The first details are beginning to emerage about ATI’s ‘Multi Video Processing’ (MVP) system, designed to harness the power of two video cards to render 3D graphics, much like Nvidia’s existing SLI system. Nvidia’s system splits the rendering duties (roughly) across the middle, giving the top half to one card and the bottom half to another, then pasting the image together before it hits your screen. ATI’s system, on the other hand, will break the image up into tiles, then grout them all together before they hit your screen (as The Reg reminds us, that’s not an entirely new trick, having been used in the PowerVR hardware that powered the Dreamcast, for instance).
Even better, though, is news that the ATI system will be able to use any given ATI card as the secondary, not just matched pairs as in Nvidia’s system. That’s cool—it means you could buy a fancy new ATI card today, then plug in the older ATI card you had sitting around for a little speed bump (if you have the slots in your motherboard, of course).
Actually, reading again, it looks like Hexus broke this story/rumor, so we should link them, too.
ATI multi-card rendering details emerge [TheRegister]
