Eyefinity/Multi-7970 users bad news

These are about the most depressing crossfire/Eyefinity videos I've ever seen (7970's).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fdvICOU2FY&feature=player_embedded

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlFW7HgrPnM&feature=player_embedded

OK, for the first two video's they were quite disappointing. Some of his comparison methodology was LOL.

Some points:

BF3 didn't even launch in 2x 7970 Eyefinity? That is going to piss off a lot of people, myself included.
Batman was stuttering all over the place.
Dirt 3 played quite well for one card with crossfire broken I guess.
Why do reviewers always screw up testing PCI-E speeds? You don't test PCI-E 2.0 vs 3.0 with only a single card on a single monitor. You test it with the crossfire config and Eyefinity of the first video, THAT is where you will see PCI-E 3.0 pull ahead. Why is that so hard for people to understand?
Even with single 7970 PCI-E 3.0 showed an improvement. In heaven he had a 11 FPS increase and heaven is GPU only and barely uses CPU so you can rule out CPU affecting it much at all.
I don't know what the point was showing all of those games in the supposed PCI-E 2.0 vs 3.0 video with no sort of testing criteria or comparison, it was just a waste of time.

Cliff notes: BF3 Eyefinity won't launch in crossfire, Batman stutters all over the place, Dirt 3 doesn't even run with both cards, PCI-E 2.0 vs 3.0 comparison didn't compare anything.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gFxAlGjwms&feature=player_embedded

Cliff notes for the Quad-7970 video:

Apologizes for AMD about 50 times with the "The drivers will get better" phrase was getting really old. Since when do AMD drivers get better? lol

Metro in Eyefinity looked like it was running at 10 FPS with huge stuttering.

Dirt 3 running on 1 card again.

Batman was about two, yes (2) FPS.

The only thing that ran well was 3DMark benchmarks lol.

And all this with a Rampage IV extreme at PCI-E 3.0 with a i7 3960.

I look forward to the "the amazing AMD driver team will come to the rescue in the future!" replies.

EDIT: noticed Dirt 3 was running in Windowed mode, what a noob.
 
Yeah, crossfire rocks...not. Why someone would pay double or even 4x the money to get such massive problems is completely beyond me. The guy would be better off running 3-way SLI. fps might be lower but it would actually work and be playable...
 
Maybe in another driver revision things will improve drastically. I really hope so as my upgrade plans are for 2 7950 if they unlock or save for high end Kepler, which my gut feelings up those around mid february
 
crossfire is the part that improves most with drivers.
2 to 4 driver revisions we will see massiv improvement
 
I don't have MS on 2x 6950 2gb, could it be because I have 42 lanes on PCI-E? (x16 x16 dual or x16 x8 x8 or quad x8).

In DIRT there is a little annoying frame skips but rarely but Ive heard that is beacause of the game and not MS.
 
An update to my original 7970 installation woes: Somewhere between uninstalling some AMD beta drivers (I think they were 8.94), rebooting and installing the 7000 series driver it completely hosed my Windows 7 install. No matter if I used ATI-Man uninstaller, driver sweeper or anything with the new drivers the new cards fell flat on their face.

The good news after a five hour Win 7 installation marathon (I am picky about my Win 7 installs and getting them just right), these two 7970's I have are running BF3 120Hz Eyefinity beautifully!

All of the stuttering, slow downs and hiccups of my 6990's are completely gone! This new architecture completely blows away the previous series. My hat is off to AMD.

Now I have to hear of some people's Eyefinity experiences using quad-crossfire as I think expanding my setup to four 6GB 7970's when they release and five 120Hz screens in portrait Eyefinity may be in order!

Time for the 6990 and 580 to hit Ebay...
 
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Vega said:
The good news after a five hour Win 7 installation marathon (I am picky about my Win 7 installs and getting them just right), these two 7970's I have are running BF3 120Hz Eyefinity beautifully!

All of the stuttering, slow downs and hiccups of my 6990's are completely gone! This new architecture completely blows away the previous series. My hat is off to AMD.
Click to expand...

always nice when it works:D
 
Vega said:
Some points:

BF3 didn't even launch in 2x 7970 Eyefinity? That is going to piss off a lot of people, myself included.

Cliff notes: BF3 Eyefinity won't launch in crossfire
Click to expand...

Vega said:
The good news after a five hour Win 7 installation marathon (I am picky about my Win 7 installs and getting them just right), these two 7970's I have are running BF3 120Hz Eyefinity beautifully!

All of the stuttering, slow downs and hiccups of my 6990's are completely gone! This new architecture completely blows away the previous series. My hat is off to AMD.
Click to expand...

Please can you say to Cliff the right way to run BF3 with 7970CF. :D
 
Vega said:
An update to my original 7970 installation woes: Somewhere between uninstalling some AMD beta drivers (I think they were 8.94), rebooting and installing the 7000 series driver it completely hosed my Windows 7 install. No matter if I used ATI-Man uninstaller, driver sweeper or anything with the new drivers the new cards fell flat on their face.

