Questions regarding Trifire

[Pycnopodia]

I purchased a new beefy computer to play World of Warcraft but made a mistake in picking the video card. I bought Radeon 5970 but are only able to utilize one of the GPU (in wow) and Im severely bottlenecked by this as Innerspace (the app I use to render wow) does not work with Crossfire enabled and 5970 cant disable this (disabling AI doesnt disable the internal Crossfire).

I want to add in a second card (Radeon 5850) and use this to help render some instances of Warcraft. My GPU usage is 80% for one instance of WoW with max graphics and around 20% when graphics are set to a low level so according to my estimations I will be using around 80% of both cards resources if I have 5970+5850 (while one GPU on 5970 is inactive due to the liimiation).


My questions are as follows:

1. Can I disable the Trifire and run games on only the 5970`s Crossfire for compability? (In case Trifire works poorly in games).

2. I have 3 monitors in landscape mode connected to my 5970, if I add in a 5850 I will connect the rightmost monitor to both cards (5970 by DVI and 5850 by HDMI) and a projector to just the 5850 (by DVI).
Does this mean I need to disable Eyefinity and play WoW on dual screen in order to use both graphics cards?

3. Ill only be using tops 3 monitors at the same time but will having the projector conneccted to the 5850 let me switch between Eyefinity 3x1 and single monitor+big screen through tinkering in Catalyst Control Center? I want to be able to switch between using monitors and the big screen without moving around cables to different outputs

Im also considering just selling my 5970 and buying two new 5850`s or something, that is guaranteed to work and there wont be any "HAH GOTCHA" when installing it like with my 5970 performing worse then a single 5870 in wow.

This has been troubling me for a while as its kinda lame to have a brand new computer perform like some old outdated hardware and having to reduce graphics and resolution, the solution to this annoyance doesnt cost too much I just dont want to be cought in an endless cycle of replacing hardware with new hardware that also dont work as intended/planned.

Please help me

 

[Pycnopodia]

Updated signature with specs and OS.

 

[Dark Shroud]

Have you thought of just over clocking the 5970 to match the GPU speed of the 5870? You should also be able to clock it even higher than the 5870's stock setting.

If you are going to sell the 5970 do so shortly before the HD 6000 series drops. And you could always take a look at the Asus ROG Matrix 5870 with 2GB of ram. Depending on how much you make selling the 5970.

 

[Juggafat]

That is one beefy WoW rig.

 

[Pycnopodia]

Have you thought of just over clocking the 5970 to match the GPU speed of the 5870? You should also be able to clock it even higher than the 5870's stock setting.

If you are going to sell the 5970 do so shortly before the HD 6000 series drops. And you could always take a look at the Asus ROG Matrix 5870 with 2GB of ram. Depending on how much you make selling the 5970.

Overclocking is an option but I dont think its needed for now. The extra performance gained just cant make up for the loss of performance from an entire GPU.

I doubt alot of people can answer my questions regarding Trifire so I might just take a blank shot and buy a 5850, insert it and see what happens. If it lets me have my projector connected to the computer and switch between that and the monitors through catalyst CC then that alone will be enough reason to purchase it.

 

[GotNoRice]

Not familiar with "Innerspace" but I know that when you run WoW without the junk 3rd party middle-ware it is fully crossfire capable. In fact, crossfire utilization in WoW is actually pretty amazing. If I crank up the view distance and fly around Northrend near Dalaran I will actually see all 4 GPUs at 95%+. That is better than most games when it comes to crossfire utilization.

People say that WoW doesn't take much power to run these days but the game isn't the same as it was back in 2004 and it's sad the number of people who play the game and think <10 fps is normal.

 

[Pycnopodia]

There are some demanding areas for sure, some computers can handle old content fine with 60 fps while the newer zones turn into a slideshow. Its weird really since I think many of the more beautiful zonea are in the old world.

I havent been able to utilize both my GPUs in WoW by any means yet, I know it supports it so it may be my program (GPUz) that just fails to report correctly.

I ordered a 5850 and will just see what happens, I hope my psu has enough power (750w). If it works I will be able to tell Innerspace to let GPU1 handle one instance of WoW while GPU2 handles the rest.

 

[Zurginator]

WoW only takes a lot of power because it's horribly optimized and running on the same '04 engine.

If I remember right, it actually still doesn't scale at all with SLI or CFX. It also only supports 2 CPU cores, so it's pretty easy to bottleneck there.

 

[GotNoRice]

If I remember right

You remembered wrong.

I know SLI works fine at least in 2-way configuration and Crossfire works great all the way up to 4 GPUs.

http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,...est-DirectX-11-graphics-card/Reviews/?page=10

4870x2 performing on-par with the 5870 and the 5970 being significantly faster than the 5870 are both indications of Crossfire working and scaling properly.

