AMD Crossfire a scam - Almost no benefit over single card

Status
Not open for further replies.
Several screens?! Wow! I'd be going for a third card with that sort of display real estate....
 
I've had 3 CFX systems and they certainly did improve my gaming experience over a single card, but I've also had 2 SLI systems in a row now and SLI is certainly better in every way, and noticabely smoother out of the box, but to say AMD CFX is a scam and useless is FUD. It just needs more tweaking and know how to achieve decent results, it isnt as n00b friendlly as SLI.
 
oldmanbal said:
This is in reaction to an article posted yesterday on pcper, as linked to in the op, if you can't even read or understand what a thread is discussing, why post?
Click to expand...
Yeah been done. I get 26.5fps on Tomb Raider Ultra @2560x1600 with one card, 48.6 with two.

The only difference here is they finally did something lucid and and tested with vsync on.

http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphi...ils-Capture-based-Graphics-Performance-Tes-11

Without Vsync we clearly see the runts affecting the plot of frame times here on the HD 7970s in CrossFire but enabling Vsync does appear to eliminate them!
Click to expand...
Oooh. Drama. Scamz.
 
oldmanbal said:
ryan at anandtech has confirmed the new FCAT softwear/code is unbiased in analyzing data, specifically complimenting it for better demonstrating the end product that the user sees and experiences. IMO AMD would have released something similar if it wasn't so damning.

Nvidia released it to the public and said have at it, they knew what reviewers would find.
Click to expand...

The problem is PCPer used this tool to justify removing crossfire comparisons from the Titan review and kept it secret that the tool was an nVidia product. While it's possible (likely) all of the other sites new this and didn't report it too, they at least didn't include it in any of their reviews. Makes it look like PCPer is in bed with nVidia and trolling for page hits.

Edit: Read the whole report from AT. AMD did not have this tool. You claiming that AMD had this and covered it up is just in your imagination. There's no evidence to back that claim up, either confirmed or implied from Ryan's article.
 
amd is working on drivers to resolve this issue and should drop by the time the official 7990 cards drop in june. they realized hey we have a problem and are working towards a fix not like it has been hidden in some grand web of conspiracy like the Rosewill ufo landing. this was prob the main reason we didnt see an official 7990 card sooner
 
Crossfire is pretty much broken on many games unless you limit frames to 58-60 and enable vsync. AMD has been trying to work on it but at this point they have failed. I really hope over this next year that that driver team gets both more talent and more people. They have a huge task ahead if they want to get upto nvidias level.

It's a shame that AMD has serious glaring issues in everyone of their divisions. They can't seem to get anything right.

They have good hardware with GCN yet they don't put the initiative into putting that entire driver / software division in overdrive.
 
And to add, I have been with AMD/ATI since the 5XXX series. It wasn't until I bought a 660 and threw it in my HTPC that I realized how bad it really was. The infinitely weaker 660 was more enjoyable to play than my 7970s in the office in Farcry 3, Asscreed 3, and multiple other titles.

The 7970 by themselves are not bad and I adjusted accordingly in my setups.

However, I will never again purchase an AMD videocard or AMD cpu. I wish I could support them but frankly at this point they are a mess. There is a reason people are saying investing money in AMD stock is like lighting money on fire.
 
It sounds like until the new crossfire drivers are out, the trick is to enable vsync and make sure your graphics settings allow the minimum frame rates to stay above 60 FPS.
You can also try dynamic vsync and frame rate control with RadeonPro.

I wish review sites would stop running their benchmarks at settings that yield averages under 30 FPS and then apply frame time analysis to the unplayable results.
 
Crossfire has always been bad and everyone who looked at it knew it. It doesn't look much faster than one card
 
I'm gonna play some Sleeping Dogs on 1 7970 and I'll post a bit later after I'm done as far as my experience compared to gaming on 7970 x 2 the last few days..
 
so let me get this straight

AMD cards drop a crap load of frames into the buffer and some are not displayed...hopefully they can tweak how their drivers work to help alleviate the issue.

Personally I would not trust any tools released by Nvidia...don't know if they can be trusted to deliver accurate results...
 
it was smoother with 1 card, i have the game maxed out with vsync on and it pretty much stays at 60 the whole time, i saw it dip to 52fps a couple times but never to 30, i have frame rate limiter in the settings at disabled

tomb raider was definitely smoother with two cards, but this game (sleeping dogs) is much smoother with 1 7970, i noticed without vsync there was so much tearing that I just turned vsync on and didn't notice any latency issues
 
AMD admitted to AnandTech that it has a problem. First step is to acknowledge there is a problem.

