Worth hanging on to old card for DX12 mGPU?

[Sumanji]

Hey,

Planning to give away my old PC ("Desktop" system in sig) apart from the one new-ish part in there, which is an R9 380 4GB.

It obviously doesn't have the horsepower for a 2018 build (thinking Ryzen+ to play at 1440p, so probably a GTX 1080 or Vega 56/64), but is it worth hanging on to as a secondary GPU? I realize Crossfire is dead, but could it come in handy for DX12 mGPU?

Cheers,

Su

 

[JTrickle]

Nope

Someday, heterogeneous linked node adapters may be available making the load balancing less trivial.

.

https://developer.nvidia.com/explicit-multi-gpu-programming-directx-12

 

[Armageus]

It's still quite a capable card for mining - if you are into that sort of thing, if not it still sells for a reasonable amount (due to that reason)

 

[d_brennen]

By the time (if ever) hardware agnostic mGPU takes off, contemporary iGPUs will likely smoke the 380 anyway

 

[Sumanji]

It's still quite a capable card for mining - if you are into that sort of thing, if not it still sells for a reasonable amount (due to that reason)

Interesting... I wonder if I just set it to task doing that!

By the time (if ever) hardware agnostic mGPU takes off, contemporary iGPUs will likely smoke the 380 anyway

But mGPU capability must already be built in to AMD and NV drivers for them to be DX12 compliant right? Does that just mean none of the recent DX12 games are coded to take advantage of it?

[edit] Came across this: http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-3142821/dx12-vulkan-games-supporting-multi-gpu.html Seems like it is supported by a few... would be interested to find any actual benchmarks!

Cheers,

Su

 

[Rroff]

Techniques like explicit multi adaptor need the application developer to implement the functionality - something that isn't even moving yet :s by the time if ever it becomes more commonly used as above the cards of today will be of little use.

It isn't trivial to back port such functionality either - a game engine needs to be designed from the ground up really to use DX12 multi adaptor.

 

[jigger]

The Nitrous engine has been using the technique since 2014? Croteam have SSVR running very nicely since 2016 too.