General Discussions

[black_zion]

Check out the excerpts from it below.

https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/crossfire

[ajlueke]

Wow, Catalyst.  Not even the Crimson driver series, much less Adrenaline.

[black_zion]

Forget the drivers, not even citing currently supported cards!

[pokester]

It's been abundantly clear that AMD is not even trying to make anything crossfire compatible since the Wattman drivers came out. Honestly it isn't any better on the green team either. With so few people ever utilizing it, it isn't worth the developers or the driver teams time to support. While DX 12 give another avenue that will require the game developers to support Multi-GPU, I still don't think it will be widely supported. The PC side is already a small percentage of gamers and when your realize that multi card users only make up 3% of that, it isn't worth the time or the trade off in instability to mess with. You get one game working well but 10 others suffer because of the second card. I went the crossfire route a couple times and was never happy. I would have been much better to just get a better single card.

[black_zion]

Back in the day Crossfire and SLI were badly needed as GPUs were pretty weak even for the time. AMD's X1000 through the HD 3000 series were a joke, and nVidia was happy to rebrand the 8800 about a dozen times. Then Crysis and Bioshock came out and really showed how poor both camps were. I went Crossfire with the HD 4850x2 and the HD 5970, and I swore never again after the 5970 to use multiple GPUs. Thankfully with adaptive sync managing 60fps isn't necessary anymore, though monitor companies, likely driven behind closed doors by nVidia, push 144 and 240hz monitors, therefore justifying the need for cards like the 2080 Ti.

[pokester]

I had dual 4870's and only a couple games benefited. However many other games had issues with artifacts and stuttering plus many more issues to various and plentiful to list do to having that second card installed. I had a couple sli cards before that and had issues too. I had done dual cards all the way back to the beginning with Voodoo cards. I would not mess with dual again unless someone gave me a second card.

[black_zion]

Not to mention the noise, heat, and power consumption of a second card, the first being the largest drawback to me. My 5970 wailed like a banshee, a victim of the nasty blower cooler. When I replaced it with my Fury Nano...the sweet sweet sounds of silence.

[whiskey-foxtrot]

That page is definitely in need of an update; I've seen a few too many folks just on this forum alone thinking it's the magic pill to gain extra power in games etc. While I still build with 2 GPUs (for non-gaming workloads), I haven't touched Crossfire since 17.9.1 as zero relevant games supported Crossfire anyway. In the rare game that somewhat supported Crossfire, the gains were just minimal. Nice in benchmarks, but not in actual game play.

[ajlueke]

I large part of the issue is that Crossfire, and SLI were both only support through DX11.  DX12, Vulkan and other "low level" APIs don't use a driver side MultiGPU implementation anyway.