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l88bastard
2[H]4U
- Joined
- Oct 25, 2009
- Messages
- 3,718
UPDATE 1/9/2011
I just wanted to report back that I eleminated the DLL errors by once again blowing out the drivers and reinstalling them. Apparently I did not get everything out of Regedit prior to installing them the last time so the left over data conflicted with the new install. With the exception of the slow boot and unresponsive mouse for about two minutes during each boot cycle, everything is perfect.
In fact, I am blown away at how wonderful crossfire is working now! When I reported earlier that I was having input lag in BC2 because of crossfire, I have discovered that it was a stupid mistake on my part as I had two of my monitors set to RGB mode and one set to game mode. Game mode has less input lag than rgb mode on my dell u2410s and the difference was causing slight sluggish mouse responses. My monitor settings must have reset during one of the many reinstalls of the drivers.
All is perfect now, when I hit 60fps in crysis & bc2, it is smooth as a babies ass! You would swear that you are only playing on one gpu, thats how good they are!
I can't recommend the 6000 series enough and if you can get two 6950s and flash them to 6970s then you will be getting in on one hell of a gpu deal....of course you may have to go thru some driver hell, but that is pretty typical with cpu gaming
UPDATE 12/26/10
Overclocking:
Well the OC crashing is not a crysis specific thing. If I OC both cards, the system will eventually BSOD. Its not temps as themps were around the mid 60s when the system would crash. I tried overclocking each card one at a time and there is no instability issue when I do that! Both cards can OC separately and perform fine, but the system crashes if I try and OC them at the same time.
Crossfire scaling:
I was having issues before with crossfire not working anymore with ArmaII operation Arrowhead. One minute it was working perfectly and the next minute it was gone. I reinstalled the 12a hotfix drivers and also installed the eyefinity profiles and now we are back in crossfire business!
Other problems:
Well it seems the 12a hotfix drivers are good and bad. Game performance seems excellent, but they slow my cpu boot times down considerably (im using an SSD) and there is a mouse cursor conflict for about 30 seconds every time I boot up. Basically, once it gets to desktop I cannot move my mouse cursor for about 30 seconds until it initializes. I also get "fun" .DLL error messages before I start applications, but after I "x" out of them I can play problem free.
I would also like to note that I had a hell of a time reinstalling these drivers. The first install worked perfectly, but once I lost crossfire support after one of the BSODS I had to reinstall the driver again. It took me about SIX tries of complete reinstalling procedures before I finally got the second installation to work. When I install a driver I (1) uninstall the old driver (2) perform a driver sweep (3) delete all AMD/ATI directories (4) reboot (5) run driver sweeper again (6) go into regedit and delete everything AMD/ATI (7) reboot (8) install new drivers. This method serves me the best with AMD drivers, and I have not had any issue doing it this way since 10.4s. Well this was hell, because each installation would not take and it would either BSOD out of the driver installation or complete the installation and tell me there were errors. What was worse, I had no older drivers to try and fall back on as its pretty much 12a hotfix with the 6970s or nothing. Finially, after one of the installs failed, I just went ahead and tried to install the driver again (without doing my 8 point method) and it worked, but I now have the boot, mouse & dll error message issues.
UPDATE 12/22/10:
Overclocking: I had set the fans to 100%, which is dreadfully scary as it now sounds like an intergalacular blackhole generator is in the corner of my home office. I tested Cysis & Warhead under full overclock and both ended up BSODing. Its not a heat issue as the temps were only 65c at the time of BSODeath. So far the crashing looks like a crysis / warhead exclusive issue as I have not had any BSODs in other games with the OC going on.
Performance: Just a minor update after having some more time with the setup.
-Crysis/Warhead, Leaving the overclocks stock, I have played some more of crysis and warhead and I am even happier with the performance of the second card over just one single card. They really did a great job with crysis optomization, however, does anybody really play crysis anymore?
