Crossfire help expert 6970 help please :(

[ashmanuk67]

Ok I done a thread abot six months ago regarding crossfire and BF2/Vietnam.
In these games I was getting 50ish GPU usage on crossfire using Afterburner and when I used a single card it was upto 95-99% usage.

I was asked on this forum to swop over the cards and see if I get the same result and any of my two cards in the primary slot gave me the same result 99%usage so both cards are good separately BUT together poor GPU scalling.

My motherboard says both Pci-e lanes are 16X and it says this within cats display driver.

Last night on BF3 I thought I would disable crossfire and see what goes, and I was amazed how much smoother the game was ? My frames did not drop below 50 in intense fights where as crossfire I would be in low 30's
Afterburner showed yet again 96-99% usage but as soon as I enable crossfire game felt choppy and afterburner showed 50-59% usage.

It's as if my single card GPU usage (99%) is being chopped in half by crossfire and I get the feeling that my motherboard might be to blame ?? I have been having this problem for a few years now BF2 etc it's just now it's clear to me now that crossfire is not working as it should

So if anyone has any ideas and stuff I can do for a solution would be great.
I think but not sure from memory I took away my overclock back to default and mad no difference, there are a fair few people on here with 6970's crossfire that get great scalling so I know it can be had just not with my set up.

Once again any help would be great..

k

 

[kg648]

I had exactly the same issue, although I was using 3x22" screens everything just worked 100% better with one card in use instead of two so I ended up getting rid of the second one.

Sadly no help but thought I would share you my experiance with xfire with the 6970.

 

[ashmanuk67]

I had exactly the same issue, although I was using 3x22" screens everything just worked 100% better with one card in use instead of two so I ended up getting rid of the second one.

Sadly no help but thought I would share you my experiance with xfire with the 6970.

No probs at all, I am so desperate I need all the help I can get the way the game plays with one card I understand why you sold one off.

Thanks

 

[kg648]

Aye, but for me to keep it would have to feel like 300 quids worth of something useful

When I first purchased I thought "oh wow look at this" but then it just caused me hours of headaches

Replaced every bit of h/w including the PSU as it seems to be a common issue.

It appears there are quite a few people running in xfire with no issues at all though.

 

[BigRazer93]

I know this may be a little bit obvious but have you tried the newest ATI drivers and using the CAP add-on?

Also, try going into afterburner and bumping up the voltages on each card by a little bit.

 

[ashmanuk67]

I have done everything I can think of and also help from here that I now think that the motherboard is the one thing I have not changed, and is a crucial part of the crossfire process if he Pci-e lanes are not talking properly Then it makes sense that could be a culprit ??

It an Asus 775 chipset old now so maybe I should go for the 1155 chipset nice new 2500k mmmm

 

[ashmanuk67]

Hi Ben I am running 11:11 with caps 1 (was newest caps but caps 2 out now)

Also cores are set to 900 on each card from 850 but I have also set to default but no change,

Thanks for your help though as one chain of shops says " EVERY LITTLE HELPS" )

 

[Mariusz]

Hi, have you tried a fresh install of Windows? There could be remains of old drivers that aren't helping.

You could also try uninstalling the drivers, booting into safe mode and using driver sweeper to clean the ATI files before restarting and reinstalling the latest drivers.
Though beware some people have had problems with driver sweeper, its always worked fine for me but other users have had problems, but that would be quicker than reinstalling windows.

What games are you having problems with, is it just Bad Company Vietnam and Battlefield 3?
When switching from single card to crossfire have you increased the ingame settings? The cards might not be maxing out because they aren't being challenged, if that makes sense, you haven't got vsync on have you?
Have you checked task manager while in game? A q9550 @ 3.6 shouldn't be bottlenecking your cards but you never know.

Would it be possible to try the cards in another pc? If you could and you got 99% GPU usage on both cards it would point towards a problem with your system and not the cards or drivers.

 

[ashmanuk67]

Hi, have you tried a fresh install of Windows? There could be remains of old drivers that aren't helping.

You could also try uninstalling the drivers, booting into safe mode and using driver sweeper to clean the ATI files before restarting and reinstalling the latest drivers.
Though beware some people have had problems with driver sweeper, its always worked fine for me but other users have had problems, but that would be quicker than reinstalling windows.

What games are you having problems with, is it just Bad Company Vietnam and Battlefield 3?
When switching from single card to crossfire have you increased the ingame settings? The cards might not be maxing out because they aren't being challenged, if that makes sense, you haven't got vsync on have you?
Have you checked task manager while in game? A q9550 @ 3.6 shouldn't be bottlenecking your cards but you never know.

Would it be possible to try the cards in another pc? If you could and you got 99% GPU usage on both cards it would point towards a problem with your system and not the cards or drivers.

I used driver sweeper to the point i had to do a fresh install of win7
Game's wise yes only BFBC2 and BF3 also all the COD games same thing crossfire low usage, i have max out all the in-game settings to try and create a higher load but no that does not do anything "well sometimes it will make it slower fps in crossfire" and single card will fill smother faster and so on.

