AMD R9 280X And HD 7970 Can Be “CrossFired”

Technology publication Hardware Canucks report that it is possible to CrossFire the AMD R9 280X and the AMD HD 7970 GHz Edition graphics cards using the latest Catalyst 13.11 AMD drivers. What this basically means is very little has changed between most of the R9 2XX series and the HD 7XXX series so CrossFire will be a real possibility with older HD 7XXX series cards. In this case the R9 280X works just fine with the HD 7970 – for optimal performance it is ideal that you match clock speeds but that isn’t essential as the higher card will automatically downclock to pair with the lower clocked card when running 3D loads.

This also paves the way to other R9 2XX cards being used with their HD 7XXX counter-parts. Of course these other combinations aren’t verified yet but they probably will be soon. The R9 270X (Pitcairn) should work with the HD 7870 (Pitcairn not Tahiti LE) in CrossFire, the R7 260X should work with the HD 7790 in CrossFire and so on. This is great news for anyone who may want to upgrade their current HD 7XXX series card to a CrossFire set up in the future. It is also nice that AMD drivers let you do it because AMD could easily have altered the RX 2XX series so that this isn’t possible. Of course that doesn’t mean they won’t do that in future, but here’s to hoping they do not.

Image courtesy of Hardware Canucks