Most people would rather enjoy time with their family rather than partitioning their storage, installing Windows via bootcamp and trying to test it over Christmas. They may not even care and just because someone got it early doesn't mean they have any interest in benchmarks. Wait for Arstechnica, Anandtech and Barefeats to start experimenting.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Crossfire for nMP on Windows / Boot Camp
- Thread starter drunkn
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Most people would rather enjoy time with their family rather than partitioning their storage, installing Windows via bootcamp and trying to test it over Christmas. They may not even care and just because someone got it early doesn't mean they have any interest in benchmarks. Wait for Arstechnica, Anandtech and Barefeats to start experimenting.
Actually, as I said above I believe it's just a memory controller for the DMA over PCIe 3.0, according to AMD.
I agree with that
I don't agree that they don't recognize Gaming. Games are a huge part of iOS for one. And they wouldn't offer GPU upgrades on the iMac if they didn't. However, I agree they let Windows take the lead on this obviously.
As far as I'm reading, it's not even that. It's looks like it's just the drivers manually copying data between VRAM on the cards overt the PCIe 3.0 bus, which again, there is no reason they couldn't just enable that on all their cards. (They probably don't on Windows to encourage upgrades, but Apple could certainly enabled it.) Several cards in the 7XX0 line even have this functionality.
I've seen a lot of drivers have that same functionality built in for older cards, it's just that PCIe 2.0 has been slow enough to not make it as reliable.
I actually didn't know this. I can't find it on the iPhone/mobile version of site but maybe it's because I'm already subscribed?
Brilliant news, you might be the first to confirm his for us.
Crossfire support In windows is a deal breaker for me.
If possible could you also run a bench with single and crossfire configs , just to confirm the scaling.
I too hope for this. I bought a nMP to replace both a workstation mac and my 3 year old gaming PC so having dual D700's working in games would be the cherry on top.
PCI-e v3 is necessary but not sufficient.
" ....The results of course weren’t pretty for AMD, showcasing that Crossfire may have been generating plenty of frames, but in most cases it was doing a very poor job of delivering them.
...
AMD for their part doubled down on the situation and began rolling out improvements in a plan that would see Crossfire improved in multiple phases.
...
The fact that there’s even a phase 2 brings us to our next topic of discussion, which is a new hardware DMA engine in GCN 1.1 parts called XDMA. Being first utilized on Hawaii, XDMA is the final solution to AMD’s frame pacing woes, and in doing so it is redefining how Crossfire is implemented on 290X and future cards. Specifically, AMD is forgoing the Crossfire Bridge Interconnect (CFBI) entirely and moving all inter-GPU communication over the PCIe bus, with XDMA being the hardware engine that makes this both practical and efficient.... "
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7457/the-radeon-r9-290x-review/4
Because they likely are lacking in the new DMA abilities. It isn't just moving the data over PCI-e... the timing of moving the data matters. It also means the latency in getting the data moved also has to be low.
Apple could "force" it onto older cards. It would suck in the same way the somewhat broken way Crossfire has sucked with the proprietary socket.
In theory, both GPUs can be used for rendering even without XFire. The OS X graphics stack actually allows for using two different GPUs on two different busses for that purpose (see WWDC 2010 Session 422). On Windows, with some application code cooperation, both GPUs can be used to accelerate rendering intermixed with compute AFAIK. Traditional Alternate Frame Rendering (AFR) and Split Frame Rendering (SFR) approach wouldn't be viable over PCIe probably without the additional DMA HW built into the newest GPUs.
That being said, I doubt any game developers would take the time and effort to optimize for this case under Windows.
That being said, I doubt any game developers would take the time and effort to optimize for this case under Windows.
Yeah I don'T get whats so hard for the testers to just boot win and LOOK if crossfire is there or not.
When will someone test this?
OK boys, please go get one and do so for us. Oh, you can't get your hands on one? Meanwhile the discussion is educational.
You're going to have to substantiate that - how would you know? What did you do? Where did you get access to the computer?
The other question is to know if ATI Windows FirePro Drivers (Catalyst ? ) works under Bootcamp/Windows 8, and if nMP cards are recognized/certified as workstation cards or "simple" Radeon.
Well, OOPS is now up to a week behind on packages, someone in another thread had an estimated delivery date of Dec 30, and it's now estimated for Jan 6. Hard to test when your nMP is in the back of a container that OOPS left on a runway someplace.