-Arma2:
Well vanilla Arma2 does not do crossfire, which is very disappointing, however, its spinoffs operation arrowhead and private company do. As I mentioned earlier, the scaling and performance bumps were excellent with the second card, however, I have had more time with A2OA after my crossfire wedding and the marriage is not exactly perfect. I was playing the first mission of single player where I was getting awesome performance on the runway & control tower, however, once I went into the village my fps were down around 35-45fps which was still not bad considering they were 15-25fps with just one card when I tested it out. The second mission in the campaign, where you are at the airport and you jump in a tank, really has blasted my performance down to the 25fps range which is borderline suck so I had to step the eyecandy down to basically the eyecandy level I had with a single card to coax it back up the 45fps range. Its not that crossfire is not excellent in ARMA2, it is, however ARMA2 is a system hog-beast that is hard to tame. The second card is worth it for Arma2 OC, however, I feel like we are at least two graphic card generations away from being able to fully max Arma2 OA correctly, and by that time will we even want to play it anymore?
NEW PROBLEMS:
-After several Crysis overclocking Bsods & reboots my usb logitech G5 optical mouse has decided that it no longer likes to be plugged in the back USB ports anymore and will only work if I plug it into a front USB port. The ports in the back are fine and work with all of my other peripherals, but the mouse absolutely will not work with the back usbs anymore. I don't know how related this all is, but that is what is happening now.
- I have had to perform two system repairs on my computer now as it has refused to boot up twice since installing the second card. I am running windows 7 64 bit and have NEVER had any stability issues, let alone refusals to boot with this system. The first one came on last night after a hard lock crysis OC Bsod (which also took my mouse control with the rear USB ports away) and the second one ocurred first thing this morning. I am using top of the line computer parts & never had these issues with this system before. I can't exactly say its because of the second card, however, the timing of the problems seems seems to indicate that they are.
If anyone else is running crossfire setups with the 6000 series, let me know if you are having similar problems!
=================================================================================
[H]ello and merry Pre-Christmas fellow [H]ardites:
Well I did what I said I was never going to do since getting burned with two micro stuttering Sapphire Toxic 5870 2gb cards earlier this year. I purchased a second XFX 6970, which arrived this afternoon and can give my first impressions of crossfire & eyefinity with a few games tested.
My setup is a 980x OC'd to 4ghz, 12 gig-o dominator 2000 ram, Rampage III mobo, 256 gig Corsair SSD, Windows 7 64 bit and three dell U2410s @3844x1920 resolution (monitors are in portrait with bezel correction enabled).
CRYSIS:
- With one 6970 OC'd to 950hz & 1450hz memory, Crysis was putting out 30-40 fps with everything set to very high except for shadows on low & shaders on High, however in the later levels the performance sunk down to the 25-35 range.
- With two 6970s @ stock speeds, crysis is putting out 45-80+ fps with everything set to very high except for shadows on medium & shaders on High. The second card really adds a nice horsepower boost to prevent frames from dipping below 40fps & I was able to bump the shadows up a notch. In addition to the excellent crossfire scaling I am not noticing the horrid stuttering that I had with my old 5870 crossfire setup. I do notice a very tiny amount of input lag as a result of the crossfire/eyefinity setup, versus the single card, but it is very minor and only barely noticeable to the most pickiest of eyes.
If crysis is your game then the 6900 series and crossfire is perfect for you:
ARMA 2 Operation Arrowhead
WOW! Near perfect 100% scaling with Zero input lag and ZERO microstutter. ARMA 2 OA should be the poster child of crossfire eyefinity!
-With one 6970 I was averaging a solid 30fps with everything set to very high, except for no shadows, no AA, no AF, post processing to low and view distance at 1600.
-With crossfired 6970s I am averaging 55+fps with everything set to very high, shadows set to very high & view distance set to 3000.
If your a big ARMA 2 fan & have an insane resolution to push then crossfired 6970s are for you.
Battlefield Bad Company 2:
-One 6970 is puttin out 40-60fps in multiplayer with everything maxxed except for no HBAO & AA at 2x.
