You'd think wouldn't you?
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4870x2 8.54 drivers = Wow Performance in COD4!!!!
- Thread starter BigCactus
- Start date
You'd think wouldn't you?
Well I did it. I found the problem. I installed a Creative Labs Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatal1ty Pro I had laying around. Downloaded and installed the latest drivers for that then threw the ATI card back in. I'm running on just one 4870 X2 right now but I'll be tossing in a second more than likely.
That fixed the smoothness issues I was having. i still get slightly lower minimums compared to the other machine but I figure that's either chipset drivers or the fact that the D5400XS is only PCI-Express 1.0/1.0a capable. My FRAPS runs are almost identical to those found in the [H] 4870 X2 Evaluation article. Hopefully ATI enables the sideport for these things in a future driver update. That should solve the issue for me. Even if they don't, I still get excellent performance and smooth gameplay now where as I didn't before. At least not in Call of Duty 4. So there you have it. The fix is to disable my onboard audio and use an add-in sound card.
Now that's not the end of the story unfortunately. Since ATI only makes the Crossfire bridges that ship with the cards long enough to sandwich the two of them together I have another issue on my hands. Since the sound card I have laying around is PCI and right underneath the primary video card I will have to get a PCI-Express version of the card and remove the PCI card so I can actually install the second 4870 X2. We'll see how that goes. I'll report back on that when I've done it. I'm shooting for tonight on that but I may or may not have time to do it until tomorrow. We'll see.
That fixed the smoothness issues I was having. i still get slightly lower minimums compared to the other machine but I figure that's either chipset drivers or the fact that the D5400XS is only PCI-Express 1.0/1.0a capable. My FRAPS runs are almost identical to those found in the [H] 4870 X2 Evaluation article. Hopefully ATI enables the sideport for these things in a future driver update. That should solve the issue for me. Even if they don't, I still get excellent performance and smooth gameplay now where as I didn't before. At least not in Call of Duty 4. So there you have it. The fix is to disable my onboard audio and use an add-in sound card.
Now that's not the end of the story unfortunately. Since ATI only makes the Crossfire bridges that ship with the cards long enough to sandwich the two of them together I have another issue on my hands. Since the sound card I have laying around is PCI and right underneath the primary video card I will have to get a PCI-Express version of the card and remove the PCI card so I can actually install the second 4870 X2. We'll see how that goes. I'll report back on that when I've done it. I'm shooting for tonight on that but I may or may not have time to do it until tomorrow. We'll see.
Can you not just get a longer / flexiable type bridge? I had to do that to get my S1 Rev2s installed on my 8800 GTS SLIs.
And just to update the score, Dan's mobo: 0, Dan:1 Since it wasn't the cards fault. Well I guess it could have been the card not playing nice with onboard sound, not the other way around soooo Dan's mobo: 0, Dan:1, 4870x2: 0.
Or........
You could put your Nautilus to work and watercool the primary or both 4870 X2s.
That should give you room to use the PCI X-Fi????
I don't think the sound quality from the PCI-e X-Fis is up to snuff compared to the PCI version, but I could be wrong.
Can you not just get a longer / flexiable type bridge? I had to do that to get my S1 Rev2s installed on my 8800 GTS SLIs.
And just to update the score, Dan's mobo: 0, Dan:1 Since it wasn't the cards fault. Well I guess it could have been the card not playing nice with onboard sound, not the other way around soooo Dan's mobo: 0, Dan:1, 4870x2: 0.
If someone knows where I can find a longer Crossfire bridge I'm all for it. The ones the cards come with are the flexible type by the way. They are just short. I haven't seen any longer ones out there but of course that doesn't mean that they don't exist.
Well I could do that but that would actually involve getting another Nautilus. The one I already have is busy cooling the CPU of whatever is on my test bench at any give time.Also from what I understand the PCI-Express based Creative X-Fi Titanium is actually a real X-Fi and not neutered like the older PCI-Express models were.
Yeah that was a weird thing, but this isn't exactly a normal system configuration either. Mine never are.
Merry xmas:
http://cgi.ebay.com/Brand-New-ASUS-CrossFire-Bridge-PCI-E-VIDEO-CONNECTOR_W0QQitemZ180287703591QQcmdZViewItem?hash=item180287703591&_trkparms=72%3A1163%7C39%3A1%7C66%3A2%7C65%3A12%7C240%3A1318&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14
It's 110mm end to end, normal is 67 end to end. So about 1 3/4" longer.
