AMD: The Radeon RX 5700 series lacks Crossfire

Yesterday’s launch of the Ryzen 3000 series processors with Zen 2 and the Radeon RX 5700 series graphics card with “Navi” was undeniably one of the biggest events for AMD in many years. The new products added new architectures and new functions, but in retrospect it has emerged that the new graphics cards have actually lost one function – the ability to pair graphics cards via Crossfire.

Crossfire allows the user to connect up to four graphics cards in one system. The technology was introduced in 2005 and initially used a bridge between the graphics cards, but later generations have handled the communication between the system and the graphics cards via PCI Express on the motherboard. AMD retired the Crossfire brand in 2017 but has continued to support the technology.

In an interview with Techpowerup, AMD announces that the Radeon RX 5700 series lacks support for Crossfire. This means that the new graphics cards cannot be paired with older graphics interfaces such as DirectX 11, DirectX 9 or OpenGL. Anyone who wants to pair graphics cards must therefore use DirectX 12 or Vulkan, which has built-in support for pairing via software, in a function called multi-GPU.

Radeon 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.

This follows the competitor Nvidia, which less than a week ago introduced a series of upgraded variants of the Geforce RTX 2000 series with the suffix Super in the product name. The series’ performance cards, Geforce RTX 2070 Super and RTX 2080 Super, support Nvidia’s NVLink SLI function, which enables pairing of graphics cards via older interfaces such as DirectX 11, DirectX 9 and OpenGL.

Read more in related articles: