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WHEN ATI FIRST ANNOUNCED its CrossFire multi-card graphics platform to the world in late May, the clever folks on the red team had a few interesting new twists to offer in their answer to NVIDIA's SLI. One of the more appealing features of the CrossFire platform was to be a "super antialiasing" mode, allowing two graphics cards to team up in order to produce higher quality antialiasing than available on a single card alone. We liked the idea, noting that "CrossFire rigs may provide image quality benefits even in games where fill rate and geometry throughput aren't normally at a premium." Since there are quite a few current games that don't really take advantage of even a single high-end graphics card, using the extra power of a second card to improve image quality makes sense.
It seems NVIDIA liked the idea, too, since they announced shortly before the launch of the GeForce 7800 GTX that they would be bringing a similar antialiasing mode to SLI systems via a driver update. Now, in an amusing bit of one-upsmanship, NVIDIA is ready to deliver drivers that will make SLI antialiasing widely available today, while ATI's CrossFire platform is still missing in action, apparently delayed.
Some interesting results, particularly in HL2, where it seems SLI AA doesn't work properly at the moment. UT2004 players will be pleased to learn that 16x SLI AA allows playable framerates. Ace! The only snag is you might not notice a visual difference - whoops.