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Badass. I've purchased it for $2.99. The shipping was more than the part.
Yeah, I noticed the shipping was a bit exessive. But hey, for 10$ all together it's much less hassle than breaking out the soldering iron.
Dr. kitteny berk
n00b
- Joined
- May 30, 2008
- Messages
- 39
That's bloody weird, Impressively so.
Does the onboard sound do something weird like feed off the graphics PCI-E jobbers, maybe throttles them or something odd?
If this was 4 years ago, I'd blame it on offloading too much onto the CPU, but that doesn't seem likely these days.
Mostly I'm just trying to work out how onboard sound would cause such problems, Geek curiosity I suppose.
Well I'm almost positive that its' driver related. Not sure what the problem is but CPU usage isn't it. I've got 8 cores and CPU usage readings are normal.
No you don't.
Quite right. Crossfire/CrossfireX supports 2, 3, and 4 GPUs. No more. You can have either have 2 4870's, 3 4870's, 4 4870's, 1 4870 X2 +1 4870, or 2 4870 X2's. You can do whatever you want combination wise so long as the total number of GPUs doesn't exceed 4. Period.
this has to go in my sig somewhere...best post in a long time
That's impossible, given the X2 only has one connection for the bridge, not two like the 4870.
If you have two connected, then its Quad........but TWO x2s, like I have.
And I can't run Crysis for shit.
Onboard Audio takes up a conciderable amount more CPU than an X-Fi would. The Audio drivers could also have been an issue
Many gamers go with the X-Fi presicely due to this. Its the reason I did as well. I have a P5W with ounboard sound. I tried it but didnt like it due to all the hitching issues I was having in certain games. Bought an X-Fi Extreme and problems solved ! Best sound out of a PC Ive ever had.
Ofcourse my Klipsch 5.1 speakers have a little something to do with it)
Best sound out of a PC Ive ever had.Ofcourse my Klipsch 5.1 speakers have a little something to do with it
)Well there shouldn't be anything stopping him from reading the thread. Though he won't be posting as BigCactus here.
PlzFixMyComputer
Weaksauce
- Joined
- Aug 28, 2008
- Messages
- 65
If only they could inform all developers (they do) and make them do what they wanted! (they can't)
The fact is, some game devs don't care about multi-gpu.. it's last on their list of issues since it's such a small % of the market.
I was really hoping to get more of a rise then that.
Oh, and I FINELY fixed mine too (not as nice as yours though). For some reason the fix would not take when I wrote it directly into the register. When I (cough) followed the instructions and had windows add it as a .reg file it worked. still don't understand why. Now I just need a CPU upgrade and.....
I was really hoping to get more of a rise then that.
Oh, and I FINELY fixed mine too (not as nice as yours though). For some reason the fix would not take when I wrote it directly into the register. When I (cough) followed the instructions and had windows add it as a .reg file it worked. still don't understand why. Now I just need a CPU upgrade and.....
What issue did you fix and what did you do to fix it? I'm curious to know what you did exactly and how you found the fix.
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1343344
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1343988
the trick about using the registry edit worked, just not when I wrote it to the directory. The first two times I tried it wrote it straight to the registry, nothing I haven't done before. didn't work. this last time I was getting ready to pull my card out and tried it one more time following the directions and it worked. I don't know why.
now all I have to do is figure out why BFG will not let me register my card
BTW I recall you saying you had a similar problem somewhere, this would like fix it for most any monitor or TV
Godmachine
[H]F Junkie
- Joined
- Apr 7, 2003
- Messages
- 10,472
Glad you finally got it working for ya dude, I had issues for awhile with my but in the end a fresh vista install fixed most of them. Only a few others remain but they are driver bugs that will get worked out over time and they are minor. I almost returned this card but I'm glad I held out cause I think once Fallout 3 drops I'll be in heaven
Umm 8.52.2 is quite good, really good for Crysis. CrysisBench 1680x1050 VeryHigh Avg:40fps.
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=198045
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=198045
My Crysis bench with 8.52.2
http://s424.photobucket.com/albums/pp323/vonteme/?action=view¤t=GPU_EMPEROR_OF_MANKIND.jpg
http://s424.photobucket.com/albums/pp323/vonteme/?action=view¤t=GPU_EMPEROR_OF_MANKIND.jpg
I currently can't play crysis on low settings at 1920 by 1200 with a GTX280, some kind of issue going there. everything else works great. great playability. but I thought the H review put the Cyrsis playability on par between the GTX280 and the 4870X2
Off of one Geforce GTX 280 I could play at 1920x1200 with some settings on Very High and most on high. It wasn't super awesome frame rates but the game was playable. So far the best is with 3 Geforce GTX 280's in 3-Way SLI. With that setup I can do 1920x1200 with everything set to Very High no problem.
