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The dreaded microstutter

Good stuff, glad you sorted it out op.

@hernaldo,

There is more to it than just 'spending years over internet forums has shown that to be the case beyond any doubt at all'

Having used both SLI/CrossFire, it depends on the rest of the hardware in your system regarding minimising/eliminating microstutter.

There are other factors to be taken into account regarding your theory, here is just one:

Historically AMD's card is the 'cheaper' way to do it, so in theory, a lot of CrossFire setups wouldn't/don't have the appropriate higher end hardware to eliminate the stutter.

So if someone puts CrossFire into a lower/mid end spec PC, then the microstutter is going to be worse than a SLI(with comparable gpu's) system with higher end components and vice versa.

I'm not implying ones better than the other as in my case both have been fine, but there can be other reasons behind it than just putting the blame firmly at AMD's door.
 
tommybhoy said:
So if someone puts CrossFire into a lower/mid end spec PC, then the microstutter is going to be worse than a SLI(with comparable gpu's) system with higher end components and vice versa.

I'm not implying ones better than the other as in my case both have been fine, but there can be other reasons behind it than just putting the blame firmly at AMD's door.
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A lot of its down to this (can't remember which review site it was that asked them):

nVidia stance: "We believe in giving our customers the smoothest possibly experience"

AMD stance: "We think higher performance is of more value to our customers"

Basically in scenarios where microstutter and other issues might creep in nVidia have made a conscious choice to bias in the drivers on the side of smoother rendering AMD have made a conscious choice to bias towards higher framerates.

Personally I think AMD have got the level of bias wrong but there are some scenarios where going for higher framerates has merits but IMO there are more cases where it hurts more than it helps.

When it comes to multi GPU rendering compatibility/support for new releases tho a lot does come down to who is putting the most effort/quality into their driver support.
 
Rroff said:
A lot of its down to this (can't remember which review site it was that asked them):

nVidia stance: "We believe in giving our customers the smoothest possibly experience"

AMD stance: "We think higher performance is of more value to our customers"

Basically in scenarios where microstutter and other issues might creep in nVidia have made a conscious choice to bias in the drivers on the side of smoother rendering AMD have made a conscious choice to bias towards higher framerates.

Personally I think AMD have got the level of bias wrong but there are some scenarios where going for higher framerates has merits but IMO there are more cases where it hurts more than it helps.
Click to expand...

You usually write that each time the subject comes up, but, as others have asked in the past, where/when does this information come from?

If the information came out when CrossFire was in it's early days, how do you know it to still ring true?

What may have happened for one generation of gpu's doesn't necessarily mean every other series of future gpu's will remain the same?

As you are fully aware, it can be swings and roundabouts regarding a set of gpu's taking an age to render a frame compared to their counterparts, it's game dependant.

Rroff said:
When it comes to multi GPU rendering compatibility/support for new releases tho a lot does come down to who is putting the most effort/quality into their driver support.
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Can't argue with that, got to hand it to Nvidia lately for getting scaling support out the door very quickly indeed, something AMD have been slacking on lately, although I was pleasantly surprised to have release day working CrossFire performance with Max Payne 3.
 
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'For instance, when tested in the same game at the same settings, the mid-range Radeon HD 6870 CrossFireX config generally showed more frame-to-frame variance than the higher-end Radeon HD 6970 CrossFireX setup. The same is true of the GeForce GTX 560 Ti SLI setup versus dual GTX 580s. If this observation amounts to a trait of multi-GPU systems, it's a negative trait. Multi-GPU rigs would have the most jitter just when low frame times are most threatened. Third, in our test data, multi-GPU configs based on Radeons appear to exhibit somewhat more jitter than those based on GeForces. We can't yet say definitively that those observations will consistently hold true across different workloads, but that's where our data so far point.'

In the theory explained above, the 6970 is slower than a 580 so, the faster card has less stutter=Radeons have more stutter than Nvidia, strictly it's true and an obvious point, but it's out of context from your comments.

You would then have to agree that the faster gpu available has the least microstutter, wouldn't you?

I'm still at a loss in where that ties in with your previous comments with performance over quality.
 
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hernaldo said:
It's an accepted fact amongst most that nvidia SLI does a better job at avoiding micro stutter than Xfire. Don't have a specific source but spending years over internet forums has shown that to be the case beyond any doubt at all.

Same as the old "AMD can't make drivers" (or ATI rather). There's no factual evidence but a shed load of circumstantial and examples if you look around to undeniably show that as being true, in so far as nvidia make substantially better drivers for their graphics cards (won't comment on chipset - they are god damn awful).

I'm not saying "AMD can't make drivers", but that's the feeling if you put it into an exaggerated literal short sentence.
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I was under the impression it changed in the 6xxx and 7xxx series in that the amount of posts I've seen giving out about stuttering on the 5xx and 6xx series in SLI giving people issues are the same as the 6xxx and 7xxx.
 
LtMatt said:
Yes, my advice worked lol. :D

Take note fellow crossfire bf3 users. GG all. :cool:
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chipachap said:
I was under the impression it changed in the 6xxx and 7xxx series in that the amount of posts I've seen giving out about stuttering on the 5xx and 6xx series in SLI giving people issues are the same as the 6xxx and 7xxx.
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So why hasn't AMD taken this into account? why has it taken some little guy, called LtMatt to come up with a fix...
 
Regarding bf3, the op had an issue with stuttering. This is a known game specific issue that effects sli/xfire and certain single card setups. More to do with dice than nv/ati. My own previous sli gtx 470's were fine until the game got patched a while back, post patch it became a stuttery mess. Tried single card with lower settings, no joy, finally found user.cfg settings. Game ran flawlessly after that. Im now on a single highly oc'd gtx 670, yes it has more vram, runs cooler/quieter but in bf3 it only just performs better than my old gtx 470's.
 
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V F said:
So why hasn't AMD taken this into account?
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The fault highlighted by the op can affect x amount of users, it has never happened to me and x amount of others in BF3.

V F said:
why has it taken some little guy, called LtMatt to come up with a fix...
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The 'little guys' are the fixers more than you think, bucket loads of faults for both teams hardware can be found in loads of games.

The fact is there is massively different PC configurations, finding a blanket concrete fix for every problem in regards to BF3 is never going to happen, which is partly due to the amount of patches Dice put out that break something else in the engine.
 
Yeah both our suggestions work, props to surveyor for getting in there first. I have to say though that i think mine produces slightly less stutter. I guess because of the 1 frame render ahead command in a gpu limited game is going to make it smoother at least with regards to crossfire performance anyway.
 
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