Quote Originally Posted by keiths View Post
There's nothing technically different between sli and crossfire, they're the same pci express functionality. What's probable is that Nvidia wrote their drivers to require identifying a nvidia chipset to run, and rather than rewrite their drivers to ignore this requirement, they make vendors buy their chipset instead, which gets the drivers past the nvidia check; it's like old software dongles. They could have added some unecessary hardware process, but it's more likely they're relying on legal and software means to inflicting their nvidia requirement.
Actually they're a little bit different. Yeah they both depend on PCI Express, but they rely on different portions. nVidia locked out the portion that ATI requires for CrossFire and locked out all other chipsets in their drivers.

nVidia only stands to gain by allowing SLI on Intel chipsets.