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crossfire,, old cards,,, will new software make them better?

tsmspace

I saw how nvidia is releasing updated sli cards that don't need a master/slave arrangement. 

 

Also, it is a common statement that dual graphics cards are less and less supported in software. 

 

In one way, I can see how this spells doom, because now game-makers can just let the cards sort it out, but in another way, I see how it could actually mean that if I have a radeon 7970 and 7950 in crossfire,, could I see improvements in performance when compared to right now, as future driver updates are released?? 

 

buying a new graphics card is out of the question in the near term, but by the time drivers might be released, of course I might have more opportunities,,, but then I have these graphics cards already, which play my old games just fine, my hope is to upgrade to some windows-mixed-reality steam gaming,,, what is the future going to be like? 

 

i5 12400 , MSI b660 pro-a, 32g 3200 , rtx 3060, 1tb wdblack sn270

 

I gave my dad: rogstrix b350-f gaming, r5 2600, corsair vengeance 16gb ddr4 2400, gtx 980 ti , he has minecraft, halo infinite, and collects his own photography. he had a "worst laptop in store special" that finishes loading your mouse movement, but not really much else. 

 

games: Starmade, Velocidrone, Minecraft, Astrokill, Liftoff, ThrustandShoot, , Infinity Battlescape, Flight of Nova, Orbital Racer

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Eh, it might make them slightly better, but it's still not worth buying lol. Crossfire and SLI are stupid gimmicks.

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not really no.

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8 minutes ago, kelvinhall05 said:

Eh, it might make them slightly better, but it's still not worth buying lol. Crossfire and SLI are stupid gimmicks.

some titles scale pretty well with SLI, below is an SLI support list... that said the list seems to be shrinking every year and most modern cards do not need it for playing these titles. beyond extending the life of old GPUs I don't find it to be worth doing dual GPUs anymore, I stopped SLI after my GTX 770s. The second card after that just stopped really being needed for 1440p 144hz  

 

https://www.gamingscan.com/best-games-that-support-sli/

 

as to the OP question.. we are talking cards from 2011/12. In a crossfire setup though your 7970 would (from my understanding) lose its performance edge to the 7950 as each card rendered every other frame. given the performance difference I suspect you would be on about the same performance on the 7970 alone vs the 7950 but its worth trying if you have both cards already, otherwise not worth getting a 7950 to see if you already have the 7970 

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No, Crossfire is on its way out. Same for SLI.

DirectX 12 and Vulkan is supposed to allow applications and games to access multiple video cards and split the workload between them, so AMD and nVidia are no longer pushing their driver programmers to work on Crossfire or SLI

It's not really done much these days because it's just a few percentage of people who actually have more than 1 card (except those with integrated graphics in CPU + dedicated video card, but in this case the performance difference is often too large to be worth for the game developer to make use of both cards) and it takes quite a lot of man hours to modify a game engine to actually make the game work with multiple cards at same time.

 

Unless there's some serious bugs, drivers for older generation video cards are no longer worked on.

For example, on AMD's end, assume anything older than RX series is pretty much frozen in time.... drivers newer than let's say 1 year ago will work just as good as current drivers for pre- RX series cards.

On nVidia's end, I would assume anything older than GT 1030 is no longer worked on.

 

 

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11 hours ago, mariushm said:

No, Crossfire is on its way out. Same for SLI.

DirectX 12 and Vulkan is supposed to allow applications and games to access multiple video cards and split the workload between them, so AMD and nVidia are no longer pushing their driver programmers to work on Crossfire or SLI

It's not really done much these days because it's just a few percentage of people who actually have more than 1 card (except those with integrated graphics in CPU + dedicated video card, but in this case the performance difference is often too large to be worth for the game developer to make use of both cards) and it takes quite a lot of man hours to modify a game engine to actually make the game work with multiple cards at same time.

 

Unless there's some serious bugs, drivers for older generation video cards are no longer worked on.

For example, on AMD's end, assume anything older than RX series is pretty much frozen in time.... drivers newer than let's say 1 year ago will work just as good as current drivers for pre- RX series cards.

On nVidia's end, I would assume anything older than GT 1030 is no longer worked on.

 

 

I already have both installed. I did a Eungine, it ran better than a gtx 1050ti in my other computer,,, 

 

what do you mean directx 12 and vulcan,,,, so, If I have a 7970 and a 7950 slave installed in crossfire enabled, if a game runs vulcan, it will automatically split the load , and this would apply even if I did not have crossfire cable ?? 

