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I currently have an Nvidia gtx 650 with 2gb VRAM. I want to get more quality and performance in games. I have been looking at the XFX Radeon R9 295X2 with 8gb VRAM. I want to know if I can use both of them together at the same time to make it to 10gb VRAM?

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  • The reason that card has 8GB of RAM is because it is already a crossfire GPU (the X2 part gives it away) and so essentially that is two 4GB GPUs on one card. In proper use (crossfire) you are going to max out at 4GB of textures and two GPUs rendering them independently and combining their output. Any card you pair it with is going to be slower than that one card.
    – Mokubai
    Apr 8, 2015 at 18:28
  • if you need to encode screen capture you could do that on one card or the other, to offload...
    – rogerdpack
    Jan 25, 2016 at 16:11

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No, SLI only work for 2 nVIDIA and crossfire for 2 AMD cards. Mixing 2 different cards doesn't work.

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  • This answer is correct. In the future with DX12 while you wouldn't be able to run SLI with AMD cards or Crossfire with Nvidia cards DX12 supports the concept of having two independent cards working together. Its just a matter of Nvidia and AMD writing drivers that allow that to happen. It currently isn't possible since DX12 isn't out yet.
    – Ramhound
    Apr 8, 2015 at 17:42
  • @Ramhound do you have any reference to this new feature? Apr 8, 2015 at 17:43
  • Explicit Asynchronous Multi-GPU. As I said DX12 will support two independent cards working together provided the application is designed to use the feature, obviously it won't happen magically. DX9 applications will still require SLI and CrossFire.
    – Ramhound
    Apr 8, 2015 at 17:50
  • "In older APIs, in order to benefit from multiple GPUs, you'd have the two work together, each one rendering an alternate frame (AFR). This required both to have all of the texture and geometry data in their frame buffers, meaning that despite having two cards with 4 GB of memory, you'd still only have a 4 GB frame buffer."
    – Ramhound
    Apr 8, 2015 at 17:51
  • "DirectX 12 will remove the 4 + 4 = 4 idea and will work with a new frame rendering method called SFR, which stands for Split Frame Rendering. Developers will be able to manually, or automatically, divide the texture and geometry data between the GPUs, and all of the GPUs can then work together to work on each frame. Each GPU will then work on a specific portion of the screen, with the number of portions being equivalent to the number of GPUs installed."
    – Ramhound
    Apr 8, 2015 at 17:51

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