AMD Reveals XConnect External GPU Solution & Releases Crimson 16.3 Driver With Vulkan Support

At Intel’s Developer Forum last fall, I stumbled on a product I’ve seen a dozen times before: a GPU dock. It’s seemed like a year could never go by without seeing one of these things at an event, but this one admittedly grabbed me. I was told that “this” is the GPU dock that will take off, because we’ve finally reached the point when it can be done properly.

Even though I was talking to an Intel representative about the dock, they had no qualm about telling me that at that point in time, AMD had been well ahead of NVIDIA in helping get this thing to market. I was told that NVIDIA’s drivers just weren’t there quite yet, so it seemed clear that AMD would be taking great advantage of that position it has found itself in. At CES in January, we saw proof that AMD was in fact taking things seriously, as it had a dock on-hand. Even Razer had the GPU docks on display, at its large booth in the south hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center.

With all of that fluff out-of-the-way, AMD has today announced that its GPU dock solution, “XConnect”, is coming, and that Razer’s brand-new Stealth Blade is the first notebook out the door to support it.

XConnect takes advantage of the Thunderbolt 3.0 protocol to make an external graphics card act like an internal one. 3.0 offers an impressive 40Gbps bandwidth, so it’s not going to be holding anything back here. AMD’s goal is to give people the option to tote around a thin and light notebook all day, but experience some incredible gaming once they get home – using the same notebook.

AMD’s Robert Hallock explains more about XConnect in this video:

What’s brilliant about this solution is how elegant it is. Once home, you can set your laptop down in front of your monitor and then plug this dock in. Windows 10 will then take over and automatically shift to that graphics solution, without skipping a beat.

While AMD has chosen to partner with Razer on this launch, the enclosure isn’t going to be exclusively used for AMD’s Radeon graphics cards. Once NVIDIA is pleased with its drivers, these solutions should work for GeForce cards as well. At the moment, Razer isn’t revealing the price of its dock, called Core, but it’s not likely going to be that inexpensive, given Razer’s notebooks carry premium pricing.

In related news, AMD has also today released version 16.3 of its Crimson GPU driver. Versus the previous version, this driver can improve Rise of the Tomb Raider performance by 16%, and Gears of War Ultimate Edition by up to 60%. It also happens to add Vulkan support, so if any of this sounds good to you, snag the driver right here.