AMD Rebrands Crossfire After 12 Years

[Pemalite]

fatslob-:O said:

Pemalite said:

*Face Palm* I am not asking for game developers to make their source code accesible to the public.
I don't think you fully comprehend how easy it is to write a new profile.

AMD used to release Crossfire Profiles which were essentially just a bunch of small MST configuration files that essentially just "Plugged in" to the drivers that gave the drivers the appropriate settings to use for the specific game and went away from there.
They ranged from about 4kb to 40kb in size for each specific game.

Even I could write one with minimal effort, it's the testing that would get time consuming... But that isn't an issue for those genuinely interested in such an endeavor, heck just think about the hundreds of hours people sink into modding or building that "one building" in Minecraft.

That's not how it works anymore ... 

What you get is an API inside the driver in which the profiles are specifically hard coded onto the games themselves for the driver to respond ... 

Frankly, it doesn't make sense for profiles to exist when only the games know how it'll be rendered in the presence of mGPU. It makes even less sense once you consider that some render passes have different resolutions compared to the render target itself and when a game is using temporal sampling techniques ... 

I know it's not how it works anymore as AMD no longer exposes that process, I was keeping it simple for an explanation of *how* it used to be done as a precedent of how it could be done again in the future.

But still, that is the approach that could be taken if AMD wishes to "unload" it's burden of maintaining multi-GPU performance and compatability.

maxleresistant said:

CGI-Quality said:

Negative.

Maybe you are thinking about CGI rendering. But we are on a gaming forum in a PC discussion.

Incorrect.

Multi-GPU's don't have to be just two GPU's rendering a scene.
nVidia for instance can dedicate a GPU to PhysX.

You would be surprised what you can do with two GPU's instead of one. - Want more connections for more monitors? Drop in another GPU.

You also have Folding@Home, Seti, Bitcoin, Compute and so on on top of "CGI Rendering"

Xen said:

Pemalite said:

I realise this. Which I WHY I proposed that tools and a platform be made available to get around that.

Citation needed.

Provided in my link for the AMDGPU-PRO driver for Linux, in the same post. Notice the complete absense of HD 5xxx, 6xxx, a lot of the 7xxx series and its derivatives such as the R9280, 280X.

Meanwhile, Nvidia still supports the contemporaries of these cards perfectly fine... and older too.

I did take a quick look on AMD's website. And their driver supports all GCN products from what I can tell.

http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/AMDGPU-PRO-Driver-for-Linux-Release-Notes.aspx

Now Terascale parts are old, outdated and antiquated so I have no qualms of support for those parts being dropped.

JEMC said:

Past Radeon generations have allowed cards with the same core GPU to be used in CrossFire, even if the pair consisted of two different graphics cards. (The Radeon R9 290 and 290X packed the same core “Hawaii” GPU and could be CrossFire’d, for example.) But those days appear to be over as well. Even though Radeon RX Vega 56 uses a cut-down version of the RX Vega 64 GPU, AMD’s post says “gamers can pair two Radeon RX Vega 56 GPUs or two Radeon RX Vega 64 GPUs.”

That would be sad if that turns out to be the case. One of the big advantages Crossfire held over nVidia was it's flexibility.