AMD Rebrands CrossFire As Just mGPU

[boltronics]

The difference between one Fury X and two under Windows for games that supported Crossfire was mind blowing. Being able to play Far Cry Primal and the like at 2K max detail at 100FPS was beautiful. I talked about that last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C55DtdNMqoM

Not having anything comparable in GNU/Linux has been a bit disappointing from my perspective. I've always hoped that Vulkan would mean we'd eventually see some multi-GPU support in games on GNU/Linux, but I'm still waiting. Even games that push the envelope such as The Talos Principle have yet to work on it, AFAIK. However if a game were made to support it on GNU/Linux, I'd buy it immediately.

[shmerl]

Say what you want, it's not factual.

It is. No one is going to bother with obsolete stuff. Feel free to do it yourself.

[nomadewolf]

Aren't AMD and NVidia trying to get away from multiple gpus and deprecate that tech?...
So why bother with a 'dying' technology?...

[Ansla]

nomadewolf Yeap, somebody said it earlier, the title is incorect. AMD actually killed Crossfire and mGPU is a totaly different technology that will replace it. And this new technology will no longer have the problems of the old way of doing multi-gpu.

[nomadewolf]

nomadewolf Yeap, somebody said it earlier, the title is incorect. AMD actually killed Crossfire and mGPU is a totaly different technology that will replace it. And this new technology will no longer have the problems of the old way of doing multi-gpu.

Yep. I just checked it out, and it seems like it's the name they've given to Multi GPU on DirectX 12, which is done differently. In DirectX 12, all the GPUs are presented to the game engine, and it has to deal with it as it sees fit. So i suppose it'll take a while until game engines start implementing this new tech...

[Zan Lynx]

Aren't AMD and NVidia trying to get away from multiple gpus and deprecate that tech?...
So why bother with a 'dying' technology?...

Well, they are trying to get away from SLI and Crossfire, which require the GPU company to build custom per-game profiles. That's a lot of work for Nvidia or AMD, for only a small percentage of their user base, although the most profitable one (Who buys 2x 1080 Ti cards? People with money!).

With multi-GPU and DX12 or Vulkan, the game programmers decide what to do with each card. It also works well with iGPUs which are often ignored but are perfectly capable of doing physics or other compute jobs while the primary GPU is rendering.

[bridgman]

Well, they are trying to get away from SLI and Crossfire, which require the GPU company to build custom per-game profiles.

Building per-game profiles is the easy part. The hard part is writing and maintaining a driver stack which simulates a single GPU while invisibly and efficiently splitting the work across multiple GPUs then reassembling the results into a single stream of frames.

As games start making more use of post-processing (which breaks split-frame rendering) and previous frame data (which breaks alternate-frame rendering) doing that becomes impractical, and having the game engine split work between GPUs starts to make much more sense.