One of the most innovative features of the new RV570 GPU is the radical changes ATI has made in its approach to handling Crossfire. ATI has done away with the external cable, and in the process have also dropped the Master Card. This brings up the possibility of using any X1950 PRO cards as masters or slaves. In order to interface between the two cards, ATI has opted for a solution that uses two connectors that look very similar to those used for NVIDIA’s SLI.

ATI has decided to take the compositing engine off of the card and place it onto the GPU. Although this method will ultimately drive up costs, it will also come with a lot of pros that make the approach much more attractive than an external dongle. ATI has stated that these connections will be able to support resolutions up to 2560x2048.

All future GPUs from ATI will be based on this new approach to Crossfire. The “new” Crossfire will most likely be much more attractive to consumers simply because there will no longer be any additional cables added to the mess of wires already outside of PCs. Internal connectors are much more neat and desirable.

ATI has reasoned that they chose to use two connectors because they are necessary to ensure high communication bandwidth between the two video cards. A single connector has bandwidth equal to one SLI connector used by NVIDIA, therefore dual connectors should theoretically double the bandwidth between the two GPUs. A second explanation of using two connectors might be the theoretical possibility that ATI will use the dual connectors to introduce Crossfire approaches that use more than two video cards. Quad-Crossfire anyone?

Presently, it is not clear how ATI will supply consumers with the two Crossfire connectors. They might supply customers with a bridge when they buy a video card. In fact, it is likely that with every Radeon X1950 PRO video card one connector will be included. Another road that ATI can take is to have motherboard manufacturers supply the connectors when consumers purchase a new motherboard.

We tried to implement Crossfire without a bridge, and then with only one bridge connected, however, in both cases the ATI Catalyst Control Center did not allow us to work under Crossfire mode.