AMD Crossfire says so long, and thanks for all the fish

AMD CrossFire is gone, but only in name. Yesterday AMD released a GPU driver which no longer made any reference to CrossFire, their brand name for multi-GPU setups. PCWorld got in touch with AMD to ask why the name had gone, and they were told that it was because CrossFire was a DirectX 11 focused brand.

AMD has stated how they would reference multiple GPUs going forward, “In DirectX 12, we reference multi-GPU as applications must support mGPU, whereas AMD has to create the profiles for DX11. We’ve accordingly moved away from using the CrossFire tag for multi-GPU gaming.” AMD wanted to reiterate that this is just a branding change and their GPUs would continue to support multi-GPU functionality, but that it would be referred to as mGPU as it is in DirectX 12.

The reason there is a difference between DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 implementations of multi-GPU is that previously AMD and Nvidia were responsible for building multi-GPU profiles for every game individually (as they also had to with DirectX 10 and DirectX 9). However, with DirectX 12 the responsibility for creating multi-GPU profiles (known as mGPU support) has been shifted to the game developer. The idea is that they build one mGPU profile, and then the GPU manufacturers just have to make sure their cards are compatible with the mGPU API. This API is an example of the improved hardware level support that DirectX 12 is supposed to enable over previous versions.

Nvidia is continuing to refer to their multi-GPU setup as SLI. For AMD the CrossFire branding might be gone, but the functionality remains, and AMD will continue to create profiles for games using older versions of DirectX.

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