Godmachine
[H]F Junkie
- Joined
- Apr 7, 2003
- Messages
- 10,472
I recently helped my friend put together a new computer and he choose to grab 2 5870s (XFX) on the cheap used , the rest of his system is a i7 920 overclocked to 3.9ghz , 6 gigs of DDR3 and a Gigabyte mobo. Also he runs a 1920x1200 resolution.
Anyway I put it together , get the mobo installed , then the os and its all setup good. Now he downloads steam and begins to start installing his games that he can't live without (BFBC2 , TF2, CoD:MW2) and I get a phone call with him telling me his frame rates are awful.
So I go over , make sure crossfirex is enabled and it is then I check which driver he has and its catalyst and its 10.9. I do some research and notice that there are is a small download direct from AMD that provides the latest crossfire application profiles. I install this and his frame rates are still quite bad for his beefy PC ... at this point we are both a bit confused so I download the previous driver and install it (did a fresh driver sweep just to make sure nothing funky would happen). Again his performance still sucked ass , so I went and downloaded different catalyst drivers until I got 10.5 then after we launched BFBC2 (which is the probably the worst offender of this) we finally noticed a HUGE and I mean HUGE difference. Running 1920x1200 with 4xAA it was solid with max settings and v-sync turned off. I also alt-tab'd during a game and I notice his GPU usage meters on the Catalyst overdrive page are not maxed. One is about 45 percent and the other is 50 ... only about half of the rendering power is being used?
Then he tries his other games and some performance as they should with his setup and some don't. He ends up trying different drivers for each game and they all work better with certain drivers??? WTF AMD? Did you forget how to make quality drivers? Why does every game (in this isolated circumstance at least) play better with different drivers? Sometimes the difference is just beyond belief.
Is something wrong with AMD lately ? Did some of the driver team get laid off? I have a similar setup but with 2x GTX 480s and they smoke his setup and consistently stay within performance range for each driver. While I know they are faster his setup should at least be able to compete well enough and certainly perform better.
Has anyone else noticed this recently?
Anyway I put it together , get the mobo installed , then the os and its all setup good. Now he downloads steam and begins to start installing his games that he can't live without (BFBC2 , TF2, CoD:MW2) and I get a phone call with him telling me his frame rates are awful.
So I go over , make sure crossfirex is enabled and it is then I check which driver he has and its catalyst and its 10.9. I do some research and notice that there are is a small download direct from AMD that provides the latest crossfire application profiles. I install this and his frame rates are still quite bad for his beefy PC ... at this point we are both a bit confused so I download the previous driver and install it (did a fresh driver sweep just to make sure nothing funky would happen). Again his performance still sucked ass , so I went and downloaded different catalyst drivers until I got 10.5 then after we launched BFBC2 (which is the probably the worst offender of this) we finally noticed a HUGE and I mean HUGE difference. Running 1920x1200 with 4xAA it was solid with max settings and v-sync turned off. I also alt-tab'd during a game and I notice his GPU usage meters on the Catalyst overdrive page are not maxed. One is about 45 percent and the other is 50 ... only about half of the rendering power is being used?
Then he tries his other games and some performance as they should with his setup and some don't. He ends up trying different drivers for each game and they all work better with certain drivers??? WTF AMD? Did you forget how to make quality drivers? Why does every game (in this isolated circumstance at least) play better with different drivers? Sometimes the difference is just beyond belief.
Is something wrong with AMD lately ? Did some of the driver team get laid off? I have a similar setup but with 2x GTX 480s and they smoke his setup and consistently stay within performance range for each driver. While I know they are faster his setup should at least be able to compete well enough and certainly perform better.
Has anyone else noticed this recently?