Hothardware was one of a few lucky sites that had the opportunity to get to see a preview of AMD's upcoming Hybrid CrossFire technology being demoed. The technology should appear some time in Q1 '08 and it appears that we were right about the fact that there will be multiple versions of the RS780 chipset for desktop motherboards, which we told you about here.

According to Hothardware, the IGP in the RS780 chipset is essentially a Radeon HD 2400. We should see the onboard frame buffer return from past ATI efforts, although it didn't prove too popular then, but maybe this had more to do to the 32MB limitation back then rather than anything else.

The test system that was demoed consisted of an RS780 reference board, a Radeon HD 3450 and a Phenom 9500 processor. Call of Duty 4 ran at 30FPS at 1,024x768, with only the onboard graphics enabled, with a jump up to 50FPS when the HD 3450 card was added. Unreal Tournament 3 started out at 27FPS at the same resolution and this was improved to 45FPS when the card was added.

This was on early drivers, so some performance improvement can be expected. There will, of course, be some performance difference between the various RS780 chipsets as well depending on clock speeds, etc. AMD seems to have come up with a very power efficient IGP as it's supposed to max out at about 20W power consumption.

Price-wise, you're looking at between US$70-110 for an RS780 board, and we'd expect the dual x16 slot boards (as the one demoed) to end up in the upper end of that scale.

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