CrossFire, Continued

ATI's dual-slot PCIe retort to NVIDIA's SLI, CrossFire, is now starting to finally drop onto store shelves. As we've detailed the workings of CrossFire previously, suffice it to say here that, like SLI, CrossFire boosts performance through three possible means: 1) alternate frame rendering (AFR), wherein one GPU computes odd frames and the other GPU even frames, 2) scissoring, in which each frame is split horizontally and each GPU tackles its respective share, and 3) SuperTiling, which divides each frame into a checkerboard pattern and assigns alternate squares to each GPU for processing. Whereas SLI requires each card in the pair to share identical GPUs (although you can now mix and match card brands), CrossFire only requires one CrossFire edition (or "master") card with another CrossFire-compatible card, which is essentially any PCIe card from the X800 generation or later, including even the X1300.

Rather than try to pit itself in yet another ongoing battle for benchmark scores with NVIDIA, ATI has changed the messaging around CrossFire. The dual graphics strategy isn't just about speed. Instead, CrossFire's second purpose, and perhaps its main one to many users, is enhancing image quality. CrossFire enables 14X AA comprised of 12X Multi-Sampling plus 2X Super Sampling, which has one card performing Multi-Sampling and the other Super Sampling before the results are combined. ATI maintains that this is the finest quality antialiasing available on the market today.

"The interesting thing about having multiple GPUs is being able to handle multiple tasks," says ATI fellow Bob Drebin. "For example, we've demonstrated one GPU solely doing physics computations for water simulation, then generating those results and feeding them to a second GPU used for rendering and display. We're coming up on situations where GPUs will be the best compute engine available. It goes beyond just rendering. At the same time, I think being able to improve antialiasing using multiple GPUs is a good value. Instead of trying to render something from 100 fps to 200 fps, if you can come up with a way to make a better visual image at a reasonable frame rate, those are the interesting applications of the CrossFire architecture."

Intel's Strategic Withdrawal?

Read what you will at The Inquirer and other sources. The big news of the year in Intel graphics is that the #1 player is quitting the low-end market. True or false?

"We most certainly have not quit the 915G," replies Intel North American channel marketing manager Todd Garrigues. "Rather, for the next few months, we'll have limited production on the value chips, namely the 915GL and the 915GV. We are still absolutely producing and selling the 915G family. Now, largely due to the overwhelming success of the product, we're sold out. We just hit a capacity crunch on the 915G, and, honestly, within the channel, the mix of motherboards with GL and GV chips was a low percentage, so it wasn't a big deal for us. And very soon, we'll start to ship some motherboards based on an ATI chipset to help fill that price point in that marketplace."

Still Strong in the Mainstream While no benchmark buster, Intel’s 945G remains unmatched for stability. Until the 975G becomes popular, feel confident recommending this to mainstream buyers.

A blind view of the headlines might have you believe that Intel was ditching integrated graphics altogether. That's definitely not the case. The 945G is a surprisingly capable IGP that, in our tests, only underperforms the RS400 by 10% to 20% on average and considerably outperforms it in other areas, such as memory throughput. The IGP is far removed from the underwhelming results of Intel's first graphics efforts. A name like Intel Extreme Graphics was doomed to ridicule as there was precisely nothing "extreme" about the first- and second-generation IGPs. Today's 945G, on the other hand, is robust and competitive, all things considered. The 945G also handles dual-core and is Vista-ready, so expect this chip to hang around for quite a while.

We wondered if Intel saw any conflict emerging when it becomes obvious that the RC410 on its low-end boards can outperform the 945G at its more expensive mid-level.

"[Adopting Xpress 200] doesn't change anything for us," notes Garrigues. "These new boards fit the value line-up very well, but from a features/functionality standpoint they do not compete with the messages in the performance space, such as dual-core support, MEC and ADD2 support, support for multiple streams of video, etc. If the ATI chipset performs well with gaming, then I view that as an added bonus for our resellers in the consumer/retail space since it would give them a competitive, lower-cost solution."

