Although its support via DirectX11 continued, AMD moved on to the ‘Multi GPU’ name or mGPU. In contrast, AMD pretty much abandoned its dream of creating a viable multi-GPU technology and quietly retired CrossFire in 2017. However, NVIDIA gave its tech a boost and came up with NVLink, which still didn’t deliver doubled performance but was vastly superior to both SLI and CrossFire. After all, its chief competitor’s SLI technology didn’t fare significantly better. In all honesty, we can’t say that CrossFire was the only reason for AMD’s decline. It’s likely that, had CrossFire been able to fulfill its promise, things might have gone differently, but we will never truly know.
With each new generation of graphics cards, gamers hoped that those promises would finally be realized and they would be able to double their PC’s performance.ĪMD’s GPUs slumped hard in the mid-2010s and fell behind in their battle with NVIDIA. What Happened And What’s Next For AMD CrossFire?ĭespite the original promise of doubling graphical performance, it quickly became clear that the technology simply wouldn’t be able to fulfill that ambition. This technology allowed the company’s APUs to be linked with its GPUs. In 2012, AMD apparently decided to step away from this great name and changed it to something simpler: AMD Dual Graphics. For example, it allows a motherboard-integrated graphics card to link up with a discrete GPU. In effect, Hybrid CrossFireX enables multi-GPU support for different types of graphics cards. It’s about as cool as the rest of the CrossFire technology, which, unfortunately, isn’t saying much. With such a cool name, you might think this technology has to be something good. However, the cards need to be from the same series, so, for example, an HD 5750 card could be successfully configured to run with an HD 5770, AMD Hybrid CrossFireX The biggest advantage Crossfire has over SLI is that it can use cards that aren’t the same model or from the same manufacturer. Usually, the master card will work on the upmost part of the screen while the slave card works on the rest. It assigns each card a part of the screen to render and then relies on the master card to combine the images and display the correct output. SFR operates similarly in that it divides the workload between the cards, but it does so differently. However, due to connectivity and lag issues, users were often faced with micro-stuttering and, unfortunately, worse performances than those of a single graphics card. In theory, this should make rendering the image happen more quickly and smoothly. In the two-GPU configuration, the master card will, for example, process every odd frame while the slave processes every even frame.
There are two main operational modes for dual graphics card setups: Alternate Frame Rendering (AFR) and Split Frame Rendering (SFR).Īs its name suggests, AFR assigns one card to produce one frame and the other card to produce the next frame, and so on. The cards are typically set up in a master-slave configuration, which means one card will have the position of a “master” while the others will have the position of “slave.” The master card is in charge of receiving the output from the slave card(s) and meshing it together into a coherent output. This means the image you see on your screen is created using multiple GPUs. The CrossFire technology operates the same way as NVIDIA’s SLI: it pairs up two (or more) graphics cards in order to produce a single output. Two main factors caused this sequence of events: the two graphics cards needed to be specifically optimized by the game developers, and, more importantly, these technologies never delivered anywhere near double the performance.īefore looking at what happened later, let’s start at the beginning.
However, the drawbacks of both technologies persisted and ultimately led to their demise. Related: What Is SLI? List Of SLI Compatible Cards In 2004, NVIDIA was the first company to market this idea with its SLI (Scalable Link Interface) technology.
#CROSSFIREX SUPPORT PC#
The dream of having multiple graphics cards hooked into one PC and utilizing the power of those cards at the same time seemed like a crazy idea. Read on to find out what CrossFire is and what exactly went wrong. Since then, the list of CrossFire compatible cards has grown exponentially, but the technology ultimately hit a wall. AMD wasn’t willing to be left behind, so they released CrossFire. The concept of a multi-GPU setup was all the rage in the 2000s.
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