Native CrossFire Technology

That's an odd name. Wasn't the previous CrossFire technology already native?

In any case, it's good to see ATI finally discarding the silly dongle for a more sensible internal bridge solution.

We can't tell you just how often we have said that the stupid dongle would be the downfall of ATI's multi-card strategy.

Even if you can live with the inconvenience and ugliness of the dongle, the necessity of a special master card makes it harder and much more expensive for a gamer to buy a CrossFire system, instead of an NViDIA SLI system.

But while the new CrossFire connector resembles NVIDIA's SLI bridge, it won't be a straight copy. In fact, ATI will be pushing the envelope further with their new CrossFire bridge.

This new bridge actually consists of two 12-bit CrossFire connectors. Every Radeon X1950 Pro card will come with a single 12-bit connector, so if you buy two cards, you will have the two connectors required for the CrossFire bridge.

ATI says that it's not possible for the cards to work with just one connector. Presumably, the 24-bit connection is necessary for the cards to support resolutions of up to 2560x2048 at 60 Hz. But why two 12-bit connectors instead of a single 24-bit connector?

If you look at the picture on the right, notice how the two connectors fold upwards like the Catherine Zeta-Jones' derriere in Entrapment. There's a reason why ATI did that. No, it's not because they are fans of the stunning Welsh actress.

The CrossFire connectors were intentionally made longer than necessary because ATI intends to allow up to four cards to be connected in a daisy-chain. Yes, in the future, you will be able to connect up to four cards in a single system.

It's actually more flexible than NVIDIA's SLI solution in that you can also connect three cards if you wish to. In fact, ATI demoed a three-card combination at Computex where two cards were used to process graphics while the third card was used for physics computation.

When you want to hook up three or four cards, each card will be connected to each other by a single 12-bit CrossFire connector. But this makes us wonder if this will reduce performance or the maximum resolution supported.

In any case, this feature will only be made available in the future. The driver that ATI is shipping right now will not support more than two cards in CrossFire mode.