AMD confirms that their Radeon Navi RX 5700 series graphics lack CrossFire Support

AMD confirms that their Radeon Navi graphics lacks CrossFire Support

AMD confirms that their Radeon Navi graphics lacks CrossFire Support

With the launch of AMD’s new Radeon Navi graphics, one question was raised regarding its feature set. Does it support CrossFire? In other words, does the Radeon RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT support multi-GPU configurations. 

To answer this, AMD has released the following statement; 

 
 
 
    RX 5700 Series GPU’s support CrossFire in ‘Explicit’ multi-GPU mode when running a DX12 or Vulkan game that supports multiple GPU’s. The older ‘implicit’ mode used by legacy DX9/11/OpenGL titles is not supported.

  
So what does this mean? For starters, this means that CrossFire is not supported on the Navi RX 5700 series. PC gamers should not expect to run Navi in a multi-GPU configuration, at least outside of the rare usage of “explicit” multi-GPU in the occasional DirectX 12 or Vulkan title. This level of multi-GPU support remains rare in modern gaming titles, which means that in most cases multi-GPU support isn’t possible with Navi. 

Multi-GPU support has become incredibly unreliable in recent years, with fewer and fewer games supporting the feature. Beyond that, a single, stronger, graphics card is almost always better than combining two smaller graphics cards together in SLI, CrossFire or some other multi-GPU configuration. This is part of the reason why Nvidia has dropped SLI/NVLink support from its lower-end Pascal and Turing GPU lineups.  

AMD confirms that their Radeon Navi graphics lacks CrossFire Support  
While AMD’s lack of implicit CrossFire support with their Navi RX 5700 series graphics cards may be disappointing to some, it is hard to see a dual-GPU RX 5700 or RX 5700XT setup as being something that’s worth recommending to PC gamers, especially given the current state of multi-GPU support in modern software. PC gamers are almost always better off investing their money into a single graphics card, rather than two smaller ones.

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