Franken-CrossFire: Radeon RX 5600 XT Joins Radeon RX 5700
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Radeon RX 5700 (Image credit: AMD)
AMD completely abandoned the idea of CrossFire support when it introduced its Navi lineup, but if you ever wondered how two Navi graphics cards would perform together, Uniko’s Hardware has the answer for you. For the sake of science, the publication paired a Radeon RX 5600 XT together with the Radeon RX 5700 .
In the old days, it was pretty common to run a multi-GPU setup. On some occasions, a single graphics card wasn’t powerful enough to deliver an adequate gaming experience, and in other occasions, it was just more cost-effective to buy two cheaper graphics cards. Before AMD launched Navi last year, the chipmaker estimated that less than 1% of gamers still use a multi-GPU configuration. Therefore, the company decided to axe CrossFire support with Navi. If you look at it, it was a sound decision as it frees up resources for AMD to distribute elsewhere.
You can’t run two Navi graphics cards in a CrossFire configuration. However, you can still achieve a similar effect using the explicit multi-GPU (mGPU) functionality, which is present in the DirectX 12 and Vulkan APIs. It’s a flexible technology as you can mix and match different graphics cards from both AMD and Nvidia to your heart’s desire.
There are a lot of modern games that leverage the DirectX 12 and Vulkan APIs. Nevertheless, it’s up to the developer to decide whether it wants to support mGPU or not. Uniko’s Hardware pointed out that Rise of the Tomb Raider and Strange Brigade accepted the mGPU setup without problems. However, Strange Brigade only works with DirectX 12 mode as the game would crash in Vulkan mode. Interestingly, Shadow of the Tomb Raider would crash instantly as soon as it opened. Triple-A titles, including Gears 5, Borderlands 3, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege and The Division 2 don’t support mGPU.
The test platform was comprised of the latest Ryzen 7 3700X processor, ASRock X570 Taichi motherboard and a G.Skill Flare X DDR4-3200 16GB (2x8GB) memory kit overclocked to 3,600 MHz with a Cas Latency of 16. The graphics cards in question are the Asus Dual Radeon RX 5700 EVO OC Edition and Asus TUF Gaming X3 Radeon RX 5600 XT EVO.
On the software side, Uniko’s Hardware is using Windows 10 with the November 2019 update (version 1909) and Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition 20.2.1. The publication performed the tests at the 1920 x 1080 resolution with Ultra settings in Strange Brigade and Very High settings in Rise of the Tomb Raider.
Swipe to scroll horizontally
| Header Cell — Column 0 | Radeon RX 5700 | Radeon RX 5700 + Radeon Rx 5600 XT |
|---|---|---|
| 3DMark Time Spy | 8,508 points | 13,342 points |
| 3DMark Time Spy Graphics Score | 8,271 points | 14,156 points |
| Strange Brigade Average | 138. 6 FPS |
228.8 FPS |
| Strange Brigade 1% Low | 98 FPS | 151.2 FPS |
| Rise of the Tomb Raider Average | 116.9 FPS | 191.3 FPS |
| Rise of the Tomb Raider 1% Low | 87.4 FPS | 111.5 FPS |
| Power Consumption | 259.6W | 446.4W |
After enabling mGPU, the 3DMark Time Spy score jumped up by 56.8%. The real-world gaming results show performance improvements up to 65.1% and 63.6% in Strange Brigade and Rise of the Tomb Raider, respectively.
When it comes to power consumption, the sole Radeon RX 5700 draws up to 259.6W while the mGPU configuration pulls around 446.4W. That’s a very significant 72% increase in power draw.
The performance uplift is there, but you won’t be enjoying it as much since mGPU support is limited to a handful of games.
And then there is also the money issue. The cheapest RX 5600 XT and RX 5700 sell for $275 and $295, respectively. In total, you’re looking at a $570 investment. You can pick up a custom Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Super for $500 and likely get the same amount of performance at around half the power consumption.
Unless you’ve recently upgraded to a new graphics card and have an old one lying around, it’s pointless to run a multi-GPU setup in this day and age. Even so, you’ll still have to find a game that supports it, and that’s not to mention having to put up with micro-stuttering.
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Zhiye Liu is a Freelance News Writer at Tom’s Hardware US. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.
