Hey chaps I just added a 2nd 6970 to my PC, and put them in crossfire, I updated my AMD drivers, and CrossfireX was now enabled in the catalyst settings, but when playing games, I get almost no benefit. I've gone from 60-62 to 70 in iracing, but nothing at all in a few other racing games I play. So, what have I cocked up, or is this just a 'meh' moment?
That's the story of using more than one GPU - sometimes it scales, and sometimes it doesn't... and ATI have never really excelled in the multi-GPU scaling department. With GTX460 SLI I get 100% scaling in some games (Crysis being one) and also in some benchmarks, but some games make absolutely no use of the 2nd GPU at all.
Yeah, unless the game is written to take advantage of X-Fire, and ATI have enabled the game in their drives you won't see any benefit. Some games (say BF3), will scale to almost 100% though.
Have you ticked the Catalyst AI function? If you dont select that you will see no benefit at all. I have mine on advanced setting, as it forces the cards to render alternate frames, and while my max fps barely changes from the standard setting, my minimum fps are much higher.
The 'enable' crossfirex checkbox? That's checked. I'll look for the advanced option you're on about later
I doubt there are many racing games that take advantage of even one 6970. You may find you are limited by the number of CPU cores the game can use.
Get RadeonPro and tweak the profile yourself. Try Alternative Frame Rendering (AFR) as your first step as that often works but don't be afraid to try games that are similar in nature (F1, grid) and all the different modes of crossfire. Maybe one of those will work (it often does) and give you better scaling. Its also worth noting that in other games you need to watch for negative scaling. Sometimes (its happened at least 4 times through the autumn game releases) you will see games perform very poorly with the default crossfire setup. Turning it off (RadeonPro again) will dramatically improve performance until a profile comes out. Welcome to the world of crossfire, remember to jump on every new profile and driver release you are now going to need them.
Right now AMD GPU's scale better than Nvidias by a good margin, they are well ahead in that department. Though it is true that not all games will show improvements.
Have you installed the Catalyst Application Profiles (CAP)? You need these for crossfire. +1 for RadeonPro also. great tool.
Catalyst Control Centre - Gaming -3D Application Settings, below Anisotropic Filtering. Make sure it is un-ticked ie. enabled.
I added a second saphire 5770 for crossfire because I had read good reviews about ATI/AMD cards and the 5770 in crossfire. I am glad I did. It works a dream. I simply un-installed the ccc/video drivers completey and then re-installed and it worked straight away with crossfire enabled. Not all software/games will be crossfire or SLI compatible, but in the ones that are I have found 90%+ improvements. I get the crossfire logo appearing at the top, right-hand corner of my screen whenever it is used (you can turn that off in CCC). I also run afterburner with the GPU usage and temps for both cards displayed at the top, left-hand corner. It works a treat. Much better than I anticipated in both XP and Win 7 64-bit. *TIP: Try removing your original 6970 and use just the new one for an hour to make sure the second card you bought is working fine!
Just run afterburner - 99% on gpu1, 80% on gpu2. Eta - after playing for a bit longer, upto 99% on gpu1 and 98% on gpu2. still not seeing any improvements in framerates, except perhaps actually _less_ in a few older titles.
As I said, "*TIP: Try removing your original 6970 and use just the new one for an hour to make sure the second card you bought is working fine!"
This is my mobo - it only has 2 pcie slots, so I presumed they were ok - can you check for me? http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=3882#sp Ta!
