News

By: Antti Summala Aug 03, 2007

ATI says: "Crossfire is all important in the Communist world of unified shaders"

AMD wasn't holding back in their 3 consecutive presentations at Assembly's ArTech seminars today. Their second talk was supposed to be about the next round of GPUs, but ended up being a promotion for their multi-GPU technology Crossfire. Despite its humble origins as their late answer to competitor NVIDIA's trump card SLI, ATI's Richard Huddy today touted Crossfire as a "critical feature" that every game developer must support.

His rationale? Huddy claims AMD/ATI is liberally showering game reviewers with their top-line graphics cards in pairs, which obviously means that review scores are solely based on how a game performs on ATI Crossfire. Right?

The numbers just get bigger and bigger!

YouGamers tests games on just about every conceivable hardware configuration, and we'll tell you whether you need ATI HD 2900 XT Crossfire's "1 TeraFLOP of processing power - enough to beat Karpov" (for just $798) to run the games you want to play.

Huddy also warned developers in attendance that low-end cards are a "problem" for them but didn't expand on what that "problem" might be.

When we asked Huddy for our cards or a written version of his generous offer, he told us to get in touch with his PR guys.

Later in his talk, Huddy peered into his crystal ball and saw Crossfire everywhere. With ever shrinking GPU process technology, ATI can't keep fattening the memory bus for additional memory bandwidth and hence performance. The future is multi-core, Huddy claims, and multi-core equals Crossfire.

Another graphics technology that the head of European Developer Relations likes - and says you should, too - is Unified Shaders. He didn't spare the poor shaders from his gaffes, either. Here is his succinct analogy of how unified shaders work: idle Shader B says to busy Shader A, "Let me help! Let me join you in this great task - in a great Communist liberation."

Richard Huddy - ATI Head of European Developer Relations.

Mikhail Rasputin - Communist mutant supervillian.

That's a joke, by the way. Mr Huddy clearly has no ability whatsoever to jump into other dimensions but we love him all the same. Here's a big hug from all the YouGamers team, Richard!

Please head over to our discussion board to talk about this news (registration not required).