By combining an onboard GPU with an add-in graphics card, Hybrid CrossFire offers 1.5x performance of the add-in graphics card for some AMD customers.

Hybrid dual-graphics solutions –those that use an onboard graphics chip in conjunction with discrete add-in boards- are beginning to look like viable options for gamers on a budget. Fudzilla has received demo hardware from AMD that is Hybrid CrossFire enabled; meaning an ATI IGP 3200 graphics chip on the motherboard is working in tandem with a Radeon HD 2400. AMD reckons Hybrid CrossFire will generate 1.5 times the performance of the discrete card being used. While this is not particularly impressive considering the generally low performance of low-end graphics boards like the Radeon HD 2400, the potential for similar scaling when using more powerful cards is enough to whet anyone’s apetite.

[ArticleAdvert]

For now, however, AMD says that Hybrid CrossFire will only work with graphics cards up to the Radeon HD 3470, based off the RV620 graphics core. These low-cost, relatively low-performance graphics cards are commonly found in business-centric machines, which for now is the target demographic for this technology. Hybrid CrossFire, similarly to NVIDIA’s Hybrid SLI, will be able to turn off or on depending on demand. This tends to keep power consumption down, which will be particularly useful for mobile users.

We doubt Hybrid CrossFire will offer such performance advantages when applied to more powerful graphics cards, if that ever happens. However, for mobile gaming applications, where graphics card abilities are generally lacking in the first place, the power saving and on-the-fly performance boost that Hybrid CrossFire offers makes it look very attractive. For now, however, AMD does not seem to have any really powerful mobile graphics processors to challenge NVIDIA’s GeForce 8800M GTX, which currently dominates the high-performance mobile graphics market.

Source: Fudzilla

Popularity: 6% [?]

You Should Also Check Out These Post:

• Nightly News Links for 2008-11-23
• Valve Joins the Cloud Computing Trend
• NVIDIA Updates
• Sapphire's Radeon HD4850X2
• Get out and vote

More Active Posts:

• Some Updates (8)
• NVIDIA has an overcomplicated lineup (8)
• What happened... (8)
• Welcome To FPSLabs V3 With Added Awesome! (7)
• NVIDIA GeForce 9800GTX on April 1st (7)
• Razer Piranha Review (7)
• Microsoft to sell XP until 2010 (6)
• Weekly Hardware Recap (6)
• The Weekly Hardware Recap (5)
• Newbie's Guide to Vista: The Look (5)