AMD Previews “Hybrid CrossFire”

Despite AMD’s recent slew of trouble, they are doing a solid job of making up for it with some impressive new technology and future prospects. One such example is their upcoming “Hybrid CrossFire”, a new solution to help gamers with low-end rigs get their game on… even with the likes of Call of Duty 4.

The idea is simple. Pair a low-end GPU with an AMD motherboard equipped with an IGP and enable CrossFire. Both the GPU and IGP will work together to increase graphic performance. From what it appears, this will not effect games that don’t already take advantage of CrossFire, but those that do will see rather sizable increases when compared to performance on a board without an IGP.

Of course this is not for the enthusiast, but rather the budget PC builder. It will give them a chance to play the latest DX10 games, albeit at lower resolutions, without having to purchase a $100+ video card. This is pretty exciting technology, but for it to truly catch on, ATI will really need to refine their drivers and make the process of setup a simple one. After all, the majority of people who will use this setup are likely to be novice PC users. Great stuff AMD… keep it coming.

Credit: HotHardware

We saw a system up and running with an RS780 motherboard, a Radeon HD 3450, and a 2.2GHz Phenom 9500 processor, and even with the early state of the drivers and hardware, it was able to play Call of Duty 4 at over 30FPS at 1024×768 with just the IGP, and in Hybrid CrossFire mode performance jumped to over 50FPS. We also saw Unreal Tournament 3 running on the same system. With the IGP alone, UT3 ran at about 27FPS at 1024×768 and scaled to 45FPS in Hybrid CrossFire mode.

Source: HotHardware