-Crossfired 6970s allow you to add HBAO or bump up the AA for solid 60fps gaming. However, in my opinion, there is a greater degree of perciptical input lag with BC2 than crysis has in crossfire. I am not a competitive FPS online player, so the input lag makes no difference for me gameplay wise as I am a mediocre online player at best, however, a quick twitch diehard gamer is going to prefer the zero lag of a single card.
If you want everything maxed and pretty with BC2 than crossfire 6970s is for you, however, if you want everying almost maxed with snap second responsiveness than stick with a single card.
Just Cause 2
With everything maxed with 2aa I get 35-50 fps with one 6970 & almost solid 60 fps with two 6970s. There is no noticeable input lag and no microstutter with crossfire, however this is one of those games where I can take it or leave it with regards to single card versus crossfire. Smoke em if you got em, but if you only have a single card you aren't missing much with JC2.
Mafia 2
With everything maxed & AA on I get about 30-45 fps with a single 6970 and 40-50 fps with crossfire. However, the single 6970s performance is actually smoother with this title as there are bouts of choppiness with crossfire enabled.
A single 6970 seems to put out the best gaming experience with this title.
Other Info
Overclocking. With one 6970 I can easily overclock to 950hz and 1450hz memory, however, it is BSOD city if I try and overclock both 6970s in crossfire. It is important to note that my tests were one OC'd 6970 versus two stock speed 6970's as a result of system stability failure with OC'd crossfire cards. I don't know what the stability issue is as my PSU is a HX1000 Corsair PSU and it should have the juice to push it all (Correct me if I am wrong). I have the fans set to 70% and heat does not seem to be the problem either as I have a corsair 800D case. I am dissapointed by the lack of being able to OC the crossfire cards as the max OC seems to add another 7 fps to my average (for the short time it works before BSODing).
Micro-stutter: I do not notice any micro stutter if I am averaging 40+ fps with my crossfire setup, however, if i kick up the settings in crysis where it taxes the system with average fps below that I notice the stutter. However, it is important to note that the stutter I notice is nowhere near as bad as it was with my 5870 toxic 2gb cards.
I will let you know as I find out more, but I can say AMD has made great improvements on crossfire scaling & performance this go around and I am impressed.
I just wanted to report back that I eleminated the DLL errors by once again blowing out the drivers and reinstalling them. Apparently I did not get everything out of Regedit prior to installing them the last time so the left over data conflicted with the new install. With the exception of the slow boot and unresponsive mouse for about two minutes during each boot cycle, everything is perfect.
In fact, I am blown away at how wonderful crossfire is working now! When I reported earlier that I was having input lag in BC2 because of crossfire, I have discovered that it was a stupid mistake on my part as I had two of my monitors set to RGB mode and one set to game mode. Game mode has less input lag than rgb mode on my dell u2410s and the difference was causing slight sluggish mouse responses. My monitor settings must have reset during one of the many reinstalls of the drivers.
All is perfect now, when I hit 60fps in crysis & bc2, it is smooth as a babies ass! You would swear that you are only playing on one gpu, thats how good they are!
I can't recommend the 6000 series enough and if you can get two 6950s and flash them to 6970s then you will be getting in on one hell of a gpu deal....of course you may have to go thru some driver hell, but that is pretty typical with cpu gaming
UPDATE 12/26/10
Overclocking:
Well the OC crashing is not a crysis specific thing. If I OC both cards, the system will eventually BSOD. Its not temps as themps were around the mid 60s when the system would crash. I tried overclocking each card one at a time and there is no instability issue when I do that! Both cards can OC separately and perform fine, but the system crashes if I try and OC them at the same time.
Crossfire scaling:
I was having issues before with crossfire not working anymore with ArmaII operation Arrowhead. One minute it was working perfectly and the next minute it was gone. I reinstalled the 12a hotfix drivers and also installed the eyefinity profiles and now we are back in crossfire business!
Other problems:
Well it seems the 12a hotfix drivers are good and bad. Game performance seems excellent, but they slow my cpu boot times down considerably (im using an SSD) and there is a mouse cursor conflict for about 30 seconds every time I boot up. Basically, once it gets to desktop I cannot move my mouse cursor for about 30 seconds until it initializes. I also get "fun" .DLL error messages before I start applications, but after I "x" out of them I can play problem free.
