ATi surprised us with 4870 and 4850 graphics card and after that ATi did it again with 4870X2. This product was available to all users from the day it was officially launched and it reached the goal as number one by performances and by price range, as it was promised by ATi. This sudden success urged us on some thinking about new accepted ATi’s philosophy about multiGPU cards. If we look back in time, we could remember Rage Furry Maxx card as antic example and nVIDIA 9800GTX2 and ATi 3870X2 graphics cards from newer history and all of them were examples of fastest products in their own time.

Even though these examples were really successful in their attains to beat the competition, we still got the feeling that those were more forced acts and that they were more acts of parrying competition than they were result of long-term plans of manufacturers. With introduction of 4870X2 and now with 4850X2, new business philosophy rise to the surface. So we’ve decided to get some more detailed information about this multiGPU philosophy for graphics cards. Sasa Marinkovic, Senior Product Manager, Desktop Discrete Group AMD, was a right man for this task, because Mr. Marinkovic was included in few very serious products (X1950 PRO, HD2600 series and 4800 series) as SR. Product Matketing Manager, Graphics Production Group.

As always there will be users that want to have only the fastest graphics card, regardless of price and for those is intended this “king of the hill” (4870X2). All the rest of us, mortal souls, that need serious performances for reasonable amount of money or simply want better price/performances ratio, can wait for 4850X2. As Mr. Marinkovic stated it is clear that ATi have changed business model that was based on principle of making one top-class model (2900XT for example) and its derivates that were crippled versions of basic (top-range) product (2600 and 2400 models) intended for mid and low range products. New approach in building graphics cards that ATi uses has many similarities with process of building new multi-core CPUs. It’s clear what that new approach is if we reflect on the way that CPU manufacturer few years ago were racing who has CPU with higher MHz margin and now who has CPU with more cores.

As Mr. Marinkovic explains, very similar path is expected in future for graphics cards development. Of course this is not the only goal. Because it takes few years for a computer game to get developed, game developers couldn’t switch to new way of thinking over night and most of optimizations are actually done by ATi’s teams responsible for new driver development. They already had huge knowledge base thanks to experience gained with CrossFire configurations.

Despite nVIDIA with its SLI was first on market with such solution ATi’s solution performed better in most cases. Since GDD5 memory is expensive we asked Mr. Marinkovic why they didn’t use single memory buffer for both GPUs instead of implemented two memory buffers (each GPU has 1GB of video memory at its disposal). “Basic mistake is to expect higher performance levels with single frame buffer for both GPUs. That can be applicable to system memory (RAM) that has few applications that have access to it. When memory on graphics cards is concerned it’s not the case and gain in performances wouldn’t be great. Off course complexity of implementing that solution shouldn’t be disregarded along with expenses that would follow that kind of development and it is actually cheaper to implement double amount of video memory in this case”.