Quote Originally Posted by xman01 View Post
why ati didnt implement it b4?
why are there limitations to xfire and sli

this magic chip supposed to fix that?

Because from a marketing point of view that's complete failure. And you fail to realize that ATI and nvidia exist for the sole purpose of making money. What good could come from ATI and nvidia investing money and research time to get xfire/SLI working with mixed and matched configurations?

Option A: you can mix ATI with nvidia, so now you go and purchase the competitor's product. FAIL for both companies.

Option B: you can increase the performance of your current 4890/GTX 285, by throwing in your old 3870/8800 GT, rather than being forced to buy ANOTHER 4890/GTX 285. Once again, FAIL.

That's why you need a third party to come in and develop such a thing. And it seems they have found the best way (distributing directx/opengl code rather than distributing frames) to allow cards of different performance levels to scale almost perfectly. Obviously the same technique would work with cards of the same performance level and should show linear scaling.

Whether it works as advertised or not is the question. Will we see terrible micro or macro stutter, will every game engine be supported, and so on.