What Is ATI CrossFire Technology?

ATI Crossfire technology combines the power of two or more graphics processing units.Crossfire technology, developed by ATI, allows two or more video cards to work together in one computer. The technology uses ATI Radeon video cards and is supported on motherboards with AMD and Intel chipsets. ATI Crossfire technology will support up to four graphics processing units or GPUs.

 

Scissors mode allows two Crossfire GPUs to split the screen into two horizontal sections. Each section is rendered by one of the GPUs. This mode is supported by Direct 3-D and Open GL applications and provides load balancing between the GPUs. Alternate frame rendering mode alternates video frame rendering between the Crossfire GPUs. It is the default mode when using Crossfire technology and provides the best overall performance.

 

The mode is supported by Direct 3-D and Open GL applications. Super tiling mode is similar to scissors mode. However, with super tiling mode, the screen is divided into 25 five by five tiles and the GPUs divide the rendering. Super anti-aliasing mode does not increase graphics-rendering speed like the other modes. It improves image quality. Each GPU renders a full frame and the frames are combined by the compositing engine.