When the ATI Crossfire technology was first introduced on the Radeon X 800 series cards the regular user could rarely see performance increases exceeding 50 %. Now, many years later we can talk about a near – perfect performance scaling performance increases of up to 90 – 95 %. The SLI story begins with a year earlier but suffers the same problems of scaling, the current increases being seen in much the same as for the Crossfire. However, better scaling performances on multi – card solutions have been possible due to two main factors:

• The main graphics chip manufacturers ( ATI and nVidia ) have given increasingly more attention to this issue when launching new generations of video cards. Inside each multi – card solution is a small current GPU which manages communication with the other or the other GPUs.
• Games and graphics engine manufacturers have worked with graphics chip manufacturers to support as well as possible the two technologies ( Crossfire and SLI ). Usually it worked sloppy with the ATI but with the nVidia users have been able to make real progress which means that the release of other multi – card configurations by the manufacturer is possible to work optimally. Usually a new version of drivers solve many problems as well as known bugs that were discovered in the last minutes of use by various users. The most spectacular and constant growth performance occurred when using a multi – card configuration consisted of mainstream video cards performance. Well, ATI launched the Radeon HD 6870 to be able to cope with this segment. For more information on the architecture and how it ranks in terms of performance I invite you to read the article that can be found on many ATI forums ( Asus Radeon HD 6870 versus HD 6850 ).

Even with all the performance increase, both chipset manufacturers are more and more into creating better and better technologies that are able to provide performance for the lowest price and highest quality. Both technologies, SLI and Crossfire, even with all the differences, offer great performance features that single video solutions can only dream of. Powerful graphical computing is more accessible and powerful with any of this multiple – platform solution and this means that both manufacturers are going to invest more and more time and money to develop more performance. This competition can only have good sides in the usual customer point of view and this means more performance for less money.