Crossfire X to work on Nvidia, Intel and AMD chipsets

THE FIRST TIME Crossfire technology was demonstrated on an Nvidia board was when Rahul Sood talked about VoodooDNA in an Nforce configuration with Diamond Radeon HD2900XT boards in none other than HP's Blackbird 002 machine.

And now Diamond Multimedia has expanded these horizons with its entry to the retail/e-tail frame with xDNA technology.

We hear that Diamond will make a big announcement at the end of next week, as the company gears up its Radeon products and enables them to work on Intel, AMD and Nvidia chipsets in Crossfire mode.

We're not certain how many GPUs will work in fture combinations, but Intel's Bad Axe 2 motherboards with 975X chipset were the first on the market with three PEG connectors (data transfer was dependent on the combination, but you could have x8+x8+x4). This was later followed by numerous motherboards and chipsets - the 680i being the prime example.

Owners of Nforce 680i motherboards are disappointed that the 8800GT will not support three-way SLI. But if that motherboard could be fitted with three Radeon HD 3870 boards, it'd be a remarkable combination.

Judging by how VoodooDNA makes Crossfire work on an Nvidian chipset, we can take a wild shot that xDNA is a subset of technologies unified in a software package, probably a single package for simple installation.

For the very first time, we have heard about the moniker XFusion. This does not relate to AMD's upcoming processors, but rather a key element of xDNA, in the same bin as Crossfire X. DDS or Diamond Dynamic Scalability is middleware for load-balancing, modifying Crossfire drivers to get the best balance between GPU and CPU resource allocation. On non-Crossfire chipsets such as Nforce, this is important, since there is no AMD core logic behind it.

Diamond guys aren't stopping at graphics department, since besides TruHD Game there is going to be something called TruHD Live3. This is a name for lossless codec developed for Blu-ray/HD DVD media and gaming. Basically, Live3 tech should enhance sound effects in movies and games. We'll see. µ