Is Eyefinity + Crossfire Possible?

^ just did some testing.

In crossfire or single card with single monitor, vsync gave BC2 mouse feel a nasty "lag" feeling Ive felt in most games when vsync is turned on. I like my mouse at 2000dpi and 75% in windows, twitchy if you will, and vsync is always a no for me.

If i maxed out the settings with everything except vsync on I could get dips into the 80's sometimes and it didnt have that stutter to it eyefinity does in the 80's, I dont know what that says.
 
SoniCraze said:
So this is no good, I want/need a faster card for my eyefinity, two gpu's is out of the question. Fermi needs 2 cards for "eyefinity" so cant do that, ATI's refresh will probably just be 1000mhz clocked cypress but I OC there anyway so no gain. I don't really care for more AA and eyecandy since I mostly play online so the 2gb 5870's don't appeal to me at all, doesn't seem they will give me any more total fps. Just wish I had someone to give my $$ to and could get a faster single gpu that can push 3 monitors.
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Try a 5970?
 
Could the 5970 be running out of bandwidth on a 16x PCI-e lane? I mean, wouldn't a single 5970 running on a 16x lane be running into the same bottlenecks that two 5870's running on a 8x lane are?

If so, maybe the only real solution would be to drop the 5970 and instead have 5870's that are each running on a 16x lane.
 
Well i have a 5970 with dual monitors but not running in eyefinity. Now my problem with BFBC2 is that i get these bitty micro stutters that are very annoying, i thought i had fixed it by disabling 1 of my sound cards but its still there. I have not tried removing 1 monitor and playing with only one, as i dont want the answer to be, that thats the way its going to have to be to get smooth game play.

I am hoping in the next drivers, 10.4 they may be able to smooth some of this stuff out, or with the next patch update for bfbc2 as this is very annoying to play with. If things dont smoothen out soon though, i am going to end up selling my 5970
 
I hate to keep harping on this in every thread....

But, BC2 is still buggy as shit. I wouldn't think of using that game as a litmus test for how good a video card or drivers are at doing anything.
 
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I know the game is buggy, but its just weird to me that some people can play it with no problems and others cant, and yes i know diff hardware this diff hardware that, but i dont think thats the case in my situation, i want to say it has something to do with my second monitor just acting as an extension.
 
Sotorious said:
i want to say it has something to do with my second monitor just acting as an extension.
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Probably just your HD 5970. My bro has two monitors and is using a HD 5770. He or I don't see any sort of micro-stutter issue with BC2.
 
Raap said:
Could the 5970 be running out of bandwidth on a 16x PCI-e lane? I mean, wouldn't a single 5970 running on a 16x lane be running into the same bottlenecks that two 5870's running on a 8x lane are?

If so, maybe the only real solution would be to drop the 5970 and instead have 5870's that are each running on a 16x lane.
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No the 5970 wouldn't suffer the same bandwidth limit as 2 cards in a x8/x8 configuration as the 2 gpus on the one card have a fast connection between them on the PCB.
 
i thought ATI ditched the GPU to GPU direct communication channel on the 5xxx chips, said so in the anand review.

the chips might have lower latency, but not faster or more bandwidth.
 
So I sold my 2nd 5870, running just 1 @ about half the frame as crossfire but plays 2x smoother.
 
Thanks to this thread I just now realized, after about a year running crossfire with two 4870s that crossfire itself has been the bane of my problems. Every high end game I've played felt laggy even when I had well above 30 fps. Every damn one of them I had to turn down the settings to get around 60 fps before the lagginess would go away.

Yesterday I yanked one of my 4870s from my system and lo and behold, BFBC2 plays smooth at 1920x1200 with almost all settings on high. No longer do I get into an intense firefight and feel like I'm lagging around when my frames drop below 50.

I had the same problem with Fallen Earth and today I jump into the game with every setting on high including 8xAA and it's running smooth as butter even in the towns. Before I had to turn most of the settings off because it felt so laggy.

I remember having all kinds of lagging issues with Warhammer Online before I quit and I'm certain that it's the same thing here as well.

I'm just dumbfounded that my crossfire setup was doing that. I was seriously wondering how people could play games at only 40 or 50 fps when it felt so laggy.

Is crossfire that screwed up? There has to be a fix for this, right?
 
I only get microstuttering / lag with eyefinity crossfire.

Anyway, tried the 10.5 leaked drivers today and still no luck. As jittery and laggy as ever...
 
Hi, i'm new here but have the same issues everyone else seems to be having. One 5870 is ok (still some stutter) in eyefinity, 2 5870s are not ok (fps might be 150+ but the stutter is really bad). Single screen crossfire works well - much less stutter, very playable. By the way this is on a P55 board so 8x 8x.

Does anyone run MSI afterburner to monitor the cards. I noticed that when in eyefinity with crossfire the primary card is fluctuating between about 40 and 80% while the secondary card remains at 99% the entire time. This was with no vsync and no frame limit. Is that normal?

Tried enabling vsync, locks at 120 but lots of momentary slow down, while the fps didn't move from 120, this showed the same type of peaky usage in MSI. Also tried capping the frame rate at 83, both cards then ran around 60% usage and the stutter was significantly reduced, not gone but better. Still damn irritating. I'm almost to the point of selling both my atis and get one or two of nvidias new cards when they eventually appear back on the market.
 
Sotorious said:
Well i have a 5970 with dual monitors but not running in eyefinity. Now my problem with BFBC2 is that i get these bitty micro stutters that are very annoying, i thought i had fixed it by disabling 1 of my sound cards but its still there. I have not tried removing 1 monitor and playing with only one, as i dont want the answer to be, that thats the way its going to have to be to get smooth game play.

I am hoping in the next drivers, 10.4 they may be able to smooth some of this stuff out, or with the next patch update for bfbc2 as this is very annoying to play with. If things dont smoothen out soon though, i am going to end up selling my 5970
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I had the same issue with dual monitors and the 5970 while not running Eyefinity. After disabling the second monitor, or rather disconnecting it, the issues went away.
 
After hearing what Nephrinn had to say about his 4870, I tend to wonder if there will be a"quick fix" anytime soon. I'm a bit of a noob to crossfire, but it seems like quite the crapshoot where it only kicks in with a few games, and when or IF it actually does, there's a good chance you'll get stutters, jutters, ripping, tearing, and farts.
 
Just to update my EF CF situation: I've given up. Have just listed my 1 week old 5970 and will shortly list my second 5870 once a friend lets me know if he needs it for troubleshooting or not.

Gave up today after trying those leaked 10.5 drivers which didn't improve the situation at all. Single screen was always blisteringly fast but CrossfireX with eyefinity was a failure with stuttering and lag. Didn't matter which game I tried: BC2, UT3, Crysis Warhead, COD4 (although it wasn't too bad), Mount & Blade:Warband - the result was the same with eyefinity. At one stage I thought it was the x8/x8 bandwidth limitation with 2 cards so tried a 5970 - same stuttering mess :(

1 GPU runs eyefinity like a dream in comparison. At low settings CF EF was pretty decent but as soon as the settings went up the stuttering / lag became an issue.

I know some have reported their EF CF situation is fine but I would encourage them to compare it to the experience of single screen CF or 1 GPU eyefinity. A friend who had previously told me his 5970 in eyefinity was smooth now tells me he notices the stuttering after gaming on a single screen for a while (he had CTD issues in BC2 so was troubleshooting with single screen play).

This is very dissapointing indeed. I could maybe understand Ati having trouble properly implementing eyefinity in every crossfire situation with 2 cards but the fact that the 5970 has the same issue is inexcuseable IMO. As far as I'm concerned crossfire and eyefinity is broken. There's no point having higher fps if the game doesn't feel as smooth as 1 GPU.
 
UPS is dropping off 2x 5870 E6 2GB models for me today. I will be testing them at 5760x1200 on my classy which will do full 16x/16x. I'll report back if I have the same bad time everyone else is having.
 
My 2 cents:

I bought 2 5970's and 3 1920x1080 monitors for my eyefinity setup. The monitors arrived late, so for a while I was running my 5970's in crossfire and had no problems what-so-ever in BFBC2, AVP, or Crysis on a single display.

I get my monitors and try eyefinity+crossfire (3 portrait) and BC2 stutters and the screen flickers. AVP is near unplayable with stuttering and horrible FPS.

I disabled crossfire and AVP runs perfectly smooth, BC2 doesn't stutter but the screen still flickers.

For me it seems to be somehow linked to eyefinity resolutions AND crossfire, because with crossfire and 1 1920x1080 display it ran fine, and with 1 5970 and 3520x1920 it works fine (minus the flickering which is a known issue with BC2) but with crossfire and eyefinity everything goes to hell.
 
Yup, i'd say the same. EF+CF is not working well enough. Even people with extremely powerful i7s are having microstutter issues. I wil be selling my 2 5870s. Not convinced that any driver update can fix it, might be hardware (crossfire bridge maybe). Talk about disapointing.

What are the other options for tripplhead setups? Only ones i know of are trippleheadtogo??? Or can two nvidia cards (like GTX295s) run three screens without the need for another component (2 screens on one, 1 on the other). I'm ruling out 470/80s as they run hotter than the earths core and extremely hard to find.
 
Nvidia is/was supposed to release a driver update to enable "Nvidia Surround" on the GT200 series cards. Don't know when/if that's going to happen.
 
I'm going to be brief. I spent the last four hours testing eyefinity with xfired 5870 E6 cards, both being fed full 16x/16x.

I did notice very slight barely detectable stuttering when the FPS dipped below 90. Stutter became easily noticeable at 60FPS and lower. I don't see this as any new revelation. In my experience, this is the case with any dual-card application. It's great, so long as you can keep your FPS above 100. Good luck doing that in the newest games on eyefinity size resolutions.
 
lowres said:
Yup, i'd say the same. EF+CF is not working well enough. Even people with extremely powerful i7s are having microstutter issues. I wil be selling my 2 5870s. Not convinced that any driver update can fix it, might be hardware (crossfire bridge maybe). Talk about disapointing.

What are the other options for tripplhead setups? Only ones i know of are trippleheadtogo??? Or can two nvidia cards (like GTX295s) run three screens without the need for another component (2 screens on one, 1 on the other). I'm ruling out 470/80s as they run hotter than the earths core and extremely hard to find.
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Yeah I agree that a driver update is probably not going to fix it. Why not just sell 1 5870? I only have 1 in now and the experience is pretty good (well compared to the crossfirex mess). But for me I can run the games I play at high or near high settings and the experience is very good indeed. I don't think there are any better triplehead experiences to be had than a 5870 (1gb or 2gb). TripleheadToGo has a 5040x1050 limit and is expensive.

Rock&Roll said:
I'm going to be brief. I spent the last four hours testing eyefinity with xfired 5870 E6 cards, both being fed full 16x/16x.

I did notice very slight barely detectable stuttering when the FPS dipped below 90. Stutter became easily noticeable at 60FPS and lower. I don't see this as any new revelation. In my experience, this is the case with any dual-card application. It's great, so long as you can keep your FPS above 100. Good luck doing that in the newest games on eyefinity size resolutions.
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Thanks for the feedback. Your observations match mine pretty much. Explains why COD4 and HAWX ran pretty well while UT3, Crysis Warhead, Far Cry 2 and BC2 stuttered badly with settings up. Surely you are dissapointed with the result? I would be. You going to keep just one of those E6 cards?
 
Rock&Roll said:
I'm going to be brief. I spent the last four hours testing eyefinity with xfired 5870 E6 cards, both being fed full 16x/16x.

