AMD RX Vega Shying Away from CrossFire

Shying Away from CrossFire?

The media around AMD’s RX Vega Launch shows over the past days has been full of surprises. Pricing and performance being the two major talking points. However, one topic seemed to have been left out altogether. Of course, we are talking about CrossFire support for the RX Vega cards. AMD has made little to no mention of utilising the card with CrossFire.

See Also: Official AMD Radeon RX Vega Press Photos Released

Does RX Vega support CrossFire?

There is certainly support CrossFire with both the RX Vega 56 and the RX Vega 64 having full functionality for the platform. However, despite the fact that the cards do indeed support the CrossFire Multi GPU arrays. It seems that AMD is trying to career away from doing so. AMD has previously provided a big push behind the feature, especially with the likes of the RX 480 Cards in which claims were made that dual RX 480’s competed with GTX 1080 hardware. Of course, this did, in fact, yield different results which relied heavily on the specifications of the hosting motherboard, CPU and other components.

The RX480 was pushed with CrossFire for GTX 1080 performance

Why no Talk of CrossFire

It appears that AMD is keen to stray away from the CrossFire format with their latest line up of GPU’s. This could be down to many reasons, such as lack of developer support for multiple cards. Whatever the reason, it doesn’t seem to be having a detrimental effect on the hype behind Vega or the marketing involved. Nvidia has been taking a similar approach to this by slowly winding down SLI support. This falls during the Pascal 10 series launch event in which they claimed keyed 3-way SLI would be required. There is no support for >2-way SLI on 10 series cards when gaming.

The Beginning of the End of Multi-Card Systems?

Fortunately, the lack of marketing around CrossFire by AMD or SLI in the latest GPU launches isn’t the end of these platforms. What it means is that the manufacturers have a lot of confidence in the performance of a single card. Of course, this certainly does not mean that there is not support or will be supported in the future. When it comes to professional use, or enthusiast grade systems, then we are likely to see Multiple Cards in use. Whether it be for intensive use or for extreme performance, there certainly is a big market for CrossFire and SLI. However, expect to see this change soon as newer cards are released. Do you think this is a justified move by AMD not to push CrossFire?