturers are not too happy about ATI's way of doing dual GPUs but this is something that we can not confirm yet. We will have to wait for Computex to see the general feeling about this architecture.

The future of performance gaming is dual graphic cards in one board and ATI wants to start being part of that as soon as possible. Just two more weeks. µ