Because stuttering is such a complex issue and AMD had such great knowledge into their drivers, AMD assumed that stuttering was occurring due to the applications and the OS, things that were out of their control. Furthermore because those things were out of their control, AMD assumed that they were happening to NVIDIA and Intel GPUs too. After all, there wasn’t any kind of competitive analysis to scientifically confirm this. AMD never saw that NVIDIA cards weren’t experiencing as much stuttering, and consequently never saw that they did in fact have more control over stuttering than they first thought.
Click to expand...

AMD fanboys like to bash nVidia engineers for their fuck ups. What say the AMD fanboys now that AMD engineers are making asses of themselves?
 
While I think this is an important issue, everyone who is making this out to be some sort of scam needs to join a tinfoil hat support group. I am however extra happy that I decided to get a 7870 LE instead of buying a second 6870. Crossfire, and even SLI to some extent, obviously still have issues. I was getting tired of reading people boast about how great crossfire/SLI are getting.

There are two things I really don't like about the review itself.

The first is that I think the charts for frame variance are much more interesting and immune to tampering by the reviewer. With the "perceived frame rate", where the reviewer decides to set the cut off could drastically affect the results. Basically, even as AMD tries to fix the problem, they won't show any improvement until the runts get above the cut off.

It does bother me a little bit that pcper got help from nVidia instead of writing the code themselves. It doesn't seem like the code would be that complicated and if it actually is complicated, I would worry that nVidia did something that works well for their cards but not AMD cards (even if there wan't any intent to do so).
 
Last edited:
aviphysics said:
While I think this is an important issue, everyone who is making this out to be some sort of scam needs to join a tinfoil hat support group.
Click to expand...

It looks like a bloody witch hunt.

Starting with the thread title, seriously, how about someone edits it? I was under the impression flaming and extreme flamebait were not allowed.
 
Last edited:
Yeah this is 100% a flambait thread as orignally posted... and you hear the same ol tired lines " AMD DRIVERS STINK" yada yada.... if you read some of the posts here... you would think people with Radeons should trash them and run to nvidia .... there are people so dyed-in the wool loyal to NVIDIA u have to be mindful of that when you read thier posts... and my current Radeon is my first since the old 9800
 
http://techreport.com/news/24136/dr...e-radeon-frame-latencies-in-series-of-updates
http://techreport.com/review/24218/a-driver-update-to-reduce-radeon-frame-times/5

"AMD's David Baumann had posted in a thread at Beyond3D, stating that a host of different software-related issues are potentially responsible for the Radeon's latency issues. He claimed the slowdowns in Borderlands 2 are a buffer-sizing issue that could be addressed via a Catalyst Application Profile (CAP) update.

After seeing my blog post, Baumann contacted us to provide some additional insight into the situation, including word of a series of driver updates in the works intended to smooth out frame latencies"

"The most intriguing revelation in Baumann's correspondence, though, concerns one specific technical contributor to the frame latency problems on HD 7000-series Radeons based on the GCN architecture: less-than-optimal memory management in software.

Additionally, when we switched from the old VLIW architecture to the GCN core there was a significant updates to all parts of the driver was needed – although not really spoken about the entire memory management on GCN is different to prior GPU's and the initial software management for that was primarily driven by schedule and in the meantime we've been rewriting it again and we have discovered that the new version has also improved frame latency in a number of cases so we are accelerating the QA and implementation of that"

-----I read late last night on something they will be boiling into the drivers as well, not sure when but is in process..The way AMD currently does catalyst with all cards is generally speaking the drivers are told to make things run as fast as possible so there is driverline commands to speed the flow of data as fast as possible, this does cause hiccups..At some point there will be a client side option that allows us to toggle on or off raw frame speed and instead focus on "quality" of displayed frames, just as it sounds and described, option 1 speed focuses on raw data flow(and does cause bsod-performance issues etc) option 2 focuses on "clean" results so it ends up smoothing things out, it displays more consistant results and generally less issues as the card checks its data flow more thoroughly.
 
KENNYB said:
AMD admitted to AnandTech that it has a problem. First step is to acknowledge there is a problem.



AMD fanboys like to bash nVidia engineers for their fuck ups. What say the AMD fanboys now that AMD engineers are making asses of themselves?
Click to expand...

Kennyb, your language is really uncalled for.:rolleyes:
 
it felt great installing bioshock drivers a day before it came out.

NVidia's support is unmatched.
 
KENNYB said:
AMD admitted to AnandTech that it has a problem. First step is to acknowledge there is a problem.