I would also like to note that I had a hell of a time reinstalling these drivers. The first install worked perfectly, but once I lost crossfire support after one of the BSODS I had to reinstall the driver again. It took me about SIX tries of complete reinstalling procedures before I finally got the second installation to work. When I install a driver I (1) uninstall the old driver (2) perform a driver sweep (3) delete all AMD/ATI directories (4) reboot (5) run driver sweeper again (6) go into regedit and delete everything AMD/ATI (7) reboot (8) install new drivers. This method serves me the best with AMD drivers, and I have not had any issue doing it this way since 10.4s. Well this was hell, because each installation would not take and it would either BSOD out of the driver installation or complete the installation and tell me there were errors. What was worse, I had no older drivers to try and fall back on as its pretty much 12a hotfix with the 6970s or nothing. Finially, after one of the installs failed, I just went ahead and tried to install the driver again (without doing my 8 point method) and it worked, but I now have the boot, mouse & dll error message issues.
UPDATE 12/22/10:
Overclocking: I had set the fans to 100%, which is dreadfully scary as it now sounds like an intergalacular blackhole generator is in the corner of my home office. I tested Cysis & Warhead under full overclock and both ended up BSODing. Its not a heat issue as the temps were only 65c at the time of BSODeath. So far the crashing looks like a crysis / warhead exclusive issue as I have not had any BSODs in other games with the OC going on.
Performance: Just a minor update after having some more time with the setup.
-Crysis/Warhead, Leaving the overclocks stock, I have played some more of crysis and warhead and I am even happier with the performance of the second card over just one single card. They really did a great job with crysis optomization, however, does anybody really play crysis anymore?
-Arma2:
Well vanilla Arma2 does not do crossfire, which is very disappointing, however, its spinoffs operation arrowhead and private company do. As I mentioned earlier, the scaling and performance bumps were excellent with the second card, however, I have had more time with A2OA after my crossfire wedding and the marriage is not exactly perfect. I was playing the first mission of single player where I was getting awesome performance on the runway & control tower, however, once I went into the village my fps were down around 35-45fps which was still not bad considering they were 15-25fps with just one card when I tested it out. The second mission in the campaign, where you are at the airport and you jump in a tank, really has blasted my performance down to the 25fps range which is borderline suck so I had to step the eyecandy down to basically the eyecandy level I had with a single card to coax it back up the 45fps range. Its not that crossfire is not excellent in ARMA2, it is, however ARMA2 is a system hog-beast that is hard to tame. The second card is worth it for Arma2 OC, however, I feel like we are at least two graphic card generations away from being able to fully max Arma2 OA correctly, and by that time will we even want to play it anymore?
NEW PROBLEMS:
-After several Crysis overclocking Bsods & reboots my usb logitech G5 optical mouse has decided that it no longer likes to be plugged in the back USB ports anymore and will only work if I plug it into a front USB port. The ports in the back are fine and work with all of my other peripherals, but the mouse absolutely will not work with the back usbs anymore. I don't know how related this all is, but that is what is happening now.
- I have had to perform two system repairs on my computer now as it has refused to boot up twice since installing the second card. I am running windows 7 64 bit and have NEVER had any stability issues, let alone refusals to boot with this system. The first one came on last night after a hard lock crysis OC Bsod (which also took my mouse control with the rear USB ports away) and the second one ocurred first thing this morning. I am using top of the line computer parts & never had these issues with this system before. I can't exactly say its because of the second card, however, the timing of the problems seems seems to indicate that they are.
If anyone else is running crossfire setups with the 6000 series, let me know if you are having similar problems!
=================================================================================
[H]ello and merry Pre-Christmas fellow [H]ardites:
Well I did what I said I was never going to do since getting burned with two micro stuttering Sapphire Toxic 5870 2gb cards earlier this year. I purchased a second XFX 6970, which arrived this afternoon and can give my first impressions of crossfire & eyefinity with a few games tested.