Media Expansion Cards (MECs) are a 945G platform add-on descended from the old ADD and ADD2 cards. An MEC is an x16 PCIe card with an SDVO silicon module for VGA, DVI, S-Video, composite, or component output combined with an x1 PCIe analog TV tuner. While configuration is subject to the card manufacturer, MECs sell for around $40 and provide dual-head output (working alongside the IGP) as well as TV tuning. In effect, it is two display cards in one, which could prove useful in small form factor systems where space and slots are in short supply.

Looks Good, Less Filling Don’t let the 945G sale stop with integrated graphics. A Media Expansion Card (MEC), such as this unit from AVerMedia, can deliver TV tuning, dual-head output, and/or greater signal output options.

One might not think that Intel would bother to address high-end graphics, but the 955X hinted at the contrary. Intel's D955XBK board arrived with two x16 PCIe slots on it although no support for SLI or the then-far off CrossFire. Garrigues confirms that the forthcoming 975 chipset will offer dual-PCIe graphics capability. ATI has intimated that CrossFire will support all Intel-based dual-slot solutions, and a recent story on TechSpot notes that the 975 will support dual x16 GeForce cards. Given ATI's win at the low-end, no one should be surprised if SLI gets 975 support first out of the gate, followed eventually by CrossFire, but the agnostic angle promises to do well for Intel.

"Especially with the CrossFire and SLI adoption," says Garrigues, picking his words carefully, "I think it's plain that the enthusiast market is very robust and one that we are aiming to bring technology into. There's some very cool technology that we'll be announcing very soon and some features we can offer that market, be it the processors on our motherboards or other things."

XGI and S3:
Bring On the Upstarts

In 2003, the graphics teams from Trident and SiS (Xabre) merged to form XGI Technology (www.xgitech.com), and by the fourth quarter of that year the company was ringing up its first sets of reviews. At the time, the company aimed to be profitable by 2005 and the worldwide GPU leader by 2007. Sometimes, good things take longer than we'd like.

In 2004, the company scored plenty of OEM wins, particularly in Dell and Sun systems, and did well in the mobile space. For a fledgling group, XGI developed an impressive array of discrete AGP offerings from the low-end Volari V3 through the twin-GPU Volari Duo, which did some fancy footwork to join two DX9-compatible processors on one AGP board and thus compete against the NVIDIA 5950s and Radeon 9800s of its day.

In January of this year, XGI knew it was time to enter the channel. John Costanzo was hired as the Americas channel sales manager, and the following month saw XGI's first channel distribution contract with D&H. ASI came onboard soon after. Until now, though, XGI has only produced chips for the PCI and AGP interfaces. The first PCI Express part, the Volari 8300, will surface in early November. The reason for this lateness primarily centers on XGI's positioning at the low-end and mid-range, both spaces where AGP has dominated until very recently.

"The complaint I head from focus groups," says Costanzo, "is that a lot of resellers are frustrated by the fact that they buy PCIe motherboards, and they're so used to the prices of commodity AGP cards that when they go to find a PCIe solution the price seems extremely high. It's much more difficult to compete against someone doing an AGP solution on an older or less expensive motherboard. Our goal is to get into the channel, grab some of that lower cost business, build market share, and get people familiar with who we are and what we're doing."

Without having seen a board yet, we anticipate that the 8300 and its 8600/8600XT successors will compete closely against the NVIDIA 6600 and ATI X700 SKUs. Like its competitors, XGI is also taking care to address video performance along numerous paths, including a proprietary de-interlacing scheme based on dynamically assessing the amount of motion in a scene, and edge-adaptive spatial interpolation, which helps remove pesky edge artifacts. XGI builds in several power saving technologies for cooler running, making it a potential HTPC play, and, again like ATI's and NVIDIA's low-end chips, XGI has its "eXtreme Cache Technology," balancing dedicated memory with shared system memory.

We should be able to sample the first offerings from XGI's PCIe line and tell you more soon.

