Can I use two AMD GPU in the same machine (not Crossfire)

Support & Help Requests Hardware
#1

I currently use one machine (that's getting old) for CAD/Design and a different (newer) one for general purpose/gaming use.

Rather than upgrade the old workstation, is it possible to put a workstation graphic card (Radeon Pro WX x100/x200 etc) in the general purpose machine and have it coexist with the consumer Radeon RX 560 that's already there? I'm thinking I'd need to have each card drive its own monitor(s)?

Looking around the internet, opinions differ. Seems to be impossible on Windows due to driver mismatch between Consumer and Pro offerings. But, I don't use Windows on this machine :grin:and the AMD drivers (open source at least) seem more unified these days.

Currently on 18.04, but have no issues upgrading if necessary.

Thanks for any insights.

#2

You may just need to make tweaks to Xorg's configuration files to start a new X screen for the second GPU. Not to be confused with a second X server, which apparently is not a good idea for practical use.

Another option -- and I have no experience with this -- could be to set up a virtual machine (VM) and use PCI passthrough. This VM could run another copy of Ubuntu MATE with the CAD/Design tools, separate to your main system. Maybe it's possible to use the OS from the old workstation's hard drive? :slight_smile:

For this to work, your CPU and motherboard will need to support IOMMU.

Here's some links I found on this:

and Arch Wiki has a lot of detail -- https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF