Supertiling divides the image into blocks, like a chessboard. When it comes to rendering the image, one card renders one set of blocks while the other card renders the others. The benefit to this is that it should work with all games. If you want a game to run in SLI mode or any other mode on Nvidia’s solution, you need profiles made especially for the game you are playing.

Next on the list is performance. If you go to hardware review sites such as Anandtech and Tom’s hardware, you will find more than enough comparisons. The general feeling though is that while Crossfire is a step in the right direction, it just isn’t enough to get ATI in the same league as NVIDIA. Crossfire can’t reach the resolutions of SLI, and when compared to 7800 cards ATI are really in trouble. Hopefully Crossfire will mature in the next generation.

Last of all is availability. NVIDIA set the standard by having products available to buy on release day, leaving behind the old way of doing things which was to release a product but not actually have any available to buy for a very long time. Unfortunately, ATI still haven’t caught on. Crossfire is supposed to be available, but so far nobody has been able to find the Crossfire enabled cards. This has a lot of ATI fans unhappy because they stay loyal to ATI, then when they want to buy the latest and greatest they can’t because ATI paper launched their best cards with no availability. If ATI keep this up they could end up going the way of 3DFX, and if you know the origins of SLI you know what happened to them.


Article by Richard Powell.