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Crossfire and Microstutter

singh_uk

singh_uk

singh_uk

Associate
Joined
28 Aug 2006
Posts
119
I am considering getting two 5850s in the near future considering that Fermi doesn't seem like it is going to offer particularly good value for money.

I have heard however that there is a problem with SLI/Crossfire whereby whilst the framerate appears high, there is still a juddering or stuttering which makes the FPS "feel" low?

Can anyone, especially those with CF-ed 5 series cards, tell me a little more about this and if it is a real issue?
 
I believe micro stuttering has been resolved since the 4***series?
I had done some testing a while back on a 4870X2, ill see if I can dig it out.
 
I believe this was only a problem when crossfire/SLI was first introduced and has been ironed out in later drivers, i certainly have no issues with my 4870x2 doing that and i'm sure many other people no longer have these issues - otherwise we wouldn't see so many crossfire/SLI rigs now :)
 
microstutter is still an slight issue, but nowhere near as bad as earlier reports on it made it out to be. It's probably not even noticeable on the 5 Series

I used to notice it on my 4850s around 30fps, not much above where I would be feeling bad framerates anyway.
 
I run 275 sli, not a problem, makes BFC2 run a lot smoother for me,
even tho it's only DX 10. but does a great job maxed @ 1920 x 1200 with vsync on :)
 
Ben-Irvine93 said:
But couldn't that be becasue your using a 5870 with an 5970? I know you can do it and it will work fine, 3 5870 chips, but if you did 5870 cf, then you wouldnt notice it? If you get what I mean?
Click to expand...

the 5870 isn't being used at the moment mate. i use eyefinity and CFx is borked still...

i just use the 5970 atm
 
early drivers for a card tend to have it, but it gets minimized now, also the fact that games tend to support more than one card a lot better than before.

I had it on a few games when i went quad from dual, but driver tweaking fixed it, and then just newer drivers fixed it. But yea, 99% of games are fine on dual gpu now, just make sure to keep your drivers relatively up to date as they will optimize/make compatable xfire/sli with the game.

(I am assuming ati do that in their drivers in a similar way that nvidia do?
 
Microstutter is generally an issue with mismatched cards - and even then there usually has to be a ~20% performance differential to notice it and ATI have taken steps with their drivers to minimize the effect, nVidia don't even allow mismatched cards.

There have been issues with specific setups i.e. the 9800GX2 had a tendancy to suffer from "mictostutter" but this was due to a hardware issue rather than classic uneven frame times.
 
I def get microstutter on my dual 3870s. I appreciate the cards are getting on now, but hopefully any bugs on the common code of the drivers would have been sorted out by now! Running 10.3s, same with 10.2 and so on. It's quite noticable in some games (eg MW2) when the framerate drops below 60 fps.
 
I've not noticed any on my cf5770's, i mainly play fps and a lot of dirt2 using the 10.3a and the crossfire profiles. Seems more prominant on older cards.
 
OrphanBoy said:
I def get microstutter on my dual 3870s. I appreciate the cards are getting on now, but hopefully any bugs on the common code of the drivers would have been sorted out by now! Running 10.3s, same with 10.2 and so on. It's quite noticable in some games (eg MW2) when the framerate drops below 60 fps.
Click to expand...

It was the ATI 38xx cards that first kicked off the whole microstutter issue - and then certain parties tried to tar all multi GPU solutions with the same brush, but I thought ATI had fixed that in their drivers so you shouldn't really be seeing any - check both cards are running the same clock speed when in 3D.

Tho MW2 isn't a good benchmark - if your playing it online with a host player who has low fps even if they have a good connection you will get very stuttery gameplay - which will be even more noticeable at lower fps.
 
There is a theory going around that if you have any monitoring Gadgets, the polling interval can cause what appears to be a microstutter every few seconds, I was getting the odd frame stutter on my single 5850 till i closed down the GPU Monitorgadget, now i use the MSI monitor instead and so far, so good :)
 
For most games I have noticed little, if any stuttering. When playing Fear 2 and the DLC it was the complete opposite as when you turned in one direction the fps went from say around 30 ish to 60, which 'felt' fine. However, once you spun round the other way it would drop back down to 30 or so again. This was quite irritating. Once the DLC came out and I got a similar performance issue, I did start to wonder if this was to be a common occurrence.

Fortunately not. :)
 
UKDTweak said:
There is a theory going around that if you have any monitoring Gadgets, the polling interval can cause what appears to be a microstutter every few seconds, I was getting the odd frame stutter on my single 5850 till i closed down the GPU Monitorgadget, now i use the MSI monitor instead and so far, so good :)
Click to expand...

Windows sidebar/gadgets apparently cause this issue too.
 
I have crossfire 5870's and i've only ever noticed it on the heaven benchmark but nothing on anything else. Not really an issue as such. I just wish they'd sort out the hdmi drivers and the low core clock when playing 1080p movies and music on tv. There's way it can be fixed tho, just a pain.
 
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