As far as CPU utilization. WoW currently uses up to 3 CPU cores, though I believe the 2nd and 3rd thread are mainly uses for model loading.

The game engine has evolved considerably over the years. They completely revamped the shadows engine for one, added quite a bit of higher quality textures to the game, extended view distance, etc. They are also coming out with a new expansion soon which is supposedly going to make the game DirectX 11.

 

[Pycnopodia]

"Can it run Cryzis?"
"Yeah, but can it run WoW?"
=P

 

[Pycnopodia]

Overclocked my CPU, enabled HT and assigned all cores to all instances if WoW and it seems like performance jumped a bit.
Just got my 5850 card, will install it later. Just hope my psu can handle it 750w all

What do I do with crossfire bridge? Just plug it to connect both cards with each other?

 

[Galactica]

You remembered wrong.

I know SLI works fine at least in 2-way configuration and Crossfire works great all the way up to 4 GPUs.

http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,...est-DirectX-11-graphics-card/Reviews/?page=10

4870x2 performing on-par with the 5870 and the 5970 being significantly faster than the 5870 are both indications of Crossfire working and scaling properly.

As far as CPU utilization. WoW currently uses up to 3 CPU cores, though I believe the 2nd and 3rd thread are mainly uses for model loading.

The game engine has evolved considerably over the years. They completely revamped the shadows engine for one, added quite a bit of higher quality textures to the game, extended view distance, etc. They are also coming out with a new expansion soon which is supposedly going to make the game DirectX 11.

Not that i play wow but the engine is crappy and bad coding. Just because they add new textures does not mean they update the "engine" also the DX11 thing is that they use if for water reflections nothing more So no improvement what so ever.

Want to see a good engine and that is also an MMO here you go = http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3m3YKzntIw All Ingame graphics just some scripting in how the ships fly and cameramodes.

 

[vjcsmoke]

Questions regarding Trifire

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I purchased a new beefy computer to play World of Warcraft but made a mistake in picking the video card. I bought Radeon 5970 but are only able to utilize one of the GPU (in wow) and Im severely bottlenecked by this as Innerspace (the app I use to render wow) does not work with Crossfire enabled and 5970 cant disable this (disabling AI doesnt disable the internal Crossfire).

I want to add in a second card (Radeon 5850) and use this to help render some instances of Warcraft. My GPU usage is 80% for one instance of WoW with max graphics and around 20% when graphics are set to a low level so according to my estimations I will be using around 80% of both cards resources if I have 5970+5850 (while one GPU on 5970 is inactive due to the liimiation).


My questions are as follows:

1. Can I disable the Trifire and run games on only the 5970`s Crossfire for compability? (In case Trifire works poorly in games).

2. I have 3 monitors in landscape mode connected to my 5970, if I add in a 5850 I will connect the rightmost monitor to both cards (5970 by DVI and 5850 by HDMI) and a projector to just the 5850 (by DVI).
Does this mean I need to disable Eyefinity and play WoW on dual screen in order to use both graphics cards?

3. Ill only be using tops 3 monitors at the same time but will having the projector conneccted to the 5850 let me switch between Eyefinity 3x1 and single monitor+big screen through tinkering in Catalyst Control Center? I want to be able to switch between using monitors and the big screen without moving around cables to different outputs

Im also considering just selling my 5970 and buying two new 5850`s or something, that is guaranteed to work and there wont be any "HAH GOTCHA" when installing it like with my 5970 performing worse then a single 5870 in wow.

This has been troubling me for a while as its kinda lame to have a brand new computer perform like some old outdated hardware and having to reduce graphics and resolution, the solution to this annoyance doesnt cost too much I just dont want to be cought in an endless cycle of replacing hardware with new hardware that also dont work as intended/planned.

Please help me

If you are getting poor performance with cross-fire you're going to get worse performance with tri-fire. ATI's crossfire driver support has been terribly broken. This is well documented if you read the forums. ATI's crossfire drivers got so bad that a pair of GTX460 SLI was able to beat a pair of 5870CF or a 5970 handily in real game benchmark testing done by [H].

I'm sorry to inform you this, but with ATI, more gpus does not mean a better experience. If anything you might just be adding more latency and choppiness to your system. But please let us know how it works out for you. Maybe ATI finally got their CFX drivers down right.

EDIT: New info update.
ATI has fixed some of their crossfirex issues and you can download CAP patch 10.8a and see if this helps you out. Article and DL at [H].
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2010/08/26/ati_crossfirex_application_profile_108a_performance

 

[GotNoRice]

Not that i play wow but the engine is crappy and bad coding. Just because they add new textures does not mean they update the "engine"

Sorry bro but when they completely revamped the shadows engine in the game that was a bit more than them adding new textures. I agree that few of the chances have been revolutionary like that rather than simply making adjustments to the engine to allow it to use more hardware, but it is still a lot different now than what you would have played with a fresh copy of the game from Nov 04.

also the DX11 thing is that they use if for water reflections nothing more So no improvement what so ever.

