SLI and Crossfire Performance Poll

[ATAG_Septic]

Originally Posted by JG52Krupi

Firstly no fanboy/whiner arguments here please.

So I am running a 5970 in my spec and cannot use fullscreen due to the large decrease in performance (pseudo fps 40-60/fullscreen fps 15-30).

I thought I would create a poll to determine what experience other sli/crossfire users are experiencing.

PLEASE LEAVE A POST STATING WHICH TYPE YOU USE, THANKS.

XFX 5970 BE 2gb, not overclocked despite the card having plently of potential as this does not seem to improve performance. No discernable difference between full-screen or psuedo (since last two patches) but I have v-sync on. X-fire display shows approx 30% on both GPUs.

After many many hours of testing i'll share my settings, which might be useful for those with similar hardware; i7 930@4ghz 6gb ram, opsys and game installed on SSD. Win 7, Catalyst 11.7.

I currently believe the best settings for me are;

Game settings; everything on full except SSAO and AA@ 2X, building detail and forest medium. Resolution set to 1776/1000@24fps (which subjectively looks great on my screen). I get no micro-stutters and really enjoy playing the game especially using some of the greatly appreciated work of campaign and mission builders. I turn off trees for on-line play and am only rarely troubled by sound bug.

[BlitzPig_fox]

I use a HD4870X2 and cannot get crossfire to activate.

[Welshman]

only way i got crossfire to work was to uninstall the CCC and use radeon pro, make a profile for CLOD using settings i saw on here , works ok except slight graphic bugs in the prop

[Purg]

Using two 570's in SLI with the driver before the latest (latest driver gives me strange artifacts in several games I play) and the 2nd card is being utilised up to ~40% but absolutely no change in FPS compared to when I disable SLI.

[FS~Phat]

5970 + 2 x 5870 (quad SLI) get great scaling with radeon pro lost planet profile in full screen mode. Introduces some stutters when there is a big texture swap on complex maps, but have recently learnt that this is because of the serial design of crossfire and the amount of bandwidth on the crossfire bridge.

Apparently the xfire bridge bandwidth is only designed for tri-fire when using maximum Vram. I would probably get a smoother result with trifire with this game as it uses all 1GB Vram and more, and because of the serial xfire bridge it cant swap all the textures out without a hitch!

Nvidia uses a parallel setup on their SLI bridge which reduces stutters for large texture swaps with large Vram games in SLI mode. Next upgrade for me will be quadsli GTX580 3GB cards or next gen Nvidia in Sept if its out in time.

[dash2099]

Originally Posted by BlitzPig_fox

I use a HD4870X2 and cannot get crossfire to activate.

I've had that issue when installing new ATI drivers. I always have to run the driver cleaner and blow away the leftover registry data (including the monitor device ID's or eyefinity doesnt work). Every ATI driver update install seems to end up as an hour long troubleshooting affair for me.

I miss those 3DFX days, these days its all unified driver packages and expecting end users to understand what tessallation is. It seems the graphics heavies attempted to simplify but only succeeded in over-complicating everything.