The good news after a five hour Win 7 installation marathon (I am picky about my Win 7 installs and getting them just right), these two 7970's I have are running BF3 120Hz Eyefinity beautifully!

All of the stuttering, slow downs and hiccups of my 6990's are completely gone! This new architecture completely blows away the previous series. My hat is off to AMD.

Now I have to hear of some people's Eyefinity experiences using quad-crossfire as I think expanding my setup to four 6GB 7970's when they release and five 120Hz screens in portrait Eyefinity may be in order!

Time for the 6990 and 580 to hit Ebay...
Click to expand...

Told you you were whining for nothing. :D
 
Vega said:
An update to my original 7970 installation woes: Somewhere between uninstalling some AMD beta drivers (I think they were 8.94), rebooting and installing the 7000 series driver it completely hosed my Windows 7 install. No matter if I used ATI-Man uninstaller, driver sweeper or anything with the new drivers the new cards fell flat on their face.

The good news after a five hour Win 7 installation marathon (I am picky about my Win 7 installs and getting them just right), these two 7970's I have are running BF3 120Hz Eyefinity beautifully!

All of the stuttering, slow downs and hiccups of my 6990's are completely gone! This new architecture completely blows away the previous series. My hat is off to AMD.

Now I have to hear of some people's Eyefinity experiences using quad-crossfire as I think expanding my setup to four 6GB 7970's when they release and five 120Hz screens in portrait Eyefinity may be in order!

Time for the 6990 and 580 to hit Ebay...
Click to expand...

I have to say this; I'm glad I don't have the kind of cash flow you do, because my OCD would get the best of me... I'm already salivating over the 7970 and upcoming SR-X. :D
 
Vega said:
An update to my original 7970 installation woes: Somewhere between uninstalling some AMD beta drivers (I think they were 8.94), rebooting and installing the 7000 series driver it completely hosed my Windows 7 install. No matter if I used ATI-Man uninstaller, driver sweeper or anything with the new drivers the new cards fell flat on their face.

The good news after a five hour Win 7 installation marathon (I am picky about my Win 7 installs and getting them just right), these two 7970's I have are running BF3 120Hz Eyefinity beautifully!

All of the stuttering, slow downs and hiccups of my 6990's are completely gone! This new architecture completely blows away the previous series. My hat is off to AMD.

Now I have to hear of some people's Eyefinity experiences using quad-crossfire as I think expanding my setup to four 6GB 7970's when they release and five 120Hz screens in portrait Eyefinity may be in order!

Time for the 6990 and 580 to hit Ebay...
Click to expand...

Awesome to hear, glad they're doing well. Is that 3 of them? Or only 2?
 
Nice Vega!! I'm glad things are going well. I'm thinking about going dual 7950 and the latest word is they hit the block on 1/31 so as long as they can unlock I'm all over them. If not then I'll be getting dual 7970s. Maybe then you can sell these 3 gb cards to me so you can snag your 4 6GB cards.

Let me know if that's cool. I'll be looking to buy them around mid february if the 7950s don't unlock and that should be just around the time the 6GB 7950s Eyefinity Edditions come out. ;)
 
Vega said:
An update to my original 7970 installation woes: Somewhere between uninstalling some AMD beta drivers (I think they were 8.94), rebooting and installing the 7000 series driver it completely hosed my Windows 7 install. No matter if I used ATI-Man uninstaller, driver sweeper or anything with the new drivers the new cards fell flat on their face.

The good news after a five hour Win 7 installation marathon (I am picky about my Win 7 installs and getting them just right), these two 7970's I have are running BF3 120Hz Eyefinity beautifully!

All of the stuttering, slow downs and hiccups of my 6990's are completely gone! This new architecture completely blows away the previous series. My hat is off to AMD.

Now I have to hear of some people's Eyefinity experiences using quad-crossfire as I think expanding my setup to four 6GB 7970's when they release and five 120Hz screens in portrait Eyefinity may be in order!

Time for the 6990 and 580 to hit Ebay...
Click to expand...

Congrats man!! you COULD always pass on that GPU goodness (the 6990) to me :-D I'd take it and do good things with it. JK- GL selling it and enjoy the crossfire. Wish I could afford even 1 of those- I'll be hanging onto my 6850 xfire for a bit yet I think. The ONLY downside I've found with kids so far- they reduce your "play" money and time significantly, but hey- totally worth it :)
 
Vega said:
All of the stuttering, slow downs and hiccups of my 6990's are completely gone! This new architecture completely blows away the previous series. My hat is off to AMD.
Click to expand...

Hmm. I'm wondering if this is the reason why AMD lagged so poorly behind Nividia with Xfire support with the last wave of games?
 
Yeah I won't be going AMD crossfinity again any time soon. My experience has been a miserable stuttery mess over the the history of my 5870's.
 
