CrossFire is dead? Yes, it is.

https://www.pcgamesn.com/amd/rx-5700…lled-crossfire

AMD’s RX 5700 cards ditched CrossFire because less than 1% of gamers care

Here's the thing.

I have absolutely no idea why gaming media was excited about both SLI and Crossfire. To this day I haven't heard a single logical ur useful explanation why anyone should opt for that, yet gaming media was competing who'd blather about it more. Long live shallowness. It sells.

There is another reason SLI and Crossfire were getting on my nerves. The loud minority was and still is hijacking each and every game forum out there whining that some game doesn't behave properly on their pair. And I couldn't suggest them to grow a pair as that's against TOS (in most cases) plus is kinda low effort trolling which makes it boring.

"Recently" Microsoft developerd dx12 and AMD turned their vulkan to opensource, both (supposed to be) capable of managing different manufacturers' GPUs at the same time. So yes, I've expected developers to take a hint about this and "persuade" consumers into buying CPU with integrated graphics, a good nVidia card, a good AMD card and then enjoy a beauty of performance coming from combining the best of all worlds.
It didn't happen. Still didn't, can't be sure what comes in the future and which engine will start supporting it first. Unity? Nah, it's basically a phone engine with port2PC addon.

But if obviously superior dx12/vulkan is not a thing yet, superior as it doesn't lock a consumer to one manufacturer, the only logical move from AMD was to remove irrelevant Crossfire. Which will have another effect we all will cheer for - lower GPU prices.

Here's :thumbup: for AMD.

Isn't crossfire necessary to use OpenCL across multiple cards? They had their own 9 years ago, fire something I recall, but it looks like they've abandoned it.

I’d say crossfire was never alive, but opinions will vary.

SLI on the other hand was great back in the day. You apparently never basked in the glory of 2 voodoo cards in sli.

SLI is a good idea imo. Problem is theres not enough high end gamers and too many budget gamers so hardware and software devs don’t want to put money in to optimizing the technology. Same reason why games aren’t taking advantage of multi core procs.

As long as you can't combine the memory between the two graphic cards, the effect is not that great as it could have been I guess.

Crossfire / SLI was awful, but much of that was lack of proper support, sometimes even lowering performance. I only tried it once, i think it was crossfire, some card where they had merged two cards together in crossfire mode, no idea what it was called since its years ago… Left me very unimpressed.

When it worked it was nice, sure, but overall drivers sucked - tons of research required, sometimes having to use a certain driver for a certain game, proper support was very lacking, only a handful of games that i played could use it properly.

And yeah it sucks that it can't combine the memory, you're paying a lot for memory and then it cant even be utilized, lol…

Originally Posted by GothicGothicness
As long as you can't combine the memory between the two graphic cards, the effect is not that great as it could have been I guess.

Sli using nvlink bridge does indeed combine memory. Of course nowadays Single cards have so much memory that it doesn’t matter for gaming.

Again, I'm bringing up GPGPU purposes. I remember this being required as a way to connect all your devices. I would think the Tesla devices that NVidia makes needs this.

Originally Posted by Lucky Day
Again, I'm bringing up GPGPU purposes. I remember this being required as a way to connect all your devices. I would think the Tesla devices that NVidia makes needs this.

No they don't, because CrossFire (what this thread is about) is AMD only.

Originally Posted by Stingray
No they don't, because CrossFire (what this thread is about) is AMD only.

I'm talking about OpenCL and their old Firestream. NVidia needed their equivalent (was it SLI?) to run CUDA and OpenCL on multiple cards.

Originally Posted by Lucky Day
I'm talking about OpenCL and their old Firestream. NVidia needed their equivalent (was it SLI?) to run CUDA and OpenCL on multiple cards.

Hmm, not sure how else to put that. CrossFire maybe being dead obviously has no impact on NVIDIA products, because NVIDIA has a different equivalent (SLI). Plus I don't think Tesla ever supported SLI to begin with.

Originally Posted by sakichop
Sli using nvlink bridge does indeed combine memory. Of course nowadays Single cards have so much memory that it doesn’t matter for gaming.

Isn't that only for their Quadro cards ?

Originally Posted by GothicGothicness
Isn't that only for their Quadro cards ?

I’m not running sli i just heard nvlink will combine memory. Your question made me curious to dig deeper.

Apparently memory pooling is indeed supported on RTX cards but its up to each individual developer to specifically code in support. So I doubt we’ll see any real support for gaming.

Originally Posted by sakichop
I’m not running sli i just heard nvlink will combine memory. Your question made me curious to dig deeper.

Apparently memory pooling is indeed supported on RTX cards but its up to each individual developer to specifically code in support. So I doubt we’ll see any real support for gaming.

Ooo, I also checked these now, wow I really don't have time to keep up-to-date now that I have children. But the new RTX cards architecture looks like it could be a game changer. Shared memory is not only so that you can get more memory, it is also major in terms of loading and so on, if the memory is shared you can load textures and all other stuffs once only for example, it looks like in the new architecture you should be able to get much bigger benefits from sli.

I think it must just come down to the extra cost not being worth it for a tiny percentage of the market. There's all sorts of possibilities for multiple cards - DX12 and Vulkan have supported explicit multi-GPU for a while, and Nvidia has a VR feature that allows one card to be dedicated to each eye. But there's been hardly any implementation of these features.

I never touched SLI. I knew it was rarely used yet I kept seeing a lot of people with SLI complaining in forums about crashing - then "fixing" the problem by turning SLI off.

Originally Posted by joxer
And I couldn't suggest them to grow a pair as that's against TOS (in most cases) plus is kinda low effort trolling which makes it boring.

Suggest that they grow a pear instead.