Question AMD: could they bring back crossfire?

[80251]

I seem to remember the later iterations of Crossfire worked over PCIe rather than Nvidia's dedicated NVlink(?) so could AMD theoretically bring back Crossfire just by renabling it in their drivers? One good reason to bring back Crossfire would be raytracing perf.

 

[USAFRet]

Could they? Probably.
But it is more than just code in the driver.

It was phased out for several reasons:
1. Limited user base. People didn't want to buy 2x GPU, AND the required PSU to run them.

2. Limited developer base. Why spend money and effort in design/code/test of this capability, for the small user base?

3. Limited benefit. Even in the projects where it DID work, it wasn't a 2x benefit over the single GPU.

 

[Joseph_138]

Multi GPU setups were never really worth the expense, because the gains were minimal. Adding a second card never came close to doubling your gaming performance, and adding cards beyond that gave even worse returns on your investment, and drove your power bill through the roof. Usually, you would be better off spending the extra money on the top tier card, rather than trying to get the same performance from two, or more, cheaper cards. The only time you should have even considered it, is if you were already using the top tier card, and had nowhere else to go but to add another one, and even then, the benefit was questionable. Adding another GPU, just to pick up 4 or 5 frames, isn't worth it, considering what GPU's cost these days. You also need a really powerful PSU, with lots of PCIe power connectors, to power multiple GPU's, and those PSU's aren't cheap, either. The advent of DLSS, XESS, and FSR has also made multiple GPU's redundant, because you get much better performance by turning them on, rather than adding another GPU, and they're free if you have a card that supports them.