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Crossfire Woes

R

rennyf77

2[H]4U
Joined
Feb 12, 2007
Messages
2,865
i was runnning crossfire in 16/4 with 2900xt's for a while, but as soon as all these new titles became available i found crossfire inhibited performance. cod4, gears, and crysis all run better on a single card. when the 3870's came out and then the 7.11 drivers, i hoped crossfire would perform better, but gaming is still better on one card. in crysis, not only is frame rate lower, but graphic distortion abounds.
 
Crytek said they are putting out a patch i think this week or next week coming up that will fix crossfire issues.
 
rennyf77 said:
i was runnning crossfire in 16/4 with 2900xt's for a while, but as soon as all these new titles became available i found crossfire inhibited performance. cod4, gears, and crysis all run better on a single card. when the 3870's came out and then the 7.11 drivers, i hoped crossfire would perform better, but gaming is still better on one card. in crysis, not only is frame rate lower, but graphic distortion abounds.
Click to expand...

That's because a lot of those games don't have multi-GPU/CF support yet
 
i usually don't have this kind of issue with sli. a new game pops up and nvidia seems to have a beta driver available immediately.
 
rennyf77 said:
i usually don't have this kind of issue with sli. a new game pops up and nvidia seems to have a beta driver available immediately.
Click to expand...

Nvidia work close with the game developers, hence the "Works on Nvidia" at the start of most games.
 
While I don't have a 3870 yet, I find that COD4 runs better in Crossfire with my 2 X1950 pros then it does with just one card...
 
I had some weird problems with 2x 1gig 2900's in older games, dod source for whatever reason would slow to a crawl after a while, literally like 2-3fps then if i turned to look in another direction the framerate would shoot back up. Didn't seem to matter if there was anything going on or nothing at all the framerate after a while just seemed to divebomb (seemed to be throttling almost but it was the only game it ever happened in). Also had problems with the sky turning black in dod source. Previous to that had 2x1900's in crossfire which ran well, the 2900's seemed to bring in a shitload of problems.
 
rennyf77 said:
i was runnning crossfire in 16/4 with 2900xt's for a while, but as soon as all these new titles became available i found crossfire inhibited performance. cod4, gears, and crysis all run better on a single card. when the 3870's came out and then the 7.11 drivers, i hoped crossfire would perform better, but gaming is still better on one card. in crysis, not only is frame rate lower, but graphic distortion abounds.
Click to expand...

I find just the opposite. Noticible improvement in CoD4 and Crysis (DX9 mode) with Crossfire enabled on my 3850's (and my X1900's before that).

Then again, your mobo has a bit to do with that, if you're not running two PCIe-x16 lanes, there can and will be some performance issues on the high bandwidth cards.
 
Croak said:
I find just the opposite. Noticible improvement in CoD4 and Crysis (DX9 mode) with Crossfire enabled on my 3850's (and my X1900's before that).

Then again, your mobo has a bit to do with that, if you're not running two PCIe-x16 lanes, there can and will be some performance issues on the high bandwidth cards.
Click to expand...

Yeah but dod source was the only game to give that problem which i found strange. p35 mobo so 16x\4x.
 
Chris_B said:
I had some weird problems with 2x 1gig 2900's in older games, dod source for whatever reason would slow to a crawl after a while, literally like 2-3fps then if i turned to look in another direction the framerate would shoot back up. Didn't seem to matter if there was anything going on or nothing at all the framerate after a while just seemed to divebomb (seemed to be throttling almost but it was the only game it ever happened in). Also had problems with the sky turning black in dod source. Previous to that had 2x1900's in crossfire which ran well, the 2900's seemed to bring in a shitload of problems.
Click to expand...

my 2900xt 512 crossfire ran great with older titles, the only weirdness happened in fear when you killed enemies while in slo mo they would literally explode off the screen like something was wrong with the havok engine. same thing happened when i switched to 3870's. i''l have to agree that x19 crossfire was probably the most stable of ati's multi gpu solution. heck, even the x18 crossfire was kind of wonky.
 
Croak said:
I find just the opposite. Noticible improvement in CoD4 and Crysis (DX9 mode) with Crossfire enabled on my 3850's (and my X1900's before that).

Then again, your mobo has a bit to do with that, if you're not running two PCIe-x16 lanes, there can and will be some performance issues on the high bandwidth cards.
Click to expand...

i see you're running an x38 chipset, i may have to switch to that mobo soon but the prices of the x38 boards are a bit high at this point. the only other board i considered was the asus blitz, but that thing is nearly impossible to find at reasonable prices. i tend to build on the cheap, investing the bulk of my money in the video cards. again, titles released previous to this month run really well in the 16/4 config.
 
Invest in a good platform to insure that your GPU spending is maximized if you're running multi-GPU. :)

Personally, I held off on making the C2D switch and buying an Intel board UNTIL the dual x16 X38 DDR2 came out for that very reason.
 
Invest in a good platform to insure that your GPU spending is maximized if you're running multi-GPU.

Personally, I held off on making the C2D switch and buying an Intel board UNTIL the dual x16 X38 DDR2 came out for that very reason
Click to expand...

I'm having simular issues with Crysis with 3850 X-Fire on an ASUS P5E X38. I'm using the 7.11 drivers and according to the benchmarks the game runs 3-4 FPS slower with crossfire in DX9 and DX10 has terrible flashing. It may be the drivers 7.11 vs 7.10 w/ Crysis Hotfix, but I don't feel like going back, i'll just wait for the 7.12s and a patch for Crysis.
 
The crysis hotfix drivers are based off the 7.11's not the 7.10's and I think they are actually a newer build than the official 7.11's.
 
Either way, this is probably a combination of ATI not knowing what Crytek is doing, and Crytek not knowing what ATI is doing. Unless the video card company is working closely with the developer [like what nVidia does with Crytek, and what ATI does with Valve] there are always going to be certain issues.

There is obviously something wrong with crossfire support in these games if it is getting LOWER performance than a single card, but I don't think you can blame one company or another.
 
The crysis hotfix drivers are based off the 7.11's not the 7.10's and I think they are actually a newer build than the official 7.11's.
Click to expand...



I thought so too, the file dates are newer for the drivers, but the inf information is older:

Cat Hotfix:;-----------------------------------------------
;----------0711160800-8.43.1.1-071115a-055589E-ATI.2
;-----------------------------------------------
; ATI Display Information file : atiilhag.inf
;
; Installation INF for the ATI display driver.
; Copyright(C) 1998-2006 ATI Technologies Inc.
;
; Windows Vista (Beta2 RI14)
;
; Base INF Last Updated Mar 07, 2006
;-----------------------------------------------

[Version]
Signature="$Windows NT$"
Provider=%ATI%
ClassGUID={4D36E968-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}
Class=Display
DriverVer=11/15/2007, 8.430.1.1000

Cat 7.11:

;-----------------------------------------------
;----------0711121302-8.432-071101a-054442C-ATI
;-----------------------------------------------
; ATI Display Information file : atiilhag.inf
;
; Installation INF for the ATI display driver.
; Copyright(C) 1998-2006 ATI Technologies Inc.
;
; Windows Vista (Beta2 RI14)
;
; Base INF Last Updated Mar 07, 2006
;-----------------------------------------------

[Version]
Signature="$Windows NT$"
Provider=%ATI%
ClassGUID={4D36E968-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}
Class=Display
DriverVer=11/01/2007, 8.432.0.0000
;;LayoutFile=layout.inf
CatalogFile=CH_54442.CAT
 
-=PESTILENCE=- said:
Either way, this is probably a combination of ATI not knowing what Crytek is doing, and Crytek not knowing what ATI is doing. Unless the video card company is working closely with the developer [like what nVidia does with Crytek, and what ATI does with Valve] there are always going to be certain issues.

There is obviously something wrong with crossfire support in these games if it is getting LOWER performance than a single card, but I don't think you can blame one company or another.
Click to expand...

Actually, both ATI and NVIDIA were on-site working with Crytek on multi-gpu scaling, so you can't just blame "The Way It's Meant To Be Played" as the reason that crossfire doesn't work.
 
What kind of performance hit are we looking at when running 16/4? I plan on getting a p5k-v tomorrow since it has on board vid for my wait for the 3870X2's and I intend to CF them. Now this thread has me worried on the effect PCI-E 4x will have on a second card. I thought it wasn't that bad since the bridge is there for the cards to talk to each other.
 
Hypernova said:
What kind of performance hit are we looking at when running 16/4? I plan on getting a p5k-v tomorrow since it has on board vid for my wait for the 3870X2's and I intend to CF them. Now this thread has me worried on the effect PCI-E 4x will have on a second card. I thought it wasn't that bad since the bridge is there for the cards to talk to each other.
Click to expand...

won't know until i get x38 board up and running. bit tech wrote an article comparing the various crossfire implementations, but considering the date they published the article, their choice of test titles were virtually useless to me. they didn't even use bioshock.
 
I have Crossfire working now. I removed the 7.11 drivers and did a fresh install of the Crysis Hotfix. My DX9 Crysis fps are now 1.5x what they were before. Crysis is very playable with everything on High, except shadows (medium), textures (Custom Very high) I also have Color Grading enabled and POM (Parralax... something that looks cool). Averaging 35 FPS @ 1280 x 720 with vsync and tripplebuffer enabled.
 
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