AMD Phases out Radeon ‘Crossfire’ Branding for ‘mGPU’

With the release of AMD Radeon software 17.9.2 drivers, the latest Radeon Vega 64 and 56 graphics cards finally get multi-GPU support. What is noticeably missing however, is any mention of Crossfire technology. This has to do with the fact that AMD now wants that branding phased out in favor of ‘mGPU’. It still applies to the same feature everyone is familiar with, but according to an AMD representative via PCWorld, they are abandoning it for a reason.

“CrossFire isn’t mentioned because it technically refers to DX11 applications,” according to the PR rep. “In DirectX 12, we reference multi-GPU as applications must support mGPU, whereas AMD has to create the profiles for DX11. We’ve accordingly moved away from using the CrossFire tag for multi-GPU gaming.”

AMD Crossfire Lives On and More

To AMD this is simply a branding change and not a technical change. Multi-GPU will still carry on and the latest drivers show their dedication. However, enabling multi-GPU support on DirectX12 is a slightly different story than in DirectX11. The driver software team no longer have to optimize each multi-GPU profile to work on games. DirectX12 has a feature called ‘Explicit Multiadapter’ which puts that burden on the game developer. This is an API that enables low-level access to the hardware. Developers can delegate access to the GPU in a multi-GPU scenario directly and independently.

This feature not only makes the traditional similar GPU-type CrossFire or SLI possible, but it also allows different GPUs to work together. This even includes cross-manufacturer mGPU such as AMD + NVIDIA to work together. Ryan Smith from Anandtech actually wrote an article demonstrating this as far back as 2015.