Skyrim: Recommended Crossfire and general CCC settings for AMD cards?

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peppergomez

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I have 2 MSI 6970 cards and for reasons i am not sure about i have started having problems with skyrim. I am getting weird visual artificats and the performance has gotten significanlty worse. Other than turning off the wait for vertical refresh settings in CCC, i amm not sure what settings to adjust, both for Crossfiree and in CCC. I tried the preset Skyrim Crossfire setting but the game wouldnt even load.

I havent made any changes to CCC so i am not sure what has caused these recent problems. Also, i have had to disable my secondary monitors whe running any game otherwise no video displays and the fans begin spinning really fast and loudly (as I posted about recently in the Video cards thread). I am not sure whats going on, but would appreciate any suggestions on the best settings. Thanks.
 
I highly recommend taking a look at this guide.. it has recommended settings for Nvidia and AMD control panels. I used to have huge issues with crashing to desktop and visual anomalies (then I took an arrow in the knee-just kidding), but after removing all my add-ons and following this guide, it helped a lot and the game looks pretty darn good. I'm only using a single card, so I'm afraid I can't be of much assistance as far as Crossfire goes.

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=11

To more directly answer your question, I have the following settings on mine at the moment:

Anti-Aliasing mode: use app settings (morphological filtering OFF), filter = Standard (FYI: I have a large performance hit on my 6950 when filter is set to edge-detect. If morphological filtering is on, in game text usually ends up looking like crap to me.)

Anisotropic Filtering: use app settings

Tessellation: Use app settings

Catalyst AI: High quality (enable surface format optimization)

Vert refresh: Off, unless app specifies

AA Mode: Quality (super sample AA)

Triple buffering: Off


In my own case, many of my problems also had to do with the skyrim .ini files. The default ones (whenever Steam updated the game) for some reason gave me a lot of grief, particularly with the crashes to desktop. Whenever I remembered to replace them with my custom ones, a lot of my issues went away. Just remember to make a copy of your custom ini files. If steam updates the game, for example, it will usually overwrite your custom ini files with vanilla ones, which means issues can crop up again (at least that has been my experience). My game has been very stable for months now when using custom ini files (and it makes the game look better IMO). Here is one decent resource for .ini tweaks that I found:

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2227329

Goodluck and hope that helps!
 
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Edge detect should work ok, as long as you do not jack it to high for me 4x 12x samples works good with my 6870.

Morph filtering off, as well as surface format optimization off, they tend to either garble the textures and such or rob performance for nothing.

AA app controlled but set for edge detect 4x 12x sample morpological filter off
AF set to whatever you want, better to have app controlled
Tesselation amd optimized I slid the bar to center first
texture filtering high quality with surface format off
vert refresh off unless app specifies
multi sample slid all the way to left being multi sample mode(its way less performance then super sample)

You can also try a util called D3D anti-lag for skyrim( actually called FPS Limiter) http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=34
what this does is limit the FPS the card can render as well as the render ahead frames.
this explains it a bit http://linearskillz.wordpress.com/2...help-with-mouse-control-and-physics-glitches/

after its installed look for a file called D3D antilag in your file whatever YOUR user name is example start-bluejohn-D3D_antilag open this and change the max frames to whatever you want as well as the render ahead limit to whatever you want, for me with a 6870 I changed this to 120 and 0 respectively, bad comapny 2 also had this issue with radeon cards render ahead should be 0 or 3 tops for radeons, for nvidia card it matter way less, they are not "capped" but for some reason Radeon cards are :(
 
@ehksohset--

Thanks for the recommendation. Uninstalling Skyrim and all mods and reinstalling, and will follow the STEP guide.
 
Goodluck! Let us know how it goes.. I like the STEP because the person that updates that apparently takes a lot of time to test mod compatability, the game looks great, and they try to stay true to the "lore" of the game when selecting mods (i.e. no "My Little Pony" dragons). If you run into any trouble, be sure to post back. I feel like I've run into every problem possible with that game, and finally have it a stable, and very enjoyable state.
 
D3D antilag part of FPS Limiter(it installs the D3D antilag file to (your name in the start menu of windows) look for file called D3D anti-lag, dbl click to open/modify it.

Simply put, you can set a pre-determined FPS maximum(default on Radeons is apparently 30 to begin with)
as well as setting a different Render ahead X frames, this tends to smooth out would can end up being not so smooth(Radeons tend to deal better on a frame by frame basis, Nvidia doesnt seem to matter)

Also in the default game settings, steam-steamapps-common-skyrim-skyrim-skyrim prefs, you will notice gamepad rumble and mouse acceleration put these to 0 and the flag that reads under [MAIN] section bGamepadEnable=0 to force disable the joypad or bGamepadEnable=1 to force enable it, this can help performance somewhat, for me the FPS limiter helped the most :)
 
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