As promised here this is the first part of interview that we did with Godfrey Cheng, Director of Marketing Platform technologies at AMD,

What is CrossFireX?

AMD: CrossFireX is a brand new software architecture designed from the ground up to support multi-GPU for video gaming.  As you know, we have invested in new software architectures and like Orca for OGL, we expect great things from CFX.

 

What are the main features for CrossFireX?

AMD: At its heart CrossFireX is an architecture designed to support multiple GPUs in one system.  The primary application will be multi-GPU video gaming but this technology also powers our hybrid graphics.   There are other applications that we are working on and we would love to discuss those with you when the time is right.

 

How much scaling can we expect from three or four cards in CrossFire X?

AMD: Unlike last generation’s multi-GPU technologies, CrossFireX is a true multi-GPU architecture.  In some games you will see scaling well beyond 300% for 4 GPUs over a single GPU – which is a huge improvement from the classic mutli-GPU architectures.  The level of scaling will vary from game to game and application to application as there are a lot of factors at play.

 

There are some rumours that CrossFireX doesn’t scale well with DX10.  Do DirectX 10 titles scale as well as DirectX 9?

AMD: We find it amusing that others can speak about our products and their performance.  We also find it amusing that some people are trying to diminish the importance of DX9 games. DX10 titles have just recently started shipping and we continue to work with game developers to make driver optimizations that work best with their respective engines.  We expect good scaling with many of the DX10 titles.  DX9 games account for 96% of the games sold last year in North America so the vast majority of people are still playing DX9 games.  It is therefore critical that we first address the scaling on DX9 titles.  We expect good to great scaling across many of DX9 titles with the launch of the CrossFireX driver.

 

How does CrossFireX treat DX10 games differently?  And when do you expect DX10 scaling to improve?

AMD: Great question.  DX9 games are mature and the processing & rendering paths are well established and this is why we see good-to-great scaling across a broad range of games with CrossFireX.  DX10 games are very new and we need to continually work with the game developers to optimize the games.  Out of the box, we are expecting good scaling with the limited number of DX10 games out there at the moment and we expect gradual and consistent improvements in performance and scaling for DX10 titles over time as we do with any driver.  We have long established our leadership with Catalyst.  The Catalyst team at AMD promises a high quality driver with consistent and regular performance improvements.  We expect the same promises to hold true for DX10.

This is the part one, more to come soon.