Yeah, I've been banging my head against the wall with this cross(crap)finity issues and it looks like the problem could be solved by better AMD drivers, but they just wont do anything about it.

I know the hardware part of it, but for me to get rid of the stuttering is to use some sort of a frame limiter (for example MSI's AB one) and set the frame limit low enough, so that the frames are stable. Then eyefinity works perfectly.

For example, compare these two frame timings:

BF3 running ultra settings (except deferred AA) at 5760x1080 without any sort of frame limiting. Complete stutter fest, even though your average FPS would tell you otherwise.

bf3_uncapped.png


Now, this is after I capped fps at 55.

bf3_capped55fps.png


What a difference huh? However, this is not a perfect fix, because most of the time my fps will stay above 55, but as soon as they drop below that mark, for that period of time stutter fest comes back again as (I suppose) AMD tries to keep that average fps high and fails miserably.

Looks like a pretty simple software fix to me - dynamically find out what both cards are capable of outputting and adjust the frame limit just below that value. Yes, the averages will suffer ever so slightly, but the experience will be 100 times better and people like me will not want to throw their $1100 purchase out of the window. This doesn't even have to be done at a single monitor resolutions, because at 1 monitor these things don't stutter at all even loaded up to 99%.

I've had exactly the same issues with 6990+6970. Thought that PCI-E 3.0 would help, but I guess not.

ATI has to do something or I'm just going NVIDIA as soon as possible.

P.S. I'm not sure how Vega got his cards to work right, but I've replaced my CPU (2400->2600k->FX8120->3960x), Motherboard (twice z68 -> 990fx -> and finally X79), RAM (three times), PSU (upgraded to Antec 1200W and now downgraded back to HX1050), Windows 7 (reinstalled about 10 times over the last 3-4 weeks), monitors (got three 60Hz instead of current 60-120-60), plugged in my PSU into a different socket, etc, etc, etc, and these things still stutter like hell in eyefinity.
 
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FcZenitFan said:
Yeah, I've been banging my head against the wall with this cross(crap)finity issues and it looks like the problem could be solved by better AMD drivers, but they just wont do anything about it.

I know the hardware part of it, but for me to get rid of the stuttering is to use some sort of a frame limiter (for example MSI's AB one) and set the frame limit low enough, so that the frames are stable. Then eyefinity works perfectly.

For example, compare these two frame timings:

BF3 running ultra settings (except deferred AA) at 5760x1080 without any sort of frame limiting. Complete stutter fest, even though your average FPS would tell you otherwise.

snip

Now, this is after I capped fps at 55.

snip

What a difference huh? However, this is not a perfect fix, because most of the time my fps will stay above 55, but as soon as they drop below that mark, for that period of time stutter fest comes back again as (I suppose) AMD tries to keep that average fps high and fails miserably.

Looks like a pretty simple software fix to me - dynamically find out what both cards are capable of outputting and adjust the frame limit just below that value. Yes, the averages will suffer ever so slightly, but the experience will be 100 times better and people like me will not want to throw their $1100 purchase out of the window. This doesn't even have to be done at a single monitor resolutions, because at 1 monitor these things don't stutter at all even loaded up to 99%.

I've had exactly the same issues with 6990+6970. Thought that PCI-E 3.0 would help, but I guess not.

ATI has to do something or I'm just going NVIDIA as soon as possible.

P.S. I'm not sure how Vega got his cards to work right, but I've replaced my CPU (2400->2600k->FX8120->3960x), Motherboard (twice z68 -> 990fx -> and finally X79), RAM (three times), PSU (upgraded to Antec 1200W and now downgraded back to HX1050), Windows 7 (reinstalled about 10 times over the last 3-4 weeks), monitors (got three 60Hz instead of current 60-120-60), plugged in my PSU into a different socket, etc, etc, etc, and these things still stutter like hell in eyefinity.
Click to expand...

What drivers are you using? I'm running BF3 on ultra, FXAA High, 0xMSAA across 5760x1200 and get no (noticeable) stutter at all, SP or MP. FPS ranges from 50 to 70. I am using the drivers from the CD until non-beta ones come out. Have you also tried turning off HT on your cpu. I read somewhere that might cause some problems. GL!
 
inglewood78 said:
What drivers are you using? I'm running BF3 on ultra, FXAA High, 0xMSAA across 5760x1200 and get no (noticeable) stutter at all, SP or MP. FPS ranges from 50 to 70. I am using the drivers from the CD until non-beta ones come out. Have you also tried turning off HT on your cpu. I read somewhere that might cause some problems. GL!
Click to expand...

I've tried HT off before, didn't help. I'm using latest RC11 for 7970. Hm....I wonder if the drivers on the CD are non-beta? I'm pretty sure that they are even more beta than RC11, but I guess it's worth a try, although my experience with 6990+6970 tells me that I guess you have to get lucky to get these things to work right in crossfinity.
 
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