I've been using Afterburner for years, and it works well, but I was still getting some stutter so wanted to see if Radeon Pro worked any better. It takes a couple minutes to install but making a profile to strictly address stutter only takes a few seconds.
Here's what a single 7870XT looks like, Borderlands 2, 2560x1600, all settings on high, vsync off.
This is a scene with a lot of enemies in it so it taxes the CPU as well, that may explain the longer frames. As you can see it can't maintain 60fps (16.7ms frame time). It's honestly hard to tell how smooth the gameplay is with all the shearing.
With vsync on it's not very smooth with a lot of doubled frames. If you told me I was playing on a crossfire setup with a lot of microstutter I wouldn't argue with you.
Turning down most of the settings until the frame rate was 60fps min helped quite a bit.
This was fairly smooth, still some 32ms frames but nothing to complain about. What you would expect of single card gameplay.
Here's two 7870XTs, max game settings, vsync off.
It's a mess. It honestly doesn't feel as bad as it looks since it's a 60Hz monitor and none of the frames are over 16ms, but with all the shearing I wouldn't want to play like this.
Here's two cards with Afterburner running.
It's not too bad. There's the occasional 30ms frame, but if you gave somebody the computer and told them they were playing on a single card they wouldn't dispute it. If you're playing the game solely for the purpose of detecting stutter, you'd notice the double frames every few seconds, but you can do that on the single card too. There's nothing here to make the experience poor.
Two cards with Radeon Pro running:
It feels like it looks, perfect. Reminds me of the old days playing on a CRT. I wasn't able to actually notice the the 32ms frames every 12 seconds or so, it plays smooth as glass. If you're looking for a way to play completely free of any stutter at all, this is how to do it.
At this point, even if I were only using a single card I'd still use RP. Here's a single card:
It allows you to do other things like enable SMAA/HBAO and most everything else even if the game doesn't support it.
To set it up, disable vsync and triple buffering in the application, locate the executable with RP and under the tweaks tab set Vsync Control to "Always On", Display Refresh 60 or 120, Dynamic Framerate Control 60 or 120. If your game can't reach 60fps on any settings you want to play at set the DFC to something lower. For Unreal engine games that don't allow you to turn off their own triple buffering, leave RP's turned off or you'll get stuttering (note: when using Crossfire don't enable triple buffering at all).
Alternately the newer version has the ability to set Vsync Control to "Dynamic", which will automatically turn off Vsync when the framerate falls below the refresh rate. This automatically turns on triple buffering so the latter method works better when you can't turn it off in game. None of the Radeon Pro settings introduced any mouse lag.
I imagine the guy who wrote this is plenty brilliant, but I can't believe the people writing assembler at AMD are incapable of figuring this out. Hopefully all the whining about "runt frames" will finally get AMD off their ass to fix this.
If you're brave you can get a work in progress release here that enables SMAA customization. I noticed it conflicts with Office 13 so you have to kill the RP process before you run Office.
Here's what a single 7870XT looks like, Borderlands 2, 2560x1600, all settings on high, vsync off.
This is a scene with a lot of enemies in it so it taxes the CPU as well, that may explain the longer frames. As you can see it can't maintain 60fps (16.7ms frame time). It's honestly hard to tell how smooth the gameplay is with all the shearing.
With vsync on it's not very smooth with a lot of doubled frames. If you told me I was playing on a crossfire setup with a lot of microstutter I wouldn't argue with you.
Turning down most of the settings until the frame rate was 60fps min helped quite a bit.
This was fairly smooth, still some 32ms frames but nothing to complain about. What you would expect of single card gameplay.
Here's two 7870XTs, max game settings, vsync off.
It's a mess. It honestly doesn't feel as bad as it looks since it's a 60Hz monitor and none of the frames are over 16ms, but with all the shearing I wouldn't want to play like this.
Here's two cards with Afterburner running.
It's not too bad. There's the occasional 30ms frame, but if you gave somebody the computer and told them they were playing on a single card they wouldn't dispute it. If you're playing the game solely for the purpose of detecting stutter, you'd notice the double frames every few seconds, but you can do that on the single card too. There's nothing here to make the experience poor.
Two cards with Radeon Pro running:
It feels like it looks, perfect. Reminds me of the old days playing on a CRT. I wasn't able to actually notice the the 32ms frames every 12 seconds or so, it plays smooth as glass. If you're looking for a way to play completely free of any stutter at all, this is how to do it.
At this point, even if I were only using a single card I'd still use RP. Here's a single card:
It allows you to do other things like enable SMAA/HBAO and most everything else even if the game doesn't support it.
To set it up, disable vsync and triple buffering in the application, locate the executable with RP and under the tweaks tab set Vsync Control to "Always On", Display Refresh 60 or 120, Dynamic Framerate Control 60 or 120. If your game can't reach 60fps on any settings you want to play at set the DFC to something lower. For Unreal engine games that don't allow you to turn off their own triple buffering, leave RP's turned off or you'll get stuttering (note: when using Crossfire don't enable triple buffering at all).
Alternately the newer version has the ability to set Vsync Control to "Dynamic", which will automatically turn off Vsync when the framerate falls below the refresh rate. This automatically turns on triple buffering so the latter method works better when you can't turn it off in game. None of the Radeon Pro settings introduced any mouse lag.
I imagine the guy who wrote this is plenty brilliant, but I can't believe the people writing assembler at AMD are incapable of figuring this out. Hopefully all the whining about "runt frames" will finally get AMD off their ass to fix this.
If you're brave you can get a work in progress release here that enables SMAA customization. I noticed it conflicts with Office 13 so you have to kill the RP process before you run Office.
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