At the beginning of September, Tarinder brought HEXUS readers the full tin o' beanz on GeCube's dual-2600XT graphic boards utilising ATI's Gemini Technology.
HEXUS can confirm that a long-forgotten project to bring 3 GPUs into the land of affordability has been rejuvenated back at Ruby's HQ.
While the CrossFire team pursued the goal of getting 2 GPUs to work together in an attempt to challenge SLi, the company's chipset teams were wondering how they could get in on the act and help utilise whatever pixel-processing power was available on the mainboard to help boost not only general graphics, but - more importantly - benchmarks.
The problem has been that ATI's IGP (integrated graphics) solutions have been lagging one generation behind the graphic cards themselves.
Having SM3 on the card and only SM2 on-board means major driver woes. You can't share a workload over different paths.
Now that ATI's IGP teams are on schedule to release a DX10.1 integrated part in time for a New Year's Celebration, the driver team is stepping-up to the plate in order to deliver a solution that will allow the (albeit smaller) 2400 chip in the northbridge to share some of the workload.
Given that ATI now seems confident of delivering solutions with 1, 2, 3 and 4 GPUs working in tandem... the only questions remaining are "Will a pair of Gemini boards be able to work in tandem with an on-board 2400 GPU
to give the user QUIN-FIRE ?"...
...and will nVidia beat them to the punch with the all-important SEX-FIRE?