The DX11 changes in Cataclym will affect much more than just water, the screen-shots from the beta that were posted everywhere were simply using water reflection to showcase one of the new features. And even if it did only affect nothing but water I don't see how that wouldn't represent an improvement, as I believe there is going to be an entire water zone in cataclysm.

 

[GotNoRice]

If you are getting poor performance with cross-fire you're going to get worse performance with tri-fire. ATI's crossfire driver support has been terribly broken. This is well documented if you read the forums. ATI's crossfire drivers got so bad that a pair of GTX460 SLI was able to beat a pair of 5870CF or a 5970 handily in real game benchmark testing done by [H].

I'm sorry to inform you this, but with ATI, more gpus does not mean a better experience. If anything you might just be adding more latency and choppiness to your system. But please let us know how it works out for you. Maybe ATI finally got their CFX drivers down right.

While there are CF issues with some games WoW is not one of them.

OP is using ghetto-ass middleware which borderline violates the TOS of the game. It's used to control multiple characters at the same time so that you can do some really lame borderline cheating stuff in-game.

WoW has excellent crossfire support all the way up to quad GPU and if he wasn't running the game through the quasi-legitimate middleware I doubt he would be having any problems at all.

 

[Pycnopodia]

I plugged it in and it seems to be working fine but my PSU gotta be near its limit
Gonna do some extensive stress testing shortly, I already noticed the increased noise levels but only during heavy load so Im not bothered by it - just concerned that maybe the GPUs might overheat. There is practially no space at all between them and there is a killer xeno pro and asus d2x xonar card just above the top card and below the bottom card - both of these cards run pretty hot also.

If you are getting poor performance with cross-fire you're going to get worse performance with tri-fire. ATI's crossfire driver support has been terribly broken. This is well documented if you read the forums. ATI's crossfire drivers got so bad that a pair of GTX460 SLI was able to beat a pair of 5870CF or a 5970 handily in real game benchmark testing done by [H].

I'm sorry to inform you this, but with ATI, more gpus does not mean a better experience. If anything you might just be adding more latency and choppiness to your system. But please let us know how it works out for you. Maybe ATI finally got their CFX drivers down right.

EDIT: New info update.
ATI has fixed some of their crossfirex issues and you can download CAP patch 10.8a and see if this helps you out. Article and DL at [H].
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2010/08/26/ati_crossfirex_application_profile_108a_performance

There is no need to be sorry Im aware of the things you are saying
I need another individual GPU because I can only connect three displays to the 5970 and the 5850 will also alleviate some of the workload from the 5970 when playing WoW as Innerspace can select what GPU should render which window.

Im planning on disabling trifire for general gaming
But Ill give it a try anyway, maybe Im in for a surprise and it works for gaming as well.


GotNoRice, That is new to me and without evidence I will not take your word for it. All blue official forum posts I have seen have stated that Blizzard is fine with the use of such programs so long as nothing is automated. Innerspace is incapable of any kind of automation, every action requires user input.

 

[Pycnopodia]

This worked excellent btw!

With this new card installed and working I can:

- use my big screen without replugging any cables
- have all four displays enabled simultaneously
- run my main toon in WoW at almost the highest graphic settings (nerf shadow detail)
- let the 5850 render four WoW windows with slave toons
- let the 5970 render just my main toon
- render all five windows at the same resolution (1920x1200) for pixel perfect mouse broadcasting
- run slave toons with much higher background fps
- run slave toons with much higher graphic settings (used to be everything at absolute minimums)

- With Trifire enabled I am also able to play Dragon Age: Origins in Eyefinity, previously I didnt do this as I had to disable Frame Buffer Effects to get playable framerates and the game is unplayable without them

- Possible performance gains in other games
- Disable CrossfireX for whenever I want troublefree compability mode

GPU usage on my main is now around 45-50% with every setting maxed out except for shadows which is one notch below max. With shadows at max gpu usage rices to 95% right away and fps remains at 60 but will drop occasionally.


I pretty much just gambled on this working and it feels very good to finally get rid of this bottleneck and see the true potential of my hardware =)

 

[vjcsmoke]

glad it worked out for you. kind of weird to hear about this slave toons thing though. Are you multi-boxing wow? Do they allow that?

 

[Pycnopodia]

glad it worked out for you. kind of weird to hear about this slave toons thing though. Are you multi-boxing wow? Do they allow that?

Thanks, this feels like a brand new computer I should have just gone through with this ages ago

I do multibox but dont mistake it for boting, mboxing is allowed as long as you dont use any illegit 3rd party apps - typically hacks or bots.


Heres a video of it in action in case you are curious
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Nzn8aLYPGM&NR=1