ATI Radeon X1800 CrossFire Preview - PAGE 1

When ATI officially launched its first CrossFire platform back in September after multiple delays, it fell prey to poor technical capability (primarily in its resolution and refresh rate limitations). So although the product was on the market and available (albeit in very limited quantities), it was not taken to in the same manner as NVIDIAs competing dual video card solution, SLI.

CrossFire with the X850 XT was not helped by the fact that everybody was fully aware of what was right around the corner - the R520. Sure enough, about a month later ATI released their latest, most advanced graphics chip yet. At launch (with cards showing up at retail another month later, in November), there was no announced support for running X1800 XT's in tandem, as the standard cards do not come with the capability to run in parallel without heavy processing work done externally.

Now, two and a half months after the intial launch/announcement of the card, and a month and a half after solid availability, ATI is pulling the curtain on the CrossFire solution for their latest round of cards. This time around though, ATI is promising full availability at launch time, which would be their first full step towards a material launch, and would match what NVIDIA has been doing for the past few product launches. We can only hope that this is the case as even within the past couple of months, ATI have promised availability for a month after their product 'announcement' and have not been able to deliver on even that.

If ATI can turn it around starting today, I'm sure we'd all be quite happy to forgive and forget in the name of fully extinguishing the dreaded paper launch. Today we bring you a small preview of what CrossFire has in store for the X1000 series.