ATI CrossFire Technology White Paper

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In 2001, ATI began working with Evans & Sutherland to collaborate on multi-GPU workstation products. The result was the powerful simFUSION ® image generator, which uses up to 4 ATI GPUs per board. Versions built using the Radeon® 9700 and 9800 series GPUs feature ATI’s exclusive Supertiling and Super AA technologies, and can support up to 24-sample anti-aliasing at extremely high resolutions in real time. For even more demanding applications, multiple simFUSION image generators can be linked together. The Evans & Sutherland RenderBeast ® visualization system uses up to 16 simFUSION boards in parallel, for a total of 64 GPUs. The complete system is capable of rendering up to 768 billion pixels per second and supporting up to 384-sample anti-aliasing. This technology has proven ideal for ultra-high fidelity military simulators, commercial flight simulators, planetariums, automotive design visualization, and other industrial applications. Multi-GPU Workstation products developed by Evans & Sutherland. Left: SimFUSION ® 6000q board with quad Radeon 9800 GPUs. Right: RenderBeast ® visualization system with 64 parallel Radeon GPUs. While these multi-GPU technologies were revolutionary, limitations in supporting platform technology have kept them from being able to deliver their full benefits to a wide range of PC users. To make that a reality, a fast, cost-effective, bi-directional interface between PC components was needed. In 2004, the introduction of the PCI Express® platform fulfilled this requirement, and enabled a new generation of highly efficient multi-GPU technology for PCs. - 3 -
CrossFire – How it Works CrossFire is the most sophisticated and powerful technology currently available for multi-GPU graphics rendering. It consists of the following components: • Radeon CrossFire Edition graphics card with Compositing Engine • Secondary PCI Express graphics card with Radeon X800 or X850 series GPU • CrossFire Ready motherboard with dual PCI Express graphics slots • Catalyst driver with CrossFire support CrossFire Block Diagram In a CrossFire system, each GPU has its own dedicated PCI Express link to the North Bridge of the motherboard chipset, and is allocated its own command buffer and non-local storage space in system memory. Allocating separate command buffers allows each GPU to be assigned its own unique set of tasks. Another portion of system memory is set aside for sharing of data between the GPUs. Shared data includes synchronization commands, textures, off-screen buffers, and other temporary data generated during the - 4 -
Page 1 and 2: ATI CrossFire Technology White Pap
Page 3: Background The world around us poss
Page 7 and 8: Alternate Frame Rendering (AFR) Mod
Page 9 and 10: Scissor Mode In this mode, each fra
Page 11 and 12: Super AA Mode 6x AA 12x SuperAA Com
Page 13 and 14: Anti-Aliasing Sample Patterns An ad

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