Moreover, ATI’s specification mentions a special technology called Xpress Route. Its key point is to optimize the PCI Express lanes inside the chipset so that data from one PCI Express x16 slot traveled to the other graphical slot with minimal latencies and at a highest possible rate.

According to ATI, this is particularly important for the multi-GPU operating mode when the graphics cards are actively communicating between one another. This is especially important for configurations with two Radeon X1800 GTO, Radeon X1600 or Radeon X1300 which, unlike Radeon X1900/X1800 CrossFire Edition, do not have a hardware image-compositing unit, but rely only on the PCI Express bus.

Well, such solutions are not really in high demand since a single high-performance graphics card is going to have better performance and compatibility characteristics, but low data-transfer latencies and high PCI Express bandwidth are also necessary for today’s fastest CrossFire configuration with two Radeon X1900 XT cards, especially in high resolutions or extreme full-screen antialiasing modes.

Theoretically, the launch of the new CrossFire Express 3200 will allow ATI to enable the use of any two identical graphics cards in the CrossFire mode for their entire product range. This way you don’t need to purchase CrossFire Edition mainboards for certain specific configurations. However, this approach will automatically eliminate the highest speed SuperAA support, which is very important for high-end solutions.

Efficient data transfers between PCI Express slots can only be utilized in multi-GPU systems so far, but may have more applications in the future. For example, low data-transfer latencies will be useful for a co-processor that would process the game’s physics model. Besides games, a high PCI Express bandwidth may come in handy in video editing applications when one GPU is responsible for the OS interface and for outputting the resulting image on the screen and the other performs video-editing tasks proper (encoding, applying special effects, and so on).

So, ATI Technologies has created and implemented the CrossFire Xpress 3200 chipset not only as a multi-GPU-compatible gaming platform with maximum performance, but also as a future-proof solution.

Since the new chipset from ATI is targeted at PC enthusiasts, the company took care to provide some overclocking opportunities which will be discussed below.