AMD launches CrossFire API on GPUOpen

[AverageNinja]

AMD has published brand new CrossFire resources on GPUOpen, to aid game developers in achieving the highest possible rendering performance on multi-GPU setups.

Read more on the CrossFire API resources on GPUOpen.

 

[nvmd]

DX12 achieved the highest goal possible, making GPUs from different brands work together. I think it's safe to assume that if it can do that, it can definitely do the same thing without external help for GPUs from the same brand.

So what's the point of this? Give DX12's Multiadapter to DX11? Or are they different from each other? And if so, how?

 

[AverageNinja]

DX12 achieved the highest goal possible, making GPUs from different brands work together. I think it's safe to assume that if it can do that, it can definitely do the same thing without external help for GPUs from the same brand.

So what's the point of this? Give DX12's Multiadapter to DX11? Or are they different from each other? And if so, how?

DirectX 12 is still in its early stages, and there are a lot of (older) GPUs which don't support DX12. Keeping that in mind, developers will have to include DirectX 11 support in their games for at least a couple more years.

That, and AMD's post on GPUOpen is to help developers optimize CrossFire performance, which is never a bad thing. Keep in mind that even when you can combine two brands of GPUs, there will always be people who want to use multiple GPUs from the same brand, rather than mix-and-match, too. For those people, it's very important that SLI / CrossFire is well-optimized, which is what this post is all about.

You do have a point, though. DirectX 12 is obviously the way to go for the future, and the ability to have two different brands of GPUs in your system is great. But as I said, optimizing single-brand CrossFire / SLI configurations will always remain a priority for both AMD and NVIDIA. Just because cards from both brands can work together now, doesn't mean that they're not competitors anymore, so they'll want the best possible optimization for their cards.