Several years ago, the most important motherboard chipset makers kept a tight collaboration with Intel and AMD. But at one point, things started to get a little bit out of hand. It’s known that Intel was relying more and more on its own chipsets rather than VIA’s and NVIDIA’s, but AMD clearly needed some helping hand with motherboard chipsets. Nowadays, things are not different at all for Intel, while AMD has slowly started to build its own chipsets, knowing that it can do better than VIA and NVIDIA, especially after it managed to finalize the ATI acquisition.

The upcoming 790GX chipset is AMD/ATI’s in house solution to their Hybrid CrossfireX technology. Weeks away from the official launch, a Chinese website is now releasing some more information about the architecture behind the 790GX. We found out that it supports a local frame buffer, just as the 780G. However, the motherboard integrators didn’t really care about the local frame buffer in the past, because of the increased production cost, so history could repeat as well with the 790GX.

The Chinese source managed to take a closer look at a 790GX-powered Unika motherboard that integrates a DDR2 memory chip from Hynix as a local frame buffer. It’s not much, but in a hybrid configuration it is supposed to add to the overall system performance, as the integrated GPU doesn't have to share system memory in Windows and the frame buffer is faster than sharing system memory when you're playing games using the IGP. Moreover, the 790GX-powered motherboards will include an improved graphics core, supposedly the Radeon HD 3300.

As I previously stated, it looks like we are going to see improved AMD/ATI products more often now, but that doesn’t mean our wallet is going to like this perspective.