AMD fanboys like to bash nVidia engineers for their fuck ups. What say the AMD fanboys now that AMD engineers are making asses of themselves?
Click to expand...

Its funny how you say AMD fanboys like to bash Nvidia engineers when a lot of AMD engineers recently jumped ship to Nvidia and took some data with them :eek:

I think we all try to spend our money wisely and I had lots of time to experiment with this current iteration of cards from both AMD and Nvidia. Amd sold me on their product because of price/performance ratio. Had nothing to do with the name, a 7970 is faster and cheaper then a GTX 680 period.
 
TroyX said:
it felt great installing bioshock drivers a day before it came out.

NVidia's support is unmatched.
Click to expand...

Ok? I was still able to play bioshock the day it was released on AMD hardware with no problems so I could easily say AMD's support is unmatched because they did not need drivers one day before the game dropped, they already had them :confused:

Useless comment :rolleyes:
 
TroyX said:
...

NVidia's support is unmatched.
Click to expand...

Sure is. For 3 years now all their drivers have had issues with the 2560x1600 Dell's and HP's (ZR30W), the most common of the high res monitors.

Hopefully they get it fixed before that resolution is obsolete. Only the nVidia 4xx, 5xx, and 6xx series cards are affected, and only the last 4 years worth of drivers have issues with overlays.

Can somebody who is buddies with nVidia tell them that 2560x1600 monitors exist, and not all of them are gaming platforms?
 
Reality said:
it was smoother with 1 card, i have the game maxed out with vsync on and it pretty much stays at 60 the whole time, i saw it dip to 52fps a couple times but never to 30, i have frame rate limiter in the settings at disabled

tomb raider was definitely smoother with two cards, but this game (sleeping dogs) is much smoother with 1 7970, i noticed without vsync there was so much tearing that I just turned vsync on and didn't notice any latency issues
Click to expand...

What resolution? No way did you have the MSAA maxed out, the game would be unplayable with one card @ 1080p
 
After having had two Radeon HD 7970's in CrossfireX and two (later 3) GeForce GTX 680 4GB cards in 2-Way/3-Way SLI I can tell you that the latter was always smoother. Granted I had some stability issues with CrossfireX but the performance was always disappointing. Not according to benchmarks necessarily but in terms of my experience. It was never fluid or as smooth as it should have been. My GTX 680's have been the opposite experience for me.

Unfortunately your milage may vary.
 
Nvidia marketing stronger then ever, had GTX680 sold it, get 7950, gameplay experience is same.
 
I understand that in multi gpu configuration Nvidia wins, but for single card for me it was and it is same, now all of a sudden all go crazy about this.
 
psyside said:
I understand that in multi gpu configuration Nvidia wins, but for single card for me it was and it is same, now all of a sudden all go crazy about this.
Click to expand...

I'd generally agree. For a single card I usually can't tell the difference between the two save for a couple games which run better on one vs. the other.
 
Dan_D said:
After having had two Radeon HD 7970's in CrossfireX and two (later 3) GeForce GTX 680 4GB cards in 2-Way/3-Way SLI I can tell you that the latter was always smoother. Granted I had some stability issues with CrossfireX but the performance was always disappointing. Not according to benchmarks necessarily but in terms of my experience. It was never fluid or as smooth as it should have been. My GTX 680's have been the opposite experience for me.

Unfortunately your milage may vary.
Click to expand...

This was always my experience as well, with both my own 5870 CFX setup and my mates 6970 2-way and later 3-way CFX setup, the sheer amount of wasted frames was maddening. It was especially obvious under more significant loads where in a number of cases a single 5870 regardless of reported framerates always felt significantly smoother. Never had the same sort of problems with both my 560 ti SLI setup and my 680 SLI setup. At least there is now a very concrete way of quantifying the issue that a lot of people have been talking about for years.
 
ShuttleLuv said:
Thats the point though, you think you're getting 48 but you might not be.
Click to expand...

That's with vsync on. I'm not going to play at 1600p at the highest visual settings possible so I can watch some guy's head rendered 2.5" away from his lower body.
 
TroyX said:
it felt great installing bioshock drivers a day before it came out.
NVidia's support is unmatched.
Click to expand...

This guy with 2x Titans disagrees.
damstr said:
Well I don't know but now all of a sudden the game is crashing at a certain part right when I open the doors. Just freeze's.

I tried updating to the new drivers 314.22 and it still froze. Switched back to the 314.14's that I've been on playing this game on for 3 hours today perfectly fine and still freezing. Really getting annoying because I can't go any further in the game...
Click to expand...
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top