I am sure its something in my system, it ridiculously bad. I will look into it further but everything else is great. I also recalled DH saying that tri sli scaled well on the skulltrail ? how much performance in crysis did you loose BTW? I have read that others have been able to turn up the AA in crysis using the 4870X2 by the H review nicked it.
Yeah the Driver Heaven article showed that 3-Way SLI indeed beats 4870 X2 Crossfire. Though they gave the impression that 4870 X2 CrossfireX didn't perform like it should on the Skulltrail. Now granted with that said the ATI Radeon 4870 X2 and 4870 X2 CrossfireX was no slouch on it. I'm just wondering if the cards really need PCI-Express 2.0 in order to shine.
I do have a theory about the relatively poor 4870 X2 performance on the D5400XS though. While the 5400 chipset does in fact support PCI-Express 2.0 the D5400XS motherboard doesn't because of its' use of nForce 100 MCP's. This may be the reason why the 4870 X2 bites so much ass on the board in question. The nForce 100 MCP's provide PCI-Express 1.0/1.0a support alone and they are what give the board its' 64 PCI-Express lanes that allow for four fully functional PCI-Express x16 slots. The PCI-Express 2.0 lanes provided by the 5400 Seaburg chipset are actually translated into 1.0/1.0a PCI-Express lanes as they are essentially routed through the nForce 100 MCPs. This is what allows the board to support SLI. It is my understanding that the nForce 100 MCP's (and 200 series MCPs) actually cause some increase in bus latency and this may be the reason for the poor performance of the 4870 X2 on the board. I get the high maximums often seen in reviews as well as the averages but the card drops to lower lows and of course fluctuates in regard to performance more than it should. The stuttering effect created by the onboard IDT sound may actually be due to that card residing on the PCI-Express 2.0 bus built into the Seaburg 5400 chipset. When I disabled that sound and used a sound card on the PCI bus that stuttering effect stopped but the lower minimum frame rates are still there, albiet not quite as bad. It's just a theory I have as to why the 4870 X2 runs like shit on this board but it does fit the facts. I do not know if ATI ever could correct this issue if that's the case.
So if one wanted to essentially replicate the Skulltrail setup but use 4870 X2's in CrossfireX the ASUS Z7S WS would probably be the better board to use as it doesn't support SLI and it allows for full PCI-Express 2.0 support and all the PCI-Express lanes are native to the chipset rather than being routed through something like the nForce 100 MCPs.
EDIT: Before anyone asks, I've already tried to tweak the PCI-Express bus and that results in instability and lockups. So that didn't work for me.
At what resolution? I'd be impressed at 1920x1200 but not at 1680x1050.
interesting. so basically the motherboard is going to be bottleneck under some conditions. I know that PCI2 2.0 makes little difference on most cards but I am wonder if that will hold true to the 4870X2, would be interesting to see. even if it does I can easily see the increase in bus latency being a problem. esp if the drivers don't account for this. But the odd thing is that scaling seemed improved with the GTX280 SLI. I would think that it would hinder it as well.
given this are you going to go back to your GTX280 SLI?
Most likely if there is a performance problem with the D5400XS and the 4870 X2 it comes from the latency created by the nForce 100 MCPs rather than the lack of PCI-Express 2.0 support. Though I haven't seen any performance data from anyone whos used a 4870 X2 on a PCI-Express 1.0/1.0a motherboard. So I really can't speak to that.
My D5400XS is having tons of problems as of late. (Onboard audio died, eSATA weirdness, cold boot problems, the bottom two PCI-Express slots work intermitantly. etc.) I've got a replacement coming early next week so I'll make my final decision after that. More than likely though I will be switching back to my Geforce GTX 280 3-Way SLI setup.
Sure at maybe 16 X 12 or 1080. Not, I repeat not on 19 X 12 or higher, unless you think 20 frames per second is "playable" or you dig slideshows.
I have CrossfireX X2s and Crysis sucks ass on very high at 19 X 12. If I stand still the game is ROXORS........but if I actually want to DO something, forget it.