With a nVidia chipset, like the 590, 650i, 680, 690i, or something of the like, you are most likely going to have an SLi board.
With an AMD manufactured board, such as the 740G, 770, 780G, 790GX, 790FX, or something of the like, you are most likely going to have a CrossfireX board. With an Intel manufactured board, something like an X38, P43, P45, X48, or something of the like, you are most likely going to have a CrossfireX board. With the i7 platform, most X58 motherboards support BOTH CrossfireX and SLi. With everything before Intel Core i7, the motherboard is either SLi capable or CrossfireX capable. And even more.įirst, you want to know if your motherboard is SLi/CrossfireX capable.
Sli crossfirex ready driver#
Okay, so now that we have a basic definition, let's get into some more complicated information, what a SLi interface looks like, what a Crossfire/CrossfireX interface looks like, connectors, what you can do with SLi/CrossfireX, performance increases, driver support. It's the second version of Crossfire released by ATi more on this later though. It's the other multi card solution that you hear about normally, and it doesn't stand for anything.
More on this later though.ĬrossfireX, is a term created by the engineers and marketing peeps over at ATi/AMD. It's a multi card solution that relies on two of the same cards to be running parallel to each other. It's just another term cooked up by the engineers and marketing people over at nVidia. SLi, the acronym means 'Scalable Link Interface'. CrossfireX and SLi both rely on multiple cards, and 'bridges', soft flexible pieces of plastic and metal that connect two card together and transfer information between the two cards easily. This means that there are two or more cards working in tandem to help process information and relay it to your computer monitor at an even quicker speed than with only a single card. CrossfireX and SLi are both multi card solutions. The short answer is a graphics processing unit (GPU) that has more than one card doing work, at the same time. CrossfireX and SLi both rely on multiple cards, and 'bridges', soft flexible pieces of plastic and metal that connect two cards together and transfer information between the two cards easily. SLi, CrossfireX, what does it all mean to you? Is it just another buzzword in the cloud known as the internet? Just another random thing the enthusiasts are messing with to make their PC's even better?
Sli crossfirex ready windows#
So far this mode does not work under Windows Vista.įigure 1: Split Frame Rendering (SFR) mode.įigure 2: Alternate Frame Rendering (AFR) mode.The End All Be All FAQ about SLI and CrossfireX While with a single video card you can typically only obtain up to 4x or 8x anti-aliasing modes, with SLI this number is elevated to 8x, 16x or 32x, depending on the SLI mode. In fact under this mode the game usually runs slower but with a better image quality. This mode isn’t intended to improve gaming performance but increasing image quality. Here two GPUs process the first frame under SFR mode while the other two GPUs are processing the next frame also under SFR mode. AFR of SFR, which is used on Quad SLI system.AFR (Alternate Frame Rendering), where each GPU processes an entire frame, but while one GPU is processing the current frame, the other GPU is already rendering the next frame, so when the first frame is delivered, the second frame is already rendered (ideally) or almost rendering.This is the mode used by SLI configurations using two video cards. SFR (Split Frame Rendering), where each frame is divided in two and each half is sent to a different GPU to be processed.