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6990 & 6970 crossfire help

sparx1981

sparx1981

sparx1981

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Joined
9 May 2011
Posts
38
Hi guys,

I got a couple of new cards delivered yesterday. 1 6990 and a 6970. I've managed to get these setup in my rig and they work fine in Crossfire. Dirt 3 gets over 90fps at 6144 x 1152 and everything up as high as it could go.
That's exactly what I was hoping for.....

I've used MSI afterburner in the background and found that Dirt 3 uses all 3 GPU's. 6990 having 2 and the 6970 having 1...All three GPU are used in Metro 2033 (around 30fps with everything on at this resolution), Resident Evil 5 (over 100fps), Shift 2 - around 50 fps everything full and I assume others will be the similar.

Now the slightly bad news is I've found that other games aren't doing this. For example

Crysis 2 - GPU 1 never even gets used. 2 and 3 are pushing hard but number 1 just sits there doing nothing. I get about 30 - 40 fps with everything up full but high res textures off. If I turn these on the fps goes down to 18 - 25. Butt GPU 1 still doesn't do anything.

F1 2010 - GPU 1 sits there twiddling it's thumbs and doing nothing..... Like Crysis 2 all the work is being done by GPU 2 and 3. I still get good frame rates around 50 fps, but notice that it gets stuck for a second every now and then.. not good when driving at 200mph.

Is there something I can do to force all three GPU's to be used? Is anyone else having a similar experice or have any suggestions?

Thanks
 
Some games take advantage of CF set ups. Its an unusual set up you have, that may be the reason some games may not take to it.

Two normal 6970's have two cores, one per card and games can access each core per card easily, but with having two cards with one core on one card then two cores on another card, the game might not be programmed to use that sort of set up.

That is all I can come up with!
 
what board do you have? a board with only 16 PCI-express lanes (8x8x) could really struggle to cope.
 
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Gerard said:
Doesnt seem to have any hit for badboy or gareths setup, one of them is using a sandybridge platform.
Click to expand...

If you mean BaDBoY_uK then he's running a Sandy Bridge setup with a HD 6990 in a x16 speed slot and a HD 6970 in a x8 speed slot an a Gigabyte UD7 motherboard (NF200 chip).

He wouldn't experience a x8 speed slot bottlenecking a HD 6990 (if it does).
 
Surveyor said:
If you mean BaDBoY_uK then he's running a Sandy Bridge setup with a HD 6990 in a x16 speed slot and a HD 6970 in a x8 speed slot an a Gigabyte UD7 motherboard (NF200 chip).

He wouldn't experience a x8 speed slot bottlenecking a HD 6990 (if it does).
Click to expand...

I indeed use my 6990+6970 with an i7 2600k at 4.8GHz. In fact - despite poor airflow - I use the two 16x lanes and thus split 16x across the 6990. I have the 6970 in the top slot of my Gigabyte P67A-UD7.

However, when switching from 16x to 8x for the 6990 it doesn't really increase fps a whole amount. I tested Heaven 2.5 in both lane amounts - maybe 100 points added to 2900

Sparx, what is your setup? Have you got the 6970 or the 6990 in the top slot? What are the lanes of your mobo?

Use RadeonPro to drive GPU usage but these guys are right, some games love CF while some hate it. Metro is awesome. Dirt3 is awesome. Crysis 2 is a ******* console port crap game! :) :)
 
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Hi Badboy,

I'm running a P7P55d-e Pro, socket 1156 with an I7 870 Oc'd using the Asus TurboV Evo software to around 4Ghz.

The ram is 8gb running at 1600mhz.... it's single channel though as the stupid board wont allow it to run in dual. Only alternative is to get faster ram and run single channel.... or slower ram and run dual. Not sure if this would make much difference to performance though.

As for the Graphics card config.... the 6990 is in the top slot and the 6970 is in the lower slot. I haven't tried RadeonPro yet so I'll give that a go now.... does it make much difference?

Also what sort of performance are you getting with Metro? I know it's a beast graphically, but at 6368 x 1152 and everything up full (apart from tesselation I think) I'm only getting about 15 - 25 fps. Maybe this is normal due to the game?
 
crossfire and eyefinity is broken for some games, f1 2011 is one of them, just sold my second 6970 because of it. i bet it works with one card fine.
 
sparx1981 said:
Hi Badboy,

I'm running a P7P55d-e Pro, socket 1156 with an I7 870 Oc'd using the Asus TurboV Evo software to around 4Ghz.

The ram is 8gb running at 1600mhz.... it's single channel though as the stupid board wont allow it to run in dual. Only alternative is to get faster ram and run single channel.... or slower ram and run dual. Not sure if this would make much difference to performance though.

As for the Graphics card config.... the 6990 is in the top slot and the 6970 is in the lower slot. I haven't tried RadeonPro yet so I'll give that a go now.... does it make much difference?

Also what sort of performance are you getting with Metro? I know it's a beast graphically, but at 6368 x 1152 and everything up full (apart from tesselation I think) I'm only getting about 15 - 25 fps. Maybe this is normal due to the game?
Click to expand...

Firstly, change your sig mate. 400x75 picture or 4 lines of text. Admins here are little Hitlers about that sort of thing

Secondly, with most things maxed and 6068x1200 res, I get 50-70fps. All GPUs are used - thanks to their coders! Switch off DOF. It doesn't add much! Also turn down AA

I would recommend adding new hardware, given what you have said. You are bottlenecking it mate - you need CPU/MOBO/RAM capable of dealing with 3 GPUs

Let me know if it helps
 
Why another thread? I thought we got to the bottom of this with the first thread? Have you tried Badboy's suggestion from the other thread?
 
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