2x R9-290, when did crossfire become terrible?

[Asa]

Hi!

I used to play with crossfire 290s. Certain issues pushed me over to the other side (primarily HDMI 2.0, but also things like heat, noise, and profile problems), but while I had my crossfire setup I loved the performance.

I broke my replacement card, so I'm back on the 290s while I wait for Polaris/Pascal. I fired up a few games like Witcher 3 and Ryse to see how the crossfire profiles had improved, and in most cases I found performance was terrible. Geralt's shoulder pads don't flicker any more, but the game visibly crawls.

A quick look at afterburner shows that while crossfire is working, the 2nd GPU isn't really doing anything.

So... when did crossfire become terrible? Is there a particular highpoint driver version I could look to roll back to for Witcher 3 in particular?

 

[Asa]

I have seen SLI and Crossfire have had pretty poor support in a lot of recent games, but I'm mostly looking at older games that used to work well and trying to figure out why they don't any more.

I do have hairworks enabled on Witcher 3, and probably should limit the tesselation if that's still necessary. But when I played Witcher 3 before I had hairworks, and I had good usage on both GPUs. Now I get GPU1 maxed out, and GPU2 occassionally getting involved for a fraction of a second if it feels like it.

What drivers are you testing with? I'm on 16.2.1 hotfix