 

The only more modern title I'm actually playing is Duesex mankind divided. Other games are indie:: Starmade, Astrokill, Velocidrone, , freerider, liftoff, and ThrustandShoot ,, ..... all running on the Gtx 1050ti btw. I plan to run the DRL simulator on my crossfire setup (which has a b350 rogstrix and a r5 2600). I scored about 4500 on the i7 4790k gtx 1050ti and about 5500 on the r5 2600 7970-7950 crossfire running the win10 eungine benchmark. I never ran the DEMD benchmark on the r5, but got about 45 fps avg on the i7. ... I don't know what graphics engine demd uses. I was planning to get the halo mcc and probably something like doom or wolfenstien, but am satisfying myself with a linux(lubuntu) build using a supermicro-x3470-r6950 and half-life 1 & now 2 (orange pack on steam). 

 

I am probably going to eventually upgrade the r5 2600 build with a newer nvidia model, probably 200-300 range at the time of purchase, but may look used market. actually I am wondering about that new minecraft skins, and also REALLY want to get into space-sim vr, so hopefully an r5 2600 build with fair graphics can offer,, don't have any goggles but astrokill is a MINIMUM STANDARD for a physics engine if I'm going to play,, I can't see playing something like Elite Dangerous where the ships can't yaw, because Top Gun, , or anything like x-wing where ships move only forward,,,, Thrust and Shoot is the flight model and Astrokill is the game-play model I'm hoping for., although Astrokill is the one if you have only a screen, and Starmade is the one if you want FPV racing, because you can minecraft yourself up a bunch of courses, then fly a super agile ship-core around with those 3d newtonian physics and controls that are focused on player friendly maneuvering, not ensuring a certain kind of dogfight can still happen. 

 

 

anyway,,, It seems like if the ORIGINAL crossfire of 7970 and 7950 tout were available when I try to run things, I should manage with what i have, it's just a question of will the 7950 do enough to count as "in there" or, should i take it out for better thermals, I have only fans and a tower heat sink. I don't really need the extra heat, it's Hawaii with no ac. 

 

 

 

i5 12400 , MSI b660 pro-a, 32g 3200 , rtx 3060, 1tb wdblack sn270

 

I gave my dad: rogstrix b350-f gaming, r5 2600, corsair vengeance 16gb ddr4 2400, gtx 980 ti , he has minecraft, halo infinite, and collects his own photography. he had a "worst laptop in store special" that finishes loading your mouse movement, but not really much else. 

 

games: Starmade, Velocidrone, Minecraft, Astrokill, Liftoff, ThrustandShoot, , Infinity Battlescape, Flight of Nova, Orbital Racer

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3 hours ago, tsmspace said:

what do you mean directx 12 and vulcan,,,, so, If I have a 7970 and a 7950 slave installed in crossfire enabled, if a game runs vulcan, it will automatically split the load , and this would apply even if I did not have crossfire cable ?? 

with crossfire :

 

driver must implement  crossfire

you must enable crossfire in driver

video card manufacturer often has to send crossfire or sli profiles through driver updates to increase compatibility with various games

video game must scan for video cards at the start and driver will report crossfire

video game can still choose weather to run in crossfire or not - some games will use one card even if one cards are in crossfire

both video cards usually need to have the same content in their local memory because while one card works on one frame, the other card works on the future frame, or on a totally separate part of the current frame - so for example if you have two cards with 2 GB of memory, each card may show up as a 1 GB memory video card, because the other GB holds a copy of the other video card's memory, or something like that... so it sucks if you want to play at ultra quality your video card memory is now half the amount.

 

In DX12 (and also Vulkan has something similar) you have asynchronous compute, which means an application or game can "talk" to multiple video cards and determine their capabilities, and do stuff with them at the same time.

The driver doesn't have to implement anything special, like they have to do with Crossfire or SLI. You don't have to enable anything.

It adds more complexity to making the actual game engine, because you have to program more stuff, because you may not want to send work to the Intel integrated video card when you have a 2080 installed in your PC, the integrated graphics may just slow down the 2080 by keeping it waiting.

The benefit is that the games can choose to put some parts on one GPU (like actual rendering of each frame on one video card) and do other things with the other card, like for example perform computations of the AI on the second card, or just load shaders and perform calculations about how to draw some smoke or whatever in parallel while the other card does something else, and then apply math results from second card on the workload of first card, or just read from disk and decompress and optimize textures that will be needed on the first card for the next game level (to make loading times slower)... basically with crossfire and SLI, both cards are locked together and they're both doing the same stuff, same steps, they're in sync... with asynchronous compute it's possible to do this, but it's also possible to do much more, without driver needing to be aware of it.

You don't see it used so much because a lot of people still have old video cards and because it's HARD to code things like this and for a lot of games it's not worth it because few people actually have multiple video cards and a lot of games are really optimized for one card, because that's what game consoles have (ps4,xbox etc)

 

 

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