The birth of Crossfire and Google goes online (PCGH-Retro, September 27)

… 1998: A full 23 days after the company was founded, the main product of a new company goes online: the user commands a database search using a puristic-looking website and within a short time receives the results of his query as hyperlinks with a brief preview of the content. The internet search engine Google is not the first of its kind, but in the long run it is the most successful. In addition to the high quality of the search results, this is perhaps also due to the fact that the results are displayed without being tied to a platform and without much fanfare. Years later, the simplicity of the website www.google.de has remained, but hidden behind an unobtrusive menu is a whole armada of Google services from the (purchased) video portal Youtube to Google Maps, translators and even a complete (smartphone) operating system called Android.

…2005: Pairing two graphics cards together to increase performance – this idea is not new, years ago this possibility existed with 3dfx’ Voodoo 2 cards. In 2004, this technology called SLI was revived with Nvidia’s Geforce 6 cards. On September 27, 2005, Nvidia’s competitor Ati will be presenting its own multi-GPU technology: Crossfire. The first cards to allow such a combination are the Radeon X800 and the X850, each in a special Crossfire edition; Ati supplies the Radeon Xpress 200 Crossfire Edition as a suitable chipset in an Intel (RD400) and an AMD version (RD480). The Crossfire graphics cards largely correspond to the regular versions, but unlike Nvidia’s SLI, interconnection only works if such a card is combined with a normal card as the “master”; communication between the two runs through a special DVI-Y cable. Only later Crossfire generations manage without special master cards.