How To Make Sure Crossfire Is Working?

[LtMatt]

Perfect, just wanted to make sure i was barking up the right tree. BF4 does use a fair amount of CPU, 60-70%, but the GPU usage never really goes above 65%, so i dont think its the CPU limiting it, i would just expect more usage and more frames, its playable though, guess i will just wait for mantle.

What in game settings are you using for BF4?

 

[LtMatt]

Have you got the crossfire bridge installed? Can you see both gpu's in device manager/gpu-z?

 

[LtMatt]

Ehhh this is embarrassing then, do I have to have the bridge installed even for the 7990? In my defence this is my first dual GPU setup, not to mention AMD card.

Ok i didn't realise you have a 7990. Its normal, you don't have an option to enable/disable crossfireX with the 7990. If you wish to disable crossfire for a specific title you need to create a profile for the game in question using CCC and disable it there. I will need to update this guide to reflect that info.

 

[LtMatt]

But how could I enable frame pacing if I don't have the xfire option in CCC? It is not showing in CCC either!!

Maybe you need to reinstall the drivers then. What OS are you using?

 

[LtMatt]

It is 8.1. Yes guess I'll try that. Thank you for your help.

Try this.

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showpost.php?p=25247146&postcount=5

Windows 8.1 might be blocking part of the driver install.

 

[LtMatt]

Was the certificate in there? It may be in there again after the fresh driver install. Did you tick always allow AMD before the drivers installed?

What does your device manager show?

 

[LtMatt]

It shows exactly what you have (in addtiion to MS basic display adapter which I assume in the MOBO's GPU).

I deleted the [not available] file in the Certificate Trust List folder as per your screenshot.
I checked after the install and it is still not there.

Funnily enough I don't recall being prompted whether I want to always allow AMD drivers when I installed.

That's ok you probably have it ticked from a previous install then. I'm out of ideas im afraid. Have you tried a different game/benchmark?

 

[LtMatt]

I'm downloading Heaven and Valley right now. I do remember after first driver install CCC opened and asked me about enableing/disabling CF for unassigned applications, I don't recall what I had choosen, but I seriously doubt it is that important.

Well I was thinking I'm gona be gaming for a while today, guess not . Thanks for your help Matt.

Hopefully when I resolve the issue I'll post here, perhaps it could be of help for someone in the future.

Well if that message popped up then crossfire is enabled. You should still be able to see this in CCC though and tick it. However this is only for applications that don't have a crossfirex profile. You should also be able to enabled/disable frame pacing.

 

[LtMatt]

Also on heaven only 1 GPU was running... :s was getting 20s-30s FPS. I don't have that option under performance mate, only AMD overdrive. Really don't know what to do. Could it be the card is faulty?

Can you show me the gpu-z sensors tab and clocks for each gpu.

 

[LtMatt]

I think Windows 8 is still blocking the driver install with the beta for whatever reason. You could try disabling Driver Signature Enforcement in W8 (http://www.fotoclubinc.com/blog/how...on-of-windows-7-printer-drivers-on-windows-8/)

Then immediately try to install the latest beta. At least we know the card works now you've tried it on 13.9. There are actually new 13.11 WHQL drivers you could try on the AMD site if you can't get the beta's to work.

http://www2.ati.com/drivers/amd_catalyst_13.11_r9_290_whql.exe

I'd try and stick with the latest beta's though, assuming you can get them to install.

 

[LtMatt]

Don't mean to pose too many questions or deny the previous person help for his question; I've recently decided to give crossfire a try, and bought two xfx 270x cards, most specifically for BF4. However, upon installation there's little to no improvement in the games performance. I found this thread searching on how to properly set up crossfire and followed it as closely as possible.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v293/muirplayer57/bf41.png

As you can see in my screenshot here, neither card is running at 90%, let alone 80 or 70, and the frame rate is quite low I'd think. Lowering the resolution or quality only causes a drop in GPU usage percentage, and frame rate stays generally the same.

Some games or benchmarks do run both GPU's in the 90 percentage range consistently (far cry 3, unigine heaven).

My specs are as follows:

Mainboard: Asus M5A97 (old model, not le, r2.0, or le r2.0) AMD 970/SB950; xFire is x16/x4
CPU: FX-8350 @ stock speed
RAM: 16gb Patriot Sector 5 @ 1066
GPU: XFX Radeon R9 270x x2
PSU: Thermaltake ToughPower 750watt

I've disabled ULPS manually using regedit.
Power control settings for both cards are at 20%.

Only ideas I could come up with for this are that my mainboard needs an upgrade (a 990FX chipset), or a different power supply with a single rail due to the fact that the one I have now is a multi rail PSU with 18amps per rail. Or maybe both need to be updated?

Any help would be much appreciated.

Overclock your cpu as much as you can. Its likely stopping your cards from working at 99%.

One side effect of having a x16 x4 crossfire setup is the x4 gpu will rarely reach 99% becauase of the pci-e limitation. You'd be better off getting a board with x8 x8 or even x16 x16.

Running on Windows 8 or 8.1 can help improve cpu performance so that is also recommended.

 

[LtMatt]

Glad it helped gents.

 

[LtMatt]

Don't suppose you've a guide for setting up the fan curve in afterburner when using crossfire ? I want to find a happy medium between noise and Cooling on the top card scared of it getting too hot!

These are the settings you want. As for the profile itself well just experiment and see what works for you. It varies from card to card.

 

[LtMatt]

Made a little discovery yesterday while trying to figure out why half of my fully supported crossfire games were not using the second GPU.

That innocent little "Enable AMD CrossireX for applications that have no associated application profile" was the culprit. With that ticked I only get usage on one GPU for games like Diablo 3 that definitely have a profile. Crossfire worked on Crysis 3 though, so I'm not sure what the pattern is.

With that setting unticked I get the full-on sexy 100% utilisation across both cards, as I've come to know and love on my R9 290s.

Hmm now that I think about it the link is probably Tridef 3D. I only tested across 4 games, but the 2 that didn't work used Tridef.

That's an interesting discovery. I've had that ticked for a long time and have not noticed an issue. That said, i will now untick it just incase.

 

[LtMatt]

How do you know performance doesn't change, are you using Vsync?

 

[LtMatt]

Show me the performance overlays as instructed in the guide please. Let's see what the gpu usage is going. Before you do that open up CCC and select restore factory defaults.
Double check crossfire is enabled in CCC too.

 

[LtMatt]

The two Heaven screenshots show you're running in Windowed mode. Don't forget Crossfire only works in Full Screen mode (except Mantle games).

5 stars and very good spot Stu.

 

[LtMatt]

Stu takes the credit for this one.

Now you've enabled the overlay though it will allow you to keep an eye on things and ensure performance and scaling is where it should be. Essential for every crossfire enthusiast.

 

[LtMatt]

you're telling me!

I was playing Crysis 3 there and couldn't get crossfire working at all, same old symptoms of 100% gpu utilisation on both cards, but only 300mhz clock on the 2nd one.

then at some point during messing around, I had paused the game and then alt+tabbed out of it and when I went back in i had the crossfire logo in the corner and 100fps on the uber max ultra settings, so i thought that was great, but it only lasted as long as that gaming session unfortunately and no amount of alt+tabbing after that would bring it back.

Sounds like you're not in full screen mode, check the video settings as Crysis does have an option for that. Or perhaps the game is saying it's full screen, but it's not. A sure fire way to check is to press Alt+enter. That will cycle the game between windowed and full screen mode and should kick in both cards.

 

[LtMatt]

Battlefield 4 and Plants Vs Zombies. Both use Mantle, both love crossfire.