Multi-GPU CrossFire-X Support Coming to Radeon RX 5700 GPUs on Vulkan

Low-level APIs have favored AMD hardware, right from Mantle to Vulkan and DirectX 12. The reason? Radeon drivers have always been a bit on the lousy side while NVIDIA has invested a lot on their GameReady program from the very beginning, resulting in better day-zero performance in most titles. The case for AMD is the opposite, and you’ll most likely be seeing better performance as the parts age. With DirectX 12 and Vulkan the tables have turned as the lower CPU overheads and better hardware utilization courtesy of features like Asynchronous Compute have significantly improved the performance of red hardware across a slew of games. While some DX12 games like Sniper Elite 4 and Ashes of the Singularity do support multi-GPU configurations, Vulkan still lacks it.

However, according to a new update, all high-end AMD graphics cards, including the Vega 56 and 64 as well as the newly announced Navi products (RX 5700/X) might be getting Crossfire X (or whatever Khronos decides to call it) support in the coming weeks. These updates will be released for both Windows 10 as well as Ubuntu, as unlike DX, Vulkan isn’t exclusive to the Microsoft platform and plays well with Open Source systems. The GCN 1.5 version refers to the last Vega generation while 1.6 is for Navi (RDNA 1.0). These patches are quite recent, so we might see an announcement very soon. It’ll be interesting to see if NVIDIA follows in their rival’s footsteps or sticks to the mainstream market.

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