Thursday, August 22nd 2019
AMD CEO Lisa Su: "CrossFire Isn't a Significant Focus"
AMD CEO Lisa Su at the Hot Chips conference answered some questions from the attending press. One of these regarded AMD's stance on CrossFire and whether or not it remains a focus for the company. Once the poster child for a scalable consumer graphics future, with AMD even going as far as enabling mixed-GPU support (with debatable merits). Lisa Su came out and said what we all have been seeing happening in the background: "To be honest, the software is going faster than the hardware, I would say that CrossFire isn't a significant focus".
There isn't anything really new here; we've all seen the consumer GPU trends as of late, with CrossFire barely being deserving of mention (and the NVIDIA camp does the same for their SLI technology, which has been cut from all but the higher-tier graphics cards). Support seems to be enabled as more of an afterthought than a "focus", and that's just the way things are. It seems that the old, old practice of buying a lower-tier GPU at launch and then buying an additional graphics processor further down the line to leapfrog performance of higher-performance, single GPU solutions is going the way of the proverbial dodo - at least until an MCM (Multi-Chip-Module) approach sees the light of day, paired with a hardware syncing solution that does away with the software side of things. A true, integrated, software-blind multi-GPU solution comprised of two or more smaller dies than a single monolithic solution seems to be the way to go. We'll see.
Source:
TweakTown
There isn't anything really new here; we've all seen the consumer GPU trends as of late, with CrossFire barely being deserving of mention (and the NVIDIA camp does the same for their SLI technology, which has been cut from all but the higher-tier graphics cards). Support seems to be enabled as more of an afterthought than a "focus", and that's just the way things are. It seems that the old, old practice of buying a lower-tier GPU at launch and then buying an additional graphics processor further down the line to leapfrog performance of higher-performance, single GPU solutions is going the way of the proverbial dodo - at least until an MCM (Multi-Chip-Module) approach sees the light of day, paired with a hardware syncing solution that does away with the software side of things. A true, integrated, software-blind multi-GPU solution comprised of two or more smaller dies than a single monolithic solution seems to be the way to go. We'll see.
88 Comments on AMD CEO Lisa Su: "CrossFire Isn't a Significant Focus"
heat- nothing to write home about, the gpus normalize themselves and the clocks according to power and temps, no special heat up in the case.
power- only when gaming, otherwise it is zero essentially. and two 180w gpus are not that much.
performance- you try to get what is possible and available. Also as I said with RTX you need every bit of gpu power.
love Wot, have crossfire and SLI
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided 51 FPS
Ghost Recon Wildlands 48 FPS
Monster Hunter World 43 FPS
Most of the rest were way, way over 60 FPS average.
Bear in mind also that these games were benched at their highest quality settings. For the very small handful of games that don't perform to your expectations then you could turn down the settings a bit. I'm not defending the price of the 2080 Ti but you could go that route with 4K. It is possible.
I expect the 3080 Ti will probably be quite a bit faster than the 2080 Ti.
But 4K gaming is still a niche market even after all of these years. It's for people that are willing to pay for it.
Neither company is focusing on it as it's difficult to get max performance out of both cards and to split the workload between 2 cards.
So those griping about it, 10 of the world's smallest violin players are playing the song, "my heart bleeds for you"
when nothing worked except benchmarks, SLI and Xfire became redundant
I'd rather not deal with any of those hassles and buy an appropriate single card for the money. Any of the games where a 2080 Ti doesn't reach 60 FPS can easily be adjusted to do so considering the settings TPU runs at (Ultra - which typically includes AA).
I always kinda wondered if multi GPU didn't just exist for the epeen value, and then 'oh yeah it also adds some performance'. It does feel good having a rig full of hardware, never mind the practicalities.You must be fun at lan parties :rolleyes:
Gaming's in a pretty good place if you care to look beyond the frontpage news, really. Maybe its just burned out in general for you?You're actually very right about that. But we also place higher demands on our games now, the dependancy on VRAM I think was a catalyst for SLI's demise. Nvidia started killing it right at the same time AMD started looking at HBM; and Nvidia had to move to delta compression, and VRAM capacities doubled overnight.
Now look at today; high end GPU between Maxwell and Pascal gained another 4GB (970 > 1070) and the high end even goes to eleven ;)
This makes it even harder to sell 'wasted' hardware resources like doubled VRAM. And I reckon its also harder to push all that across the bridge/bus. Nvidia had to scale those up already.
I think inevitably you will meet the same problems with SLI/Crossfire as you do with MCM solutions, but with MCM you can solve it all within a single chip/design/board, and with much shorter paths.Teehee. I remember the 1080ti reviews and I saw those exact same framerates across the testing at 4K. 60 FPS 4K (as in minimums) is fár away from us. And yet, price is soaring for marginal performance bumps. Look how long it took for us to say we can finally 'kill 1080p' with a specific GPU. And even then some new games cripple even the higher end models at that res.
Games evolve. A resolution bump is simply a major bump in your requirements for smooth gameplay, and it won't ever be fixed by new releases if you keep playing new games. Well, it will, but you can safely look at periods of a decade for that to materialize. I think many people can now say they made a major mistake buying into 4K gaming (monitor, mostly) as GPU performance increases slow down.
these are the cards
www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/evga-gtx-1080-sc-acx-3-0.b3597
and the result of RTX port royal benchmark, again, depending on SLI
One more thing, I'm sure the high bandwidth SLI bridge does it's share of the workload, especially at exteme resolutions.
The HB bridge is good depending on the titles at 4k+ resolutions. Some testing saw no improvement to a peak of 25% in one title (others were single digit to 10% or so when it went negligible).
Do pay attention that your vram clock is a bit high, and there is a performance hole somewhere in that region, as opposed to say +300 mhz. Is your card COMPLETELY stable on these clocks? And you may get a used one to add and do SLI...
But as it is, my 1080 has been running as in my specs since I bought it and hasn't crashed once.
Gotta say its an interesting thought, that Q2 of yours looks reasonably playable too. Although I do get the impression from the video you suffered some mad input lag. Bumping into walls, couldn't time your jumps, slow mouselook... Or were you just enjoying the scenery?
Nice share anyway, watched the whole thing ;)
mega.nz/#!zZMAVaDJ!rzKEfBQWUsQsau3Y5WxiXWP5qYmnlUhaVx2WnIyCM8s
Download and play in your favourite hardware assisted media player.
Nice, though you do really have to look for those little details. I have to say the overall lighting quality still looks rather dull. I mean, a point light source doesn't do that much other than it used to with old tech, and because of the low poly count, there isn't much 'happening' as you move past them.
A stunt that worked for maybe 3-5 years. If there was a real intention to push that tech to a point like nowadays multiple cpu cores are used or cuda, then we would have it more developed by now, and probably multi brand by microsoft.