My setup is a 980x OC'd to 4ghz, 12 gig-o dominator 2000 ram, Rampage III mobo, 256 gig Corsair SSD, Windows 7 64 bit and three dell U2410s @3844x1920 resolution (monitors are in portrait with bezel correction enabled).
CRYSIS:
- With one 6970 OC'd to 950hz & 1450hz memory, Crysis was putting out 30-40 fps with everything set to very high except for shadows on low & shaders on High, however in the later levels the performance sunk down to the 25-35 range.
- With two 6970s @ stock speeds, crysis is putting out 45-80+ fps with everything set to very high except for shadows on medium & shaders on High. The second card really adds a nice horsepower boost to prevent frames from dipping below 40fps & I was able to bump the shadows up a notch. In addition to the excellent crossfire scaling I am not noticing the horrid stuttering that I had with my old 5870 crossfire setup. I do notice a very tiny amount of input lag as a result of the crossfire/eyefinity setup, versus the single card, but it is very minor and only barely noticeable to the most pickiest of eyes.
If crysis is your game then the 6900 series and crossfire is perfect for you:
ARMA 2 Operation Arrowhead
WOW! Near perfect 100% scaling with Zero input lag and ZERO microstutter. ARMA 2 OA should be the poster child of crossfire eyefinity!
-With one 6970 I was averaging a solid 30fps with everything set to very high, except for no shadows, no AA, no AF, post processing to low and view distance at 1600.
-With crossfired 6970s I am averaging 55+fps with everything set to very high, shadows set to very high & view distance set to 3000.
If your a big ARMA 2 fan & have an insane resolution to push then crossfired 6970s are for you.
Battlefield Bad Company 2:
-One 6970 is puttin out 40-60fps in multiplayer with everything maxxed except for no HBAO & AA at 2x.
-Crossfired 6970s allow you to add HBAO or bump up the AA for solid 60fps gaming. However, in my opinion, there is a greater degree of perciptical input lag with BC2 than crysis has in crossfire. I am not a competitive FPS online player, so the input lag makes no difference for me gameplay wise as I am a mediocre online player at best, however, a quick twitch diehard gamer is going to prefer the zero lag of a single card.
If you want everything maxed and pretty with BC2 than crossfire 6970s is for you, however, if you want everying almost maxed with snap second responsiveness than stick with a single card.
Just Cause 2
With everything maxed with 2aa I get 35-50 fps with one 6970 & almost solid 60 fps with two 6970s. There is no noticeable input lag and no microstutter with crossfire, however this is one of those games where I can take it or leave it with regards to single card versus crossfire. Smoke em if you got em, but if you only have a single card you aren't missing much with JC2.
Mafia 2
With everything maxed & AA on I get about 30-45 fps with a single 6970 and 40-50 fps with crossfire. However, the single 6970s performance is actually smoother with this title as there are bouts of choppiness with crossfire enabled.
A single 6970 seems to put out the best gaming experience with this title.
Other Info
Overclocking. With one 6970 I can easily overclock to 950hz and 1450hz memory, however, it is BSOD city if I try and overclock both 6970s in crossfire. It is important to note that my tests were one OC'd 6970 versus two stock speed 6970's as a result of system stability failure with OC'd crossfire cards. I don't know what the stability issue is as my PSU is a HX1000 Corsair PSU and it should have the juice to push it all (Correct me if I am wrong). I have the fans set to 70% and heat does not seem to be the problem either as I have a corsair 800D case. I am dissapointed by the lack of being able to OC the crossfire cards as the max OC seems to add another 7 fps to my average (for the short time it works before BSODing).
Micro-stutter: I do not notice any micro stutter if I am averaging 40+ fps with my crossfire setup, however, if i kick up the settings in crysis where it taxes the system with average fps below that I notice the stutter. However, it is important to note that the stutter I notice is nowhere near as bad as it was with my 5870 toxic 2gb cards.
I will let you know as I find out more, but I can say AMD has made great improvements on crossfire scaling & performance this go around and I am impressed.
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