Sources close to ATI Technologies said the company was preparing a technology that is similar to NVIDIA"s Multi-GPU Scalable Link Interface, but offers additional flexibility and enhancements not presently available on NVIDIA"s approach to graphics multiprocessing.
The multi-GPU technology from ATI will presumably be branded as Multi Rendering and will have a number of fundamental shifts from technologies of this kind, sources said. The main thing ATI is currently working on is how to enable two different graphics cards to work in pair, providing enhancements to gamers who use the technology. NVIDIA"s SLI technology only allows two very similar graphics cards to work in parallel, which puts some restrictions with deployment of multi-GPU graphics sub-systems by end-users. It is unclear whether there are any other advantages ATI"s Multi Rendering technology may offer in addition to higher average framerate.