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AMD’s RX 5700 cards ditched CrossFire because less than 1% of gamers care
Dave James
Updated:
AMD
AMD has shifted the dubious burden of multi-GPU support to game developers for its Navi RDNA-based graphics cards, such as the impressive new RX 5700 XT, because just 1% of PC gamers use multiple graphics cards. And even that looks like an optimistic number. The new 5700-series cards have ditched traditional CrossFire support, and instead rely on DirectX 12’s explicit multi-GPU mode.
In previous versions of Microsoft’s API, and the open source OpenGL API, the burden of making sure two or more graphics cards could work together on a single application was down to the drivers themselves.
That meant AMD and Nvidia had to put the work in to make sure support was there, but increasingly game engines were required to specify more cues to the drivers to make alternate frame rendering (AFR) function across multiple graphics cards. Consequently it became harder to optimise, and required more and more dev work.
With DirectX 12’s explicit support, alongside Vulkan, control over the management of multiple graphics cards has shifted completely to the applications in question. And so it’s now pretty much totally down to the game developers to make sure their engines are able to see multiple GPUs as a single entity to boost performance.
It was a great idea in principle as it meant devs could be more creative about how the GPUs were accessed, and not just have them running the classic AFR mode. But to spend resources on that dev work you’d ideally want a hefty install base to code to, which is why so few games bother to put that effort in, which is why fewer graphics cards support multi-GPU implementations, and therefore why fewer and fewer people are bothering to use them in their gaming rigs.
A spiral of multi-GPU doom, if you will.
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“I think the latest numbers that I’ve seen is that less than 1% of people are doing multi-GPU configurations,” AMD’s Sasa Marinkovic tells me ahead of the Navi launch, “because obviously, a single GPU is still much better performing than getting the diminishing returns of multi GPU.”
Having run twin graphics card rigs in the past as my main gaming PC – with both Nvidia and AMD setups – I can attest to how frustrating an experience it can be. Some game engines work brilliantly with SLI and CrossFire, some getting mighty close to that perfect 100% scaling which is the holy grail. But then other games steadfastly refuse to acknowledge your second GPU, and knowing your expensive silicon is just sitting there twiddling it’s transistors is a real wind-up.
“I think some games scale fantastically well,” says Marinkovic, “others not so much.
So it depends what game you’re playing. But the modern APIs will put that more on the game developers.”
It seems like it’s almost a relief for AMD not to have to worry about CrossFire anymore. With so few people using it, not having to spend the limited software resources the company has on a feature that’s wasting away must surely be welcomed by team Radeon’s driver gang.
And honestly, it’s not going to be missed by many of us.
Join the conversation and let us know whether you’re going to miss multi-GPU gaming on this article’s Facebook and Twitter threads.
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3DNews Technologies and IT market. Multi-GPU Graphics Card News Live: Radeon RX 5600 XT Might Be… The most interesting in the reviews
03/11/2020 [04:47], Andrey Sozinov Perhaps many people think that the era of bundles of several video cards in desktop computers is over, and now you can only see several graphics accelerators in a workstation or server.
AMD and NVIDIA have already left behind their CrossFire and SLI technologies, designed to combine multiple video cards into bundles. NVIDIA, however, still equips Turing generation video cards with the NVLink interface, but only older models. AMD, on the other hand, completely abandoned CrossFire in Navi generation video cards. According to the company, less than 1% of gamers currently use bundles of video cards in their systems. Although you can’t run a pair of Navi graphics cards in CrossFire mode, you can still link them together programmatically, provided by the DirectX 12 and Vulkan APIs. Actually, they allow you to combine any video cards that support them, even from different manufacturers. And although almost every modern game supports DirectX 12 and / or Vulkan, developers themselves decide whether to provide support for bundles of multiple GPUs. Pink indicates the overall result, and turquoise indicates the graphics score. The system was based on an ASRock X570 Taichi motherboard, a Ryzen 7 3700X processor, and two 8 GB G.Skill Flare X memory modules, overclocked to 3600 MHz. The operating system used was Windows 10 with November 1909 Updates and Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition 20.2.1 driver. Games tested at 19 resolution20 × 1080 pixels with high or maximum graphics settings with DirectX 12 API. After activating a bunch of multiple graphics cards, the result in 3DMark Time Spy increased by 58.4% (graphics estimate) compared to the result of the Radeon RX 5700 alone. In games Strange Brigade and Rise of the Tomb Raider performance increased by 65.1% and 63.6% respectively. Of course, power consumption also increased, and quite significantly: from 259. Energy consumption It turns out that using a bundle of two video cards in a system can still provide a significant performance boost. But, unfortunately, this is not true for all games. In addition, two video cards are quite expensive, and they consume a lot of energy. Source:
If you notice an error, select it with the mouse and press CTRL+ENTER. Related materials Permanent URL: https://3dnews.ru/1005646 Headings: Tags: ← В |
However, resource Uniko’s Hardware found that the average user can still get significant benefits from using two Navi graphics cards in their system. 
