AMD dumps its CrossFire brand

AMD's newly released Radeon Software 17.9.2 driver enables dual-GPU support for the Radeon RX Vega platform but it appears the company is no longer using its familiar CrossFire brandname.

PC World got in touch with AMD and got to hear that AMD is no longer mentioning CrossFire in any of its official communications because CrossFire technically refers to DirectX 11 applications:

“CrossFire isn’t mentioned because it technically refers to DX11 applications,” an AMD PR representative told PCWorld. “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.”

This is a pretty weird branding change, considering the CrossFire brand is extremely well known among PC gamers. But AMD decided to differentiate between DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 because the technical side is completely different. With DirectX 11, the GPU makers need to craft CrossFire and SLI profiles to enable multi-GPU support.

With DirectX 12 the situation is different, this API requires developers to build multi-GPU support directly into the game engine and the video games. It gives developers much greater control over the hardware but the downside is that this is a lot more complicated, which is why there are so few DirectX 12 games with multi-GPU support.

AMD did confirm they will continue to make CrossFire profiles for DirectX 11 games.