Vulkan is a low-level API that made everyone cry the moment Khronos Group announced that it would support both Windows 7 and Windows 8.1. However, it appears that its multi-GPU functionalities will only be available in Windows 10.
According to Khronos Group’s GDC 2017 slides, native multi-GPU support for NVIDIA SLI and AMD Crossfire platforms will be possible only when WDDM is set to ‘linked display adapter’ mode.
In case you were not familiar, this mode is only available in WDDM 2.0, which is exclusive to Windows 10. As such, Vulkan’s multi-GPU functionalities will most probably not work under Windows 7 or Windows 8.1.
Now I don’t know whether there will be enough games supporting such a feature, especially since a lot of DX12 games (and I’m using DX12 as an example because more developers are currently using it) are still lacking multi-GPU support, but these few PC gamers with high-end multi-GPU systems will have to use Windows 10 in order to enjoy Vulkan’s multi-GPU support.
At this point, and given the fact that developers will have to manually add support for multi-GPUs in both DX12 and Vulkan (and we all know that most will not even bother with such a thing), we strongly suggest staying away from it.
Kudos to our reader ‘Max’ for informing us!
UPDATE:
Obviously in this article I’m talking about the Windows operating systems. From the looks of it, Linux will support multi-GPUs.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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