As expected, there are quite a few games with multi-GPU support: Uniko’s Hardware only tested Strange Brigade and Rise of the Tomb Raider, as well as the 3DMark Time Spy benchmark. 
6 to 446.4 W, or by 72%. Comparison of AMD Radeon RX 6400 and ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870 Crossfire
Comparative analysis of AMD Radeon RX 6400 and ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870 Crossfire video cards by all known characteristics in the categories: General information, Specifications, Video outputs and ports, Compatibility, dimensions, requirements, API support, Memory, Technology support.
Analysis of the performance of video cards by benchmarks: PassMark — G2D Mark, PassMark — G3D Mark, 3DMark Fire Strike — Graphics Score.
AMD Radeon RX 6400
versus
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870 Crossfire
Benefits
Reasons to choose AMD Radeon RX 6400
- Newer graphics card, release dates difference 12 year(s) 70 0 month(s) 12 year(s) 70 0 month(s) 8 a) more: 1923 MHz vs 700 MHz
- A newer technological process for the production of a video card allows it to be more powerful, but with lower power consumption: 6 nm vs 40 nm
- 2.3 times less power consumption: 53 Watt vs 120 Watt
- 2 times more maximum memory size(s): 4 GB vs 2×1 GB
- 2 times more memory frequency: 2000 MHz, 16 Gbps effective vs 1000 MHz
| Release date | 19 Jan 2022 vs 7 January 2010 |
| Core frequency | 1923 MHz vs 700 MHz |
| Process | 6 nm vs 40 nm |
| Power consumption (TDP) | 53 Watt vs 120 Watt |
| Maximum memory size | 4GB vs 2x1GB |
| Memory frequency | 2000 MHz, 16 Gbps effective vs 1000 MHz |
Reasons to choose ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870 Crossfire
- 2.
1x more shader processors: 1600 vs 768
| number of shader processors | 1600 vs 768 |
Benchmark comparison
GPU 1: AMD Radeon RX 6400
GPU 2: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870 Crossfire
| Title | AMD Radeon RX 6400 | ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870 Crossfire |
|---|---|---|
| PassMark — G2D Mark | 713 | |
| PassMark — G3D Mark | 7300 | |
| 3DMark Fire Strike — Graphics Score | 3610 |
Performance comparison
| AMD Radeon RX 6400 | ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870 Crossfire | |
|---|---|---|
| Architecture | RDNA 2. 0 |
Terascale 2 |
| Codename | Navi 24 | Broadway-XT |
| Production date | 19 Jan 2022 | January 7, 2010 |
| Place in the ranking | 140 | not rated |
| Type | Laptop | |
| Boost core clock | 2321MHz | |
| Number of Compute | 12 | |
| Core frequency | 1923 MHz | 700MHz |
| Process | 6nm | 40 nm |
| Peak Double Precision (FP64) Performance | 222. 8GFLOPS (1:16) |
|
| Peak Half Precision (FP16) Performance | 7.130 TFLOPS (2:1) | |
| Peak Single Precision (FP32) Performance | 3.565TFLOPS | |
| Number of shaders | 768 | 1600 |
| Pixel fill rate | 74.27 GPixel/s | |
| Texturing Speed | 111.4 GTexel/s | |
| Power consumption (TDP) | 53 Watt | 120 Watt |
| Number of transistors | 5400 million | |
| Video connectors | 1x HDMI 2. 1, 1x DisplayPort 1.4a |
|
| Form factor | Single slot | |
| Interface | PCIe 4.0 x4 | |
| Recommended power supply | 250 Watt | |
| Additional power connectors | None | |
| Notebook size | large | |
| DirectX | 12 Ultimate (12_2) | 11 |
| OpenCL | 2.2 | |
| OpenGL | 4.
|