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Owned a 5870 for 1 week and..

Rroff said:
But on nVidia it just works, no need to play around disabling powerplay, etc. none of your average joe wondering why their setup is flickering, artifacting, crashing, etc.
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Yes, and had it been out 6 months earlier, they'd not have run into it as much and idle speeds would have been set as normal and they'd have the same "problem" .

When someone else is beta testing half the problems of DX11 for you, while you sit around working on the drivers which don't have to be ready for 6 months it lets you do a whole hell of a lot of extra work.

But this is the fundamental problem, bioses is the main area where the problem exists and you can't recall millions of cards to update them. Nvidia got a huge headstart and could react accordingly.

THeres (admitedly far less, largely because of sales numbers) of angry Nvidia users who complain about the massive temps, noise and power usage of their dual screen setups as the cards were advertised as having X wattage under idle.

It doesn't "just" work, its substituted one problem for another. AMD users who don't know how to fix it have to work it out for themselves(which I've said in MANY threads is ridiculous, and its not limited to AMD< Intel, AMD< Nvidia, all of them don't run a single page that has the majority of current problems and work arounds listed, they should all be ashamed they don't), if not put up with flickering, Nvidia users have to put up with increase noise and heat which they weren't expecting, I'd find both equally frustrating.

For the record when I forget to set clocks properly (normally after a new install or new driver) the flickering is "mostly" limited to when I'm moving the mouse/dragging a window. The VAST majority of the time its not actually flickering. IE if I open a media player, drag it to the other screen and just watch it, generally little/no flickering, its in no way constant or always flickering, annoying, yes, awful and unusable, no.

AS said though, enthusiasts have been able to get answers on how to fix it since day one, infact before as workarounds to ignore powerplay and Nvidia's version have been around for generations, powerplay on both companies hardware is problematic and has been every single generation, optimus/hybrid crossfire is the way forward here, something that only has idle/low power usage to begin with and high powered to only turn on when needed.

Its odd, I've actually been playing wow again for a laugh, I hadn't even noticed, maxed out, that my card was staying at idle speeds as I'm running windowed :p

For the record, CCC and a slight overclock did not force 3d speeds, I hadn't tried since I went xfire, and apparently CCC profiles aren't helping much.

GPU clock tool worked the second I tried it, locked my primary GPU to 3d speeds straight away.

Unfortunately windowed + ATi + dx9 = no crossfire. But seeing as I was running 5 copies multiboxed, at idle speeds and didn't notice thats not much of an issue :p
 
drunkenmaster said:
Yes, and had it been out 6 months earlier, they'd not have run into it as much and idle speeds would have been set as normal and they'd have the same "problem".
Click to expand...

Not true - nVidia had this working fine with the GT2xx cards that use GDDR5 long before the evergreen cards were very far along development let alone available retail. nVidia was on top of the issue long ago (well aside from fan profile issues but that was quickly fixed) - same can't be said for ATI.

Also the GTX4xx cards don't run full 3D clocks in multi-monitor - unless you use rivatuner for overclocking - if you don't overclock or use another app they only run at ~400MHz core.
 
It might not be the drivers at all. Its like with all systems,software and hardware,, if something conflicting or doesn't communicate with another piece of hardware or software smoothly, then you will have probs.

So dont say its ati is at fault, cos is prob another componment or software having a barny with the card.
 
It's not an issue with the drivers, it's because MS added a live TV decoder to Win7 that uses DXVA religiously, and is untweakable. You can change the filter that media centre uses for video files easily, but not live TV. Well, that's not entirely true, it's possible to change it for HDTV channels but that will break SDTV channels etc...

So in short, you could change the filter to a software decoder for your video files and that would solve your problem but it would increase the CPU usage considerably, which isn't ideal if you're playing games as well, and it would still happen with live TV. Your solution to use an NV card to solve this, and give you some physx from a separate card, is exactly what you need. Good to hear that it works too, NV take note.

The other thing you could do is use a software TV player that doesn't use DXVA, or allows you to disable it like WinTV (that's the one that comes with Hauppage cards).
 
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