New AMD Radeon drivers support up to 12 video cards in Windows 10
AMD has added support for compute workloads with up to twelve video cards simultaneously in Windows 10 in its latest Radeon video card drivers. The feature appears to be primarily intended for crypto mining.
According to Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Edition 17.10.2 release notes, support for twelve video cards is for RX 400, RX 500, and RX Vega series models. The function is not intended for gaming, but for performing calculations with the GPUs.
AMD doesn’t talk about crypto mining, but most likely mining rig builders will be happy with the ability to use more cards at once. In previous Windows drivers, the limit was eight video cards, and this is also the case with Nvidia. AMD also warns that systems can crash with prolonged use of a configuration with twelve GPUs.
Asus announced in August a motherboard with 19 PCI-e slots and therefore room for as many video cards. To achieve the maximum, cards from AMD and Nvidia must be combined. At the presentation, Asus said it already expected a driver update from AMD that would allow the use of more than eight cards.
The new driver also adds a new setting to the Radeon Settings, allowing users to choose between optimization for graphics or for compute workloads. This function also seems to be aimed at better deploying Radeon video cards for crypto mining. The option is available on select cards, according to AMD, including RX 500 and RX 400 series models, the R9 390, R9 380, R9 290, and R9 285. Not all of those models listed appear to support the new feature, though. according to user comments on the AMD forum.
Furthermore, the update promises better performance in new games. For example, optimizations have been made for Destiny 2, which is released today for the PC. AMD promises a performance gain of 43 percent compared to previous drivers when using the RX Vega56 at a resolution of 2560×1440 pixels. With an RX 580, performance is up to 50 percent better.