What Is CrossFire & List Of CrossFire Compatible Cards

The concept of a multi-GPU setup was all the rage in the 2000s. AMD wasn’t eager to be left behind, so they released CrossFire.

Since then, the list of CrossFire compatible cards has grown exponentially, but the technology ultimately hit a snag. Read on to find out what CrossFire is and what exactly went awry.

The dream of having multiple graphics cards hooked into one PC and harnessing the power of those cards at the same time seemed like an unlikely idea.

In 2004, NVIDIA was the initial company to market this idea with its SLI (Scalable Link Interface) technology. AMD swiftly followed suit in 2005.

However, the constraints of both technologies persisted and ultimately resulted in their demise. Two primary reasons triggered this chain of events: the game developers had to specially enhance the two graphics cards, and, notably, these technologies never provided even close to twice the performance.

Before examining what transpired later, let’s start at the beginning.

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What Is AMD CrossFire?

The CrossFire technology operates the same way as NVIDIA’s SLI: it pairs up two (or more) graphics cards in order to produce a single output. This means the image you see on your screen is created using multiple GPUs.

The cards are typically set up in a master-slave configuration, which means one card will have the position of a “master” while the others will have the position of “slave.” The principal card is in charge of receiving the output from the slave card(s) and combining it together into a unified output.

There are two principal operational modes for dual graphics card setups: Alternate Frame Rendering (AFR) and Split Frame Rendering (SFR).

As its name suggests, AFR assigns one card to produce one frame and the other card to generate the following frame, and so on. In the two-GPU configuration, the master card will, for example, process every odd frame while the slave processes every even frame.

In theory, this should make rendering the image happen more swiftly and smoothly. However, due to connectivity and lag issues, users were often faced with micro-stuttering and, unfortunately, worse performances than those of a single graphics card.

SFR operates similarly in that it divides the workload between the cards, but it does so differently.

It assigns each card a portion of the screen to render and then relies on the principal card to combine the images and display the correct output. Usually, the primary card will work on the uppermost part of the screen while the auxiliary card works on the rest.

The main advantage Crossfire has over SLI is that it can use cards that aren’t the same model or from the equivalent manufacturer. However, the cards need to be from the same series, so, for example, an HD 5750 card could be successfully configured to run with an HD 5770,

AMD Hybrid CrossFireX

With such a clever name, you might think this technology has to be something beneficial. It’s about as noteworthy as the rest of the CrossFire technology, which, unfortunately, isn’t saying much.

Essentially, Hybrid CrossFireX allows multiple graphics cards of different types to work together. For instance, it permits a graphics card integrated into the motherboard to connect with a separate GPU.

In 2012, AMD apparently decided to step away from this excellent name and changed it to something simpler: AMD Dual Graphics. This technology allowed the company’s APUs to be linked with its GPUs.

What Happened And What’s Next For AMD CrossFire?

Despite the original promise of doubling graphical performance, it quickly became clear that the technology simply wouldn’t be able to fulfill that lofty ambition. With each new generation of graphics cards, gamers hoped that those promises would finally be realized and they would be able to double their PC’s performance.

AMD’s GPUs slumped hard in the mid-2010s and lagged behind in their battle with NVIDIA. It’s likely that, had CrossFire been able to fulfill its promise, things might have gone differently, but we will never truly know.

In all honesty, we can’t say that CrossFire was the sole cause for AMD’s decline. After all, its main competitor’s SLI technology didn’t fare significantly better.

However, NVIDIA gave its tech a boost and came up with NVLink, which still didn’t deliver doubled performance but was significantly superior to both SLI and CrossFire.

In contrast, AMD pretty much abandoned its ambition of creating a viable multi-GPU technology and quietly retired CrossFire in 2017. Although its support via DirectX11 continued, AMD moved on to the ‘Multi GPU’ name or mGPU.