Crossfire is 1600x1200@60 or 1920x1200@52

WE MANAGED to confirm that even the next generation ATI cards will suffer from the SiI 1161 chip limitation. This is something that it won't be able to fix for a while. Several sources who had Crossfire kits in their hands confirmed that with a CRT capable of higher resolution they could not go at higher refresh rates than 1600x1200@60.

This is an answer to all of you that bombarded us with mails that we did not get our facts right. We did. Sources close to ATI confirmed that you have to live with that resolution but strongly suggested that high end gamers who want to spend $1000+ for two cards will go out and buy a $400+ TFT display capable of gaming.

ATI simply didn't have the time to include a composition engine in its chip and that is exactly what Nvidia did. G70 and NV40 were designed with SLI in mind, and R520 and especially R420 generation weren't. So ATI had to find an answer and had to make a compromise and use the SiI chip. PCIe bus communication is simply not enough and you have to connect two cards and put two pictures together.

ATI will include support in its next generation chip but it takes two years to make the chip so we don't expect to see this happening until the R600 generation, sometime in 2006. it's a limitation but most people will live with it. I use high end gaming but still don't set resolution more than 1280x1024 anyway even when using SLI, as my TFT is limited to that resolution. On a CRT, I sometimes go to 1600x1200 4X FSAA and 8X Aniso simply because I can, not because I really super duper need or want to. In my humble opinion it doesn't make much of a difference even though many people may disagree.

Crossfire won't be perfect, but everything takes time and just remember the first revision of Nforce 4 SLI boards. ATI won't make the same mistake, Crossfire boards are easy to install and stable now for the launch but it will take ATI some time to polish the product of course. µ

See Also
Crossfire does 1600x1200@60 or 1920x1200@52