Introduction:

If you go back around a year and a half to when Nvidia were beginning to really push the idea of Dual Card solutions you’ll find many quotes coming from ATI saying that "Dual Card solutions were not a good idea" and that they were not progressing with this technology at the time.

So something must have changed between then and now or we wouldn’t be here today. So what was it? Well the one major factor in the decision to create a dual card platform is the kudos (read: sales) that come from your architecture being the fastest around. Unfortunately for ATI, as much as they felt dual cards were not the way the market should be going the fact was that as long as Nvidia had their latest and greatest card running in SLI it would always be faster than the top end Radeon running as a single card. So having been backed into a corner as far as performance crowns are concerned ATI have developed Crossfire, their answer to NVIDIA’s SLI.

Considering how fast paced the PC industry moves you would have thought that a delay of over a year since SLI was introduced would have given Nvidia such a massive market segment share that it would be unbeatable. Unfortunately though, despite SLI being available it was far from the perfect solution at the time of launch with issues such as lack of game compatibility and having to use matched cards being factors that made the purchase undesirable for many hardware enthusiasts. It has to be said however that Nvidia have improved SLI game support in recent months and their hardware will take some beating, we aim to not only test crossfire but to show you some comparisons against Nvidia in both single and dual configurations..