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Although only recently announced for consumer level hardware, similar technology known as AMR has been used for some time in professional grade cards for flight simulators and similar applications available from Evans & Sutherland, ATI had also previously released a similiar dual RAGE 128 consumer card called the Fury MAXX. History, infastructures and criticismsCrossFire was first made available to the public on September 27, 2005. The system requires a CrossFire-compliant motherboard with a pair of PCI Express (PCIe) graphics cards, which can be enabled via either hardware or software. Radeon x800s, x850s, x1800s and x1900s come in a 'CrossFire Edition' that has 'master' capability built into the hardware. One must buy a Master card, and pair it with a normal card from the same series. Radeon x1300s and x1600s have no 'CrossFire Edition' but are enabled via software. ATI currently has not created the infrastructure to allow FireGL cards to be set up in a CrossFire configuration. Another point to note is that the 'slave' graphics card needs to be from the same family as the 'master', regardless of whether the 'master' is designated by the hardware or by software. An example of a past limitation in regards to a Master-card configuration would be the CrossFire implementation in the Radeon X850 XT Master Card using a compositing chip from Silicon Image (SiI 163B TMDS) which limits a X850 CrossFire setup to a resolution of 1600x1200 @60 Hz or 1920x1440 @52 Hz and was a problem for some CRT owners wishing to use CrossFire to play games at high resolutions. As many people would find a 60 Hz refresh rate with a CRT to strain ones eyes, the practical limit becomes 1280x1024, which did not push CrossFire enough to justify the cost. However, with ATI's release of the new Motherboard Chipset named "CrossFire Xpress 3200", the 'master' card is no longer required for every "CrossFire Ready" card (with the exception of the Radeon X1900 series). With the CrossFire Xpress 3200, two normal cards can be run in a Crossfire setup. This move is viewed as an overall improvement in market strategy due to the fact that Crossfire Master cards are expensive, in very high demand, and largely unavailable at the retail level. Although the CrossFire Xpress 3200 chipset is indeed capable of CrossFire through the PCI-e bus for every Radeon series below the X1900s, the driver accommodations for this CrossFire method has not yet materialized for the X1800 series. ATI has said that future revisions of the Catalyst driver suite will contain what is required for X1800 dongleless CrossFire, but has not yet mentioned a specific date.
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