AMD to Give RV770 a Refresh, G200b Counterattack Planned

[Sr7]

What if they unlocked the sideport on it?

Here's a pretty major, but pretty common fallacy. Basically AMD has been continually advertising this "ace in the back pocket" story so that people believe that enabling this feature will magically boost performance a bunch.

All this sideport does is give a faster transport between GPUs for resources that get transferred between GPUs in AFR mode.

What does that mean? It means that the cost of transfers goes lower, but that they still exist.

Now while all that sounds great and efficient, there's one part they're failing to tell you: most major games already have certain types of unnecessary transfers between GPUs disabled via the Crossfire (or SLI) profile, to minimize the the amount of resource stalling, or they are coded out in the application by the developer themselves (if they made the game with multi-gpu in mind).

So if most game devs have removed transfers from the app-side, and most of the app profiles for Crossfire have eliminated unnecessary transfers, there is little to no gain from speeding up non-existent or non-costly transfers in existing profiled applications.

The only justification for this feature is to increase the likelihood that plain AFR (without special transfer eliminating considerations) will work much faster without the intervention of a profile, because you're driving the transfers that *do* still exist in an un-profiled application towards 0 performance-cost. That still doesn't make them free, and will never be faster than the current method of eliminating the transfers outright.

My point is I think it's more of a "Crossfire scaling compatibility with new titles which we haven't profiled for Crossfire yet" feature.