I did notice very slight barely detectable stuttering when the FPS dipped below 90. Stutter became easily noticeable at 60FPS and lower. I don't see this as any new revelation. In my experience, this is the case with any dual-card application. It's great, so long as you can keep your FPS above 100. Good luck doing that in the newest games on eyefinity size resolutions.
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How was the BC2 experience?
 
Haha. I found the first game that doesn't stutter doing xfire + eyefinity below 60fps.

What you ask?

Trackmania United Forever :D
 
Spree said:
Yeah I agree that a driver update is probably not going to fix it. Why not just sell 1 5870? I only have 1 in now and the experience is pretty good (well compared to the crossfirex mess). But for me I can run the games I play at high or near high settings and the experience is very good indeed. I don't think there are any better triplehead experiences to be had than a 5870 (1gb or 2gb). TripleheadToGo has a 5040x1050 limit and is expensive.
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Your feedback has saved me alot of time and money and is appreciated. Since returning my second 5850, I decided to oc my current card. It made a big difference at this same 5040 x 1050 resolution. I can even play BC2 smoothly now with settings on high. I get a steady 84fps in MW2 with all settings maxed inc. AAx4.
 
soekev said:
How was the BC2 experience?
Click to expand...

I just got around to testing that. And I was surprised. Running BC2 at 6028x1200 (Bezel compensated 5760x1200), All settings turned high, HBAO off, 1x AA, 16x AF. vsync off 10.3B drivers.

Most Testing was done on an empty server, so as to maintain some consistency in results. Though, these are not real benchmarks.....

@ 5040x1050 Single card, averaging 55-60fps. No stutter

@ 6028x1200 Single card, averaging 34-40fps. No stutter. But not smooth.....

@ 5040x1050 Dual card, averaging around 75 fps in high-detail areas (Lowest FPS I could get). I could detect no stutter.

@ 6020x1200 Dual card, averaging around 63 fps in high detail areas (Lowest FPS I could get). I could detect no stutter (surprised)


The experience has remained mostly the same when I play on a 24 or 16 man server that doesn't lag. FPS will dip (about 5-8 FPS less than other times) in instances where there's a lot of smoke and debris from explosions.

I'm quite surprised, what with almost everyone having problems with BC2 in terms of dual-card performance as well as with eyefinity. I am having absolutely zero issues with BC2 running xfired-eyefinity.
 
Rock&Roll said:
Haha. I found the first game that doesn't stutter doing xfire + eyefinity below 60fps.

What you ask?

Trackmania United Forever :D
Click to expand...

Ha, i found rFactor is pretty much ok too. with 16x aa 16x af and adaptive aa sampling @6036X1080. Plays really smooth with crossfire. Lol. Also found fairly decent benefit in FSX locked at 30fps (possibly to slow to even notice stuttering. Could run much higher detail than with 1 card, not 16x aa though...

@Spree, i may do that, i have 3 options right now:
1. keep one of the cards and possibly put the money towards an i7 1366 2xPCIex16 system.
2. or keep the 2 cards and sell all my 1156 bits to fund 1366 with crossfired 5870s,
3. or sell both and get a 4gb 5970 if/when they appear, running on the 1156 rig.
4. or do nothing and wait for ATI to sort this out

Not sure if the i7 will make much of difference in reality, but reading tom's reviews of their oc'd i5 vs oc'd i7 (1500buck system builder marathon things) the i7 system really stretches its legs.
 
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Mayenard said:
Your feedback has saved me alot of time and money and is appreciated. Since returning my second 5850, I decided to oc my current card. It made a big difference at this same 5040 x 1050 resolution. I can even play BC2 smoothly now with settings on high. I get a steady 84fps in MW2 with all settings maxed inc. AAx4.
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You're welcome. Your's and others' feedback have been very informative as well. Also going back to your first post did you end up actually getting eyefinity enabled under CFX before ditching the other card? What you clock your 5850 up to? Those are some nice settings you're playing at. I should try all high at 5040x1050 (currently medium at 5760x1200).

Rock&Roll said:
I just got around to testing that. And I was surprised. Running BC2 at 6028x1200 (Bezel compensated 5760x1200), All settings turned high, HBAO off, 1x AA, 16x AF. vsync off 10.3B drivers.

Most Testing was done on an empty server, so as to maintain some consistency in results. Though, these are not real benchmarks.....

@ 5040x1050 Single card, averaging 55-60fps. No stutter

@ 6028x1200 Single card, averaging 34-40fps. No stutter. But not smooth.....

@ 5040x1050 Dual card, averaging around 75 fps in high-detail areas (Lowest FPS I could get). I could detect no stutter.

@ 6020x1200 Dual card, averaging around 63 fps in high detail areas (Lowest FPS I could get). I could detect no stutter (surprised)


The experience has remained mostly the same when I play on a 24 or 16 man server that doesn't lag. FPS will dip (about 5-8 FPS less than other times) in instances where there's a lot of smoke and debris from explosions.

I'm quite surprised, what with almost everyone having problems with BC2 in terms of dual-card performance as well as with eyefinity. I am having absolutely zero issues with BC2 running xfired-eyefinity.
Click to expand...

Given what you're said before I guess those BC2 results are not surprising. In the dual card situations you're keeping your fps above 60 (the 63 and 75 you gave were minimums?). I think your powerful CPU is making that a reality as BC2 loves a CPU with long legs. If you were using a 3.6ghz core2quad like me you would probably notice stutter as the fps would go into the 50s at high settings.

BC2 is an interesting specimen as even at ultra high resolutions it still appears to grave more CPU when you would think that it would only want more GPU power.
 
Spree said:
You're welcome. Your's and others' feedback have been very informative as well. Also going back to your first post did you end up actually getting eyefinity enabled under CFX before ditching the other card? What you clock your 5850 up to? Those are some nice settings you're playing at. I should try all high at 5040x1050 (currently medium at 5760x1200).
Click to expand...

No, it never happened. One screen and crossfire worked great. Creating a group xfired wouldn't work.. I was able to add my TV as a fourth to the group if I wanted, but in the end the 5850 was used for powering the TV as an extension, so I returned it.

I oc'd it to 950/1250 at 1.2V with ease. I could probably go a bit further, but not much without losing stability or cranking voltage. It hasn't crashed on me once with this oc. :D
 
Mayenard said:
No, it never happened. One screen and crossfire worked great. Creating a group xfired wouldn't work.. I was able to add my TV as a fourth to the group if I wanted, but in the end the 5850 was used for powering the TV as an extension, so I returned it.

I oc'd it to 950/1250 at 1.2V with ease. I could probably go a bit further, but not much without losing stability or cranking voltage. It hasn't crashed on me once with this oc. :D
Click to expand...

Very nice OC indeed - 31% is exceptional. I can only do 940 on my 5870 but that's with 1.27v. So i just run 900/1200 with stock volts and keep it nice and cool (maxes around 70C) with custom fan curve in afterburner.

Rock&Roll - have you tried Warhead with those 2gb cards? I'm guessing you can run enthusiast shaders (and enthusiast everything else)?
 
Spree said:
Very nice OC indeed - 31% is exceptional. I can only do 940 on my 5870 but that's with 1.27v. So i just run 900/1200 with stock volts and keep it nice and cool (maxes around 70C) with custom fan curve in afterburner.
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Thanks. Afterburner is a great program. Since I removed that other 5850, I'm using a Vantec spectrum fan card to fill that space and keeps things below 70°C under load. It's the most use I've gotten out of a PCI slot in a long time.
 
Hmm with the length of a 5870 I don't think a spectrum fan card would be long enough to reach the 5870's fan intake.
 
i'm doing 5040 x 1050 with two 5770's. It works, I can't say how well though.
 
Contary to my earlier post, rFactor is indeed still crap with CF+EF, just like every other game i have attempted to play doesn't matter if the frames are over 60, still have stuttering. I'm at a loss of why it could be so smooth on 1 screen and total garbage on 3, i'm also at a loss as to why a few people are doing just fine. Unless it really does come down to PCIe speed.
 
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