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ATI CrossFire Technology
ATI’s CrossFire technology drives your PC to a new peak of per-
formance. By connecting a Radeon CrossFire Edition graphics card
and a standard PCI Express graphics card, the power of these multi-
ple GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) within the system will acceler-
ate your gaming performance and improve image quality.
Aside from dual GPU for 3D rendering, CrossFire’s new feature -
asymmetric processing technology, allows adding another dedicated
GPU for physics processing. The 3 GPUs simultaneously handle Data
Parallel Processing (DPP) computing tasks such as game rendering
and physics in a single system. This provides more realistic cutting
edge 3D graphics to run at high resolutions.
How CrossFire Works
CrossFire’s key objective is to maximize the speed of a multi-GPU
system. This is achieved by dividing the rendering workload to each
of the two GPUs. When each GPU has completed its assigned tasks
for a given frame, the Compositing Engine on the CrossFire Edition
graphics card combines the results from each GPU (according to the
selected operating mode) then sends the final frames out to the
display device. The result will be a complete frame rendered at up to
twice the performance of a single graphics card.
3D games are made up of a number of different tasks such as input
processing, game state updating, artificial intelligence, physics, rendering,
networking, audio, etc. The Data Parallel Processing (DPP) computing
tasks simultaneously executes a common set of instructions across a
large set of input data. Besides rendering, the detailed physics
simulations allow these GPUs to take on an expanded role in game
computing. Multiple GPUs can enhance a game by providing gener-
ous amounts of additional computing power for certain specific tasks.
Chapter 6 - ATI CrossFire Technology
