• Competitor rules

    Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.

6870 crossfire poor performance BF3

Greg0986

Greg0986

Greg0986

Associate
Joined
2 Sep 2010
Posts
2,049
Location
Somerset
Hello all,

I am using 2 6870's in crossfire and when I play BF3, at 1080p maxed settings, I get 50-60fps. Both cards are at stock. This is fine except it fluctuates tremendously. On Operation Firestorm, I get 60fps, then it shoots down to 10fps and then back up to 60fps.

I am on driver version 12.1 with the latest CAP's. What gets me is that a certain someone on youtube (Tejbz) is recording at 60fps while playing at 1080p max settings, and he is getting no lag. When I try and record at 1080p while playing, it is utterly unbearable. Is it to do with the drivers? The amount of available RAM? Should I upgrade or wait?

Cheers :D
 
Turn off Ambient Occlusion and lower the MSAA.
Should run a lot better, as I ran perfectly on my 6870s with those settings, I assume they reach a VRAM limitation as my 7950 which isn't as fast is able to perform more consistently with its 3GB VRAM.
 
VRAM probably, you only have 1GB and BF3 regularly exceeds this at 1920x1080 with high settings. As said, turn off MSAA if its on or lower the texture setting.
 
I found ambient occlusion to incur the biggest FPS inconsistency.
Also, disable hyperthreading or enable/disable core parking, as the 2600k as been known on some set ups to have an issue with BF3 due to HT.
 
As said 1GB at 1080p and max IQ is gonna cause some buffering to system ram, this can and will cause in game stutters and FPS drop. kill the differed AA and run BF3 with desktop composition disabled, this will save you a good 100mb of vram, more with AA off. Running mesh quality at high will save ram as well, the rest of the IQ settings make little impact on Vram usage.
 
Last edited:
WOW, a lot of great replies. I have turned ambient occlusion off and it has increased the fps quite a but but it makes it look ugly :p I turned MSAA off and it made the FPS increase by about 10.

What still gets me is how Tejbs can record at 60fps, max settings and get no visual lag. It almost makes me think he is lying about being maxed out.

Cheers for all the replies guys. :)
 
Set the Ambient Occlusion to the send value, as that doesn't affect the frames too much, but may increase IQ?
HBAO and SSAO don't look vastly differently from when I was on my 6870 Crossfire.
 
Nymins said:
VRAM probably, you only have 1GB and BF3 regularly exceeds this at 1920x1080 with high settings. As said, turn off MSAA if its on or lower the texture setting.
Click to expand...

Yup - I've seen max vram usage @ 1700mb+ on a couple of maps. That's only @ 1920x1200 as well.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom