AMD leaves Crossfire in favor of DirectX 12 and Vulkan

Prior to the acquisition of AMD, ATI introduced Crossfire technology in 2005, shortly after Nvidia’s similar Scalable Link Interface (SLI) the year before. The techniques were intended to enable the interconnection of several graphics processors, in order to achieve a higher aggregate performance compared to what is possible for a standalone graphics card.

In recent years, general interest in the technology has cooled, although as recently as the launch of Polaris, AMD placed great emphasis on connecting the architecture via Crossfire, to go up against Nvidia’s then flagship Geforce GTX 1080. However, the same cannot be said for new the architecture Vega, where AMD has been very quiet about Crossfire despite the architecture’s support for the technology.

In conversations between Gamers Nexus and members of AMD’s Radeon Technologies Group it is now confirmed that the company will distance itself from the technology in the future. This is due to reduced support in the industry, which means a lower value of connecting several graphics cards.

For SweClockers, the same position is confirmed and AMD points out that support for several contemporary graphics cards is there for those who want to equip the computer with extra computing power, but that this is not something that the company itself will develop in the future. Thus, both AMD and Nvidia transfer support for parallel hardware to interfaces such as DirectX 12 and Vulkan.

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AMD is thus following in Nvidia’s footsteps, which last year ended its support for more than two cards via the SLI technology in connection with the launch of Pascal. The argument was then, like AMD’s, that fewer and fewer games use the concept together with the fact that it has become more difficult to extract the total computing power in modern games.