You might recall that VIA and S3 forged a close relationship some time ago. This has done well for budget-based VIA boards with integrated S3 graphics, but the company's discrete efforts have fallen largely on deaf ears, at least here in the U.S. That may soon change.

Meet the New Kid GI’s Volari 8300 will be the company’s first PCI Express-based graphics card. The SKU aims to compete against the ATI X700 and NVIDIA 6600, offering similar features and stability but at lower price points.

"On November 1st," says VIA sales program manager Rick Clayton, "there will be an announcement in Japan about a collaboration between a very large manufacturer that, well, starts with an ‘F' and S3 with their particular chip. On November 3rd, we'll make the announcement of what we're calling the S27, which is the new chipset from S3, and on that date these boards will hopefully be in the channel. It's DirectX 9, Pixel Shader 2.0, Vertex Shader 2.0, all those kinds of things. It is in the class of the X700 ATI card, and it's PCIe only."

The ChromeS27 is slated to appear in 128MB or 256MB versions and will deliver HDTV support up to 1080p over DVI, although there is no HDCP support yet. There is also an S-Video option. Predictably, S27 incorporates a basket of video enhancing technologies and also emphasizes HD (specifically WMV-HD so far) decoding support with low CPU utilization. The core clock is slated to be an impressively high 700 MHz and will be built on a 90-nanometer process, which should help keep thermals down.

"The new Chrome20 series has great performance per watt," says S3 product marketing manager Nadeem Mohammad. "We took a some of our competitors' graphics boards and measured the power and performance, and we were not just a little better but way better. I still remember some people predicting 90 nm would have horrendous leakage and would be a power hog. Well, it all depends on how you use the technology. S3 used some of its mobile technology in this desktop range coupled with low voltage operation. When running 3DMark, the ChromeS27 running at 700 MHz still consumes less than 15W peak. That means it should be no problem for one of our board partners to design a simple, high-performance, passively cooled version for total silence. Enthusiasts have forgotten the pleasure of having a powerful system without the continuously loud cooling solutions."

More interestingly, Clayton notes that the S27 will work as a two-card solution and "will be a dual, 8-lane PCIe solution." Rather than license CrossFire or SLI, S3 developed its own "MultiChrome" technology, which, according to an unofficial S3 release, is "an open-platform and cable free multi-graphics acceleration technology. Multi-Chrome will enable two or more ChromeS27 cards or GPUs to operate together to provide additional game acceleration on any motherboard with suitable PCIe slots." Industry-wise, this is a pretty clever move as it's likely the only way S3 could hope to gather share for its platform away from the Big Two. And provided MultiChrome performs on par with its competitors, the bang-per-buck benefits might well outstrip ATI and NVIDIA. Mohammed expects the ChromeS27 to position against the X1300 and GeForce 6600 with prices landing in the $69 to $149 range.

"The 700 MHz ChromeS27 with fast 128MB DDR-III could be on the street for just under $100 and has a 3DMark05 score north of 3400," notes Mohammed. "Compare that to the X1300 Pro, which has a score of only 2800. The Chrome20 series is the most competitive set of GPUs we've had in quite a while. I'm really quite excited."

Visualize Opportunity

So long as gaming was getting all of the attention in the graphics world, there wasn't much hope for thriving channel sales. Many gamers are DIY Web buyers—there's not much you can do about that. But throwing video applications and enhancements into the mix changes everything. Now you have the ability to create high-end video subsystems tailored to family entertainment and crisp, effective corporate displays, not just relentless pursuit of high frame rates. The battle is no longer for overclocking; it's oversampling and precision correcting.

Moreover, this is the first time we can remember where the fight for the low-end and mid-range of the graphics market was actually interesting. There is now so much functionality packed into these GPUs that you can craft a rich, value-add configuration around graphics cards that don't explode your ASP. Even integrated solutions have the ability to master everything from gaming to silent living room applications. And for those who want high performance for less, XGI and S3 are two great channel plays that can help your struggle against the tier-ones.

The run-up to Vista promises to keep graphics technology advancing at a blistering pace. Stay in the race and be sure to profit from all of the new technologies you can now deliver.