Sunday, July 7th 2019
AMD Radeon RX 5700 "Navi" Graphics Cards Lack CrossFire Support
In a comical turn of events, while NVIDIA restored NVLink SLI support for its RTX 2070 Super graphics card on virtue of being based on the "TU104" silicon, AMD did the opposite with "Navi." The Radeon RX 5700 XT and RX 5700 lack support for AMD CrossFire. If you put two of these cards on, say, a swanky X570 motherboard that splits PCIe gen 4.0 to two x8 slots with bandwidths comparable to PCIe gen 3.0 x16; you won't see an option to enable CrossFire. AMD, responding to our question on CrossFire compatibility clarified that AMD dropped CrossFire support for "Navi" in favor of DirectX 12 and Vulkan "explicit" multi-GPU mode. The older "implicit" multi-GPU mode - CrossFire - used by DirectX 11, DirectX 9, and OpenGL games is not supported. The AMD statement follows.
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.
27 Comments on AMD Radeon RX 5700 "Navi" Graphics Cards Lack CrossFire Support
I doubt anyone with the 2070 Super (that actually supports SLI) runs SLI.
With the lack of support of multi-gpu in games, might as well stop wasting time on it.
Also the performance / dollar sucks on this generation of GPUs already, who would want to pay double and might or might not get a performance increase?
Personally i've never been a big fan of multi-gpu configurations , i would rather buy a single more powerfull gpu .
Also, according to AMD under 1% use multi-gpus for gaming.
But it is on the game developers now, not the GPU companies.
From my experience Crossfire / SLI lately causes more trouble in games than it is worth. Now it is up to the 3d mark programmers to give us a DX12 and Vulcan demo which allows multi gpu support.
I game at 1080, so a rx480 is doing fine, and won't even run the fans until I load a game.
I may add another rx480 from ebay at some point, but I don't see any lag, so I probably don't need it at this resolution.
I played Q2 at 30fps back in the day on a 600x800 monitor; it's been a long time since I saw that much lag, lol.
Dual card usage has dropped sharply in the recent years, not least because of NV's move.
Given how small AMD is, spending resources on handful % (less than 1?) of the market would not be wise.
If RX5700 was 100 usd it'd still be too expensive according to them.
Also, if crossfire was supported they'd complain about bad support and pointless, might as well remove it.
If removed they complain it's such an important feature but less than 0.1 % actually use it.
Here is the relevant chart.
Performance per watt shows you the most relevant power metric imaginable in this context.
Those that say it is of no use are really playing into AMD's hand as they want you to purchase the newest and greatest to attempt 4k and even 8k gaming in years coming. Why not just add an old card for cheap for better resolution support? Why, because AMD doesn't get your money if you do that.
Unless all future games support DX12 multi GPU and, less likely, all previous games patch in DX12 multi GPU, then your extra PCEI slots in your motherboard are going to waste as you cannot use multiple 5700XT for any of those titles. In this case motherboard manufactures should just stop making motherboards with multiple PCEIx16 slots right?
I am all for customization and freedom to upgrade and I wish people would not lay down and get run over as they submit to less flexibility. Needless to say, AMD's offerings have reluctantly dropped off my radar. However, a couple of 2070 Supers would look more enticing, if they supported PCEI 4.0, in the next 6 months.
So for the blockbuster titles, nothing really changed going forward (Ubisoft should really start implementing DX12/Vulkan in all their incredibly CPU bound games though). The percentage of people using multi GPUs setup has always been incredible small.