I would have thought Q9550 should be good as well but every time i try something new it does not work, new power supply 1000w nope all set to default cpu and gpu, the only thing that has never been tried is a motherboard.
As for trying in someone's computer my friends don't have a duel Pci-e board so can not try this.

 

[sedmonds]

Just a guess, but I reckon your CPU is bottlenecking the GPUs, have you tried using 3dMark or similar to see if your graphics get maxed out on the graphics tests?

 

[Marvin]

Just a guess, but I reckon your CPU is bottlenecking the GPUs, have you tried using 3dMark or similar to see if your graphics get maxed out on the graphics tests?

Doubt it. BF3 isn't exactly processor intensive, and a Q9550 is still perfectly adequate for gaming. He should be seeing higher usage with two GPUs easy.

Though, to rule it out, OP, try running task manager at the same time and see what the load per core looks like. If they're all at 100% then you've got yourself CPU bottlenecking. Use BF3 for the test as it definitely uses quad cores.

 

[ashmanuk67]

Doubt it. BF3 isn't exactly processor intensive, and a Q9550 is still perfectly adequate for gaming. He should be seeing higher usage with two GPUs easy.

Though, to rule it out, OP, try running task manager at the same time and see what the load per core looks like. If they're all at 100% then you've got yourself CPU bottlenecking. Use BF3 for the test as it definitely uses quad cores.

Good call Marvin i will try this tonight and see what all the cores are doing.

Thanks

 

[Mariusz]

+1 for running task manager, if you can connect a second monitor and have task manager open on the secondary screen whilst you game, plus run msi afterburner and have the display graphs open that would be ideal, you should be able to see if your being bottlenecked.

 

[Howling]

Smells like power to me, though I don't see why it would be suffering.
Have you got the power settings in Catalyst to +20% ?

 

[ashmanuk67]

Smells like power to me, though I don't see why it would be suffering.
Have you got the power settings in Catalyst to +20% ?

Yes have set to +20

its not my power supply that's for sure

 

[tommybhoy]

BF3 isn't cpu dependant but CrossFire scaling is:

http://www.legionhardware.com/artic...ossfire_cpu_scaling_performance_part_2,6.html

I had the same problem using a Q6600 @3.7GHz, now using a 2500K and there is a big difference in scaling.

[email protected] 6950>70 Shaded results were at stock 6970 clocks Dark results were @1GHz/1400MHz:

Amd 555BE@ 3.9GHz stock 6970 clocks:

[email protected] 6950>70 Crossfire@ stock 6950 clocks, then @970MHz/1400MHz:

I can recommend you get RadeonPro as it will give you an onscreen usage bar:

http://www.radeonpro.info/en-US/

As BF3 probably has the best scaling yet for CrossFire, unless you are highly unlucky due to a hardware config that throws out some iregularity I'm 99% sure it's the lower clocks/ipc of your current cpu.

 

[ashmanuk67]

Thanks tommybhoy for such a in depth look into my question

You said.......

As BF3 probably has the best scaling yet for CrossFire, unless you are highly unlucky due to a hardware config that throws out some iregularity I'm 99% sure it's the lower clocks/ipc of your current cpu.

What does ipc mean?? are you saying i could have a bad overclock??

I have my memory at a 1:1 ratio hence why it's at 900Mhz i am not very godd at overclocking at all

 

[tommybhoy]

IPC is 'instructions per clock', even if the 2500K was at the same speed as your cpu, because it's an improved architecture, it can do more calculations it would make your cards perform better.

Somebody might be able to explain it better than me though, or from wikipedia:

'In computer architecture, instructions per clock (instruction per cycle or IPC) is a term used to describe one aspect of a processor's performance: the average number of instructions executed for each clock cycle. It is the multiplicative inverse of cycles per instruction.'

Your overclock will be fine.

In your case, with BF3 the single card is getting utilised better than CrossFire.

I'm not suggesting to go and run out and buy a 2500K though(but it will get the best out of your gpu's), you may just have to find the sweet spot in performance with some games that are gpu dependant like BF3 is.

 

[ashmanuk67]

IPC is 'instructions per clock', even if the 2500K was at the same speed as your cpu, because it's an improved architecture, it can do more calculations it would make your cards perform better.

Somebody might be able to explain it better than me though, or from wikipedia:

'In computer architecture, instructions per clock (instruction per cycle or IPC) is a term used to describe one aspect of a processor's performance: the average number of instructions executed for each clock cycle. It is the multiplicative inverse of cycles per instruction.'

Your overclock will be fine.

In your case, with BF3 the single card is getting utilised better than CrossFire.

I'm not suggesting to go and run out and buy a 2500K though(but it will get the best out of your gpu's), you may just have to find the sweet spot in performance with some games that are gpu dependant like BF3 is.

Ok i think i get that ) i run BF3 and Resource Monitor together and all for CPU's was registering right at the top of it's graph say around 95-99% 6970's in crossfire mode.
How does that sound ? is that what i should be seeing?

Thanks again tommy

 

[ashmanuk67]

run test again with single card and the 4 CPU's was reading about 3/4 towards the top say around 70%
So the CPU is being pushed with crossfire.

How does all this sound??