help me understand crossfire

[ARGH_SLI]

i have always been with nvidia the past decade but this time i decided to go with a crossfire setup. it is totally alien to me and am having alot of trouble understanding it.

with nvidia you download the drivers and the control panel is included with them so you can edit and create application profiles and change settings in there easily. nvidia also has the sli bar within the drivers as well. i never used 3rd party applications that fiddled with drivers. only 3rd party applications i used were gpu monitoring software like evga precision or msi afterburner.

-why do people call drivers, for example, 11.4 when there is no such number under the driver's version while viewing them under device manager? the driver version would be called something like 8.85.21 or something but does not give any hint of it being the 11.4 or 11.8p that is touted on the forums.

-where is the crossfire scale bar like nvidia has? it appears that you must use a 3rd party program to get such a scale?

-what is catalyst control center, is this the actual amd driver or only it's control panel?

-what is something called CAP 11.7? it appears to be another 3rd party program. it appears to mess with application profiles but can't i edit and create those in the amd drivers directly? i have found no place to create an application profile in the amd driver and also adjust it's settings like AFR and such.

-what is the purpose radeon pro? this is another 3rd party program. upon installing this and adding a crysis 2 profile with the proper executable path to it the end result was even worse performance to the point that it slowed the game down to where even the audio was slowing down....

-what gpu monitoring application can i use for AMD that also offers logitech LCD screen support like precision and afterburner do? i would love to stick afterburner but it is not showing the memory usage for the amd cards.

i am basically having issues with crossfire not working properly in crysis 2 with dx11 ultra settings and high resolution textures. the scaling does not appear to work properly or the performance is of the same as a single card. i also have this same issue with FFXIV. even with messing around with those 3rd party programs they did not offer any solution exception, what appears to me, unnecessary bloatware and confusion.

after un-installing the bloatware i went back to latest amd drivers and simply checked to ensure crossfire was enabled in CCC. i then loaded up crysis warhead and msi afterburner was reporting full xfire scaling with both gpu's pegged. but of course crysis 2 and ffxiv do not scale at all....

 

[GotNoRice]

-why do people call drivers, for example, 11.4 when there is no such number under the driver's version while viewing them under device manager? the driver version would be called something like 8.85.21 or something but does not give any hint of it being the 11.4 or 11.8p that is touted on the forums.

Drivers are generally released on a monthly basis. 11.4 would be from April (4th month), 2011. You can see the catalyst version number via the information center in the catalyst control panel.

-where is the crossfire scale bar like nvidia has? it appears that you must use a 3rd party program to get such a scale?

The closest you will probably find is the ability to display the crossfire logo when crossfire is working, but it doesn't give you any detailed information. I use MSI Afterburner to display individual GPU usage on my Logitech G15 keyboard LCD.

-what is catalyst control center, is this the actual amd driver or only it's control panel?

Catalyst control center is the name of the control panel for the videocard driver. It is included with the driver.

-what is something called CAP 11.7? it appears to be another 3rd party program. it appears to mess with application profiles but can't i edit and create those in the amd drivers directly? i have found no place to create an application profile in the amd driver and also adjust it's settings like AFR and such.

There are no individual application profiles with AMD. The CAP installs on top of the catalyst drivers and contains profiles for games in crossfire and non-crossfire configurations. Drivers are usually released once per month but it's common for there to be several CAP updates during that time. You should always make sure to have the latest CAP.

-what is the purpose radeon pro? this is another 3rd party program. upon installing this and adding a crysis 2 profile with the proper executable path to it the end result was even worse performance to the point that it slowed the game down to where even the audio was slowing down....

This is a 3rd party program that allows you to adjust parameters on a per-game basis trying to give you some of the functionality of individual application profiles, but as you found out it's very easy to do more harm than good. For the most part, crossfire works very well with almost all games without need for anything like radeon pro.

-what gpu monitoring application can i use for AMD that also offers logitech LCD screen support like precision and afterburner do? i would love to stick afterburner but it is not showing the memory usage for the amd cards.

MSI Afterburner should work fine, do you have the latest version?

 

[magoo]

Catalyst Version release is not the driver version. Current Catalyst version, officially is 11.7 (July/2011). Ocassionally betas are released called previews or hotfixes....currently there is an 11.8 preview driver.

Actual driver version is some wierd scheme indicated in the Info portion of the Catalyst Control Center.

CCC = nvidia control panel

No user edit for application profiles in AMD.

CAP (crossfire application profiles) are separate downloads to keep Crossfire up to date in between driver releases. Visit once a week to check on any new releases.

Use MSI Afterburner or Sapphire Trixx.

 

[ARGH_SLI]

i figured it out. there is a bug. by trial and error i simply switched the in-game graphics fidelity back and forth and it allowed xfire to scale properly. for example, launch the game, the settings are on ultra. change them to extreme and xfire now worked so then change them back to ultra.



i hate bugs like this because this one took me an entire day to find.

for ffxiv i installed the CAP 11.7 from amd and that did the trick.

thanks for all the help.



btw, hardware specs; alienware m18x laptop with 6990m in crossfire.

 

[Lord_Exodia]

i figured it out. there is a bug. by trial and error i simply switched the in-game graphics fidelity back and forth and it allowed xfire to scale properly. for example, launch the game, the settings are on ultra. change them to extreme and xfire now worked so then change them back to ultra.



i hate bugs like this because this one took me an entire day to find.

for ffxiv i installed the CAP 11.7 from amd and that did the trick.

thanks for all the help.



btw, hardware specs; alienware m18x laptop with 6990m in crossfire.

Download Radeon Pro, it's excellent software for anyone using AMD crossfire. Many times you can create your own profile and fix crossfire scaling issues if present in a specific game your running. Also they have a GPU Scaling bar exactly like the nvidia one and it works flawlessly.

... oh yeah, it's freeware http://www.radeonpro.info/en-US/