Wine + Crossfire Possible?

[cjr2k3]

I got a excelent opportunity to get another HD4850 but since I only play Wine games (and HoN) is there any chance that Crossfire is working for that games? Or is still game-specific?

[cutterjohn]

I'm not even sure that CF works reliably at all udner linux. AMD's propietary driver are to be blunt, alpha quality. This is even more hilarious since they moan continuously about how they're "professional" oriented, but hell if I know a pro that would put up with this barely functional quality.

[Melcar]

Crossfire does work. Don't know what effect it will have on games running with WINE though.

[Heiko]

Crossfire works in Linux indeed. I even had hybrid crossfire working using an integrated HD3200 and an HD3450. However, I don't know either whether Wine (and those specific games) utilize crossfire properly.

You might just try and sell the 2nd HD4850 again if it doesn't work...
(perhaps there is a Wine mailinglist or forum where more people, or Wine developers know the answer to your question?)

[cjr2k3]

Thx for the answers. I'll try the wine foruns to see what I can know and post here the answer to keep people informed

[nadro]

Hi, I can check it tomorrow (I have 2x HD4850 + Ubuntu 8.10).

[cjr2k3]

Thx a lot.

I cannot find a single piece of information about Xfire... I know NVIDIA does do SLI in a generic way.

If AMD doesn't do it I don't know why... do they have some huge switch() case() block inside the drivers with every game they support?? Or the drivers just get the data and split it between the available GPUs?

The only info available is this from a article from a year ago

Another shortcoming of this initial multi-GPU implementation is the limited program support. While NVIDIA's driver requires setting an environmental variable for most programs before their SLI technology will be initialized, this allows Scalable Link Interface to be used on most any OpenGL program. The ATI Linux driver relies upon auto-detection of the program's name to determine whether to use CrossFire and that support is currently limited to Doom 3, Quake 4, and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. When attempting to trick the driver into using CrossFire for other OpenGL programs by faking their program name, we were faced by problems. Hopefully we will see an option for ATI support on other OpenGL programs in the future (of course, we would like to see CrossFire on Unigine, Lightsmark, SPECViewPerf, and even Nexuiz for some of the lower-end cards).

[cjr2k3]

I'm going to buy the HD4850 and try for myself since I cannot get anyone to know that kind of info... Worst case cenario I'll sell it again...