4870 Crossfire Problem

Grimspoon

Grimspoon

Limp Gawd
Joined
Nov 19, 2006
Messages
433
I built a new computer today:

http://www.disp0sable.org/allniterz/LWG/Ordered.jpg

Put it together (with just one 4870) and one stick of ram (2gb).

I installed MS Server 2008 (x64) and everything went smooth as ice. All drivers work, everything looks great, plays Crysis quite well. No problem.

I add the rest of my ram, 8 gb - still no problem.

I now add my 2nd video card and when I start windows, catalyst gives me a warning that there is a problem with my hardware.

I uninstal my drivers, dl the hotfix / instal and then reboot. Same problem. I try to open catalyst and it hangs.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
 
specific error would be helpful. tried complete reinstall with all components in place?
 
It says:

The Catalyst Control Center is not supported by the driver version of your enabled graphics adapter. Please update your ATI graphics driver, or enable your ATI adapter using the Display Manager.

Any ideas?
 
I was afraid that might be the case. Looks like Vista 64 is my next best alternative.
 
tried firing up the second 4870 to rule out a video card failure? how about running a card alone in the second slot to rule out a board failure?
 
I just got vista loaded up, put in the second card and installed the hotfix - vista recognized the presence of crossfire right away. I selected "enabled" so hopefully that takes care of that.

Too bad about server 2k8 - seemed nice for the few hours I had it on.

This is my first time using Vista / Server / x64.
 
Update:

With crossfire enabled, Crysis encounters severe video corruption while playing videos (but not in game).

Any thoughts?

I'm using update 1.2
 
Not the in game cut scenes, but the videos that play when you start the game, and start a new game.

Another weird thing I've encountered, when I had Crysis on server 2008 (x64), I ran the Crysis benchmark program and did some benches (single card) and it worked like normal - island flyby x3.

Now I'm on Vista (x64) isntalled the game and update, try the benchmark program, and it always starts me out at the beginning of the game, as if I were to play it.

I'm really stumped on this one...
 
Make sure you install sp1 for vista if you havent already since it includes several multi gpu fixes that youll need.
 
I installed vista x64 with SP1 slipstreamed in. I'm also all up to date with regards to windows update.

Crysis is the only game I've tried with Crossfire enabled so far.
 
Update:

It was "User Account Control" that was messing with the way the Crysis benchmark program was running the fly-by. That problem = solved.

As for the graphical glitches in Crysis with Xfire enabled - still a mystery!

Edit:

I think I've figured it out - make sure catalyst AI is enabled, not disabled!!!
 
Just quickly add my own crossfire woes to this thread, I have 2 Sapphire 4870's and I've noticed a few problems so far.

AoC I have running in 2560x1600 with high settings selected and a few things tweaked and get about 30-40 fps in Old Tarantia and about 60-70fps in a lot of other areas, but theres awful slowdown in some areas, the cards just go nuts and drop to about 5-10fps and really struggle, and then after a while or looking in a different direction the speed goes back up.

Visually not a lot is going on thats obvious, it's almost as if the culling of objects for performance is failing and it's rendering the whole map for short periods of time, I have no proof to back this up, thats just how it "feels" to me.

Also 3DMark Vantage first GPU test goes batshit crazy, the water flys up in huge unnatural columns.

Anyone else had these problems?
 
Haven't tried Vantage yet with my 4870s, and I don't play Conan (my IRL life thanks me). I'm going out on a limb to say early drivers can be blamed for these issues. We're playing with hotfixes and beta drivers which is never 100% optimal.
 
frostex's problems sounds very similar to the power play issues people were having with the 3870x2's in crysis.
 
rennyf77 said:
frostex's problems sounds very similar to the power play issues people were having with the 3870x2's in crysis.
Click to expand...

Quick google shows that the issue you're talking about is the clocks reverting to 2D (desktop) speeds?

Could be a problem, is there any software to overlay gpu clocks over the top of games, along with temps as well if possible
 
Frostex said:
Quick google shows that the issue you're talking about is the clocks reverting to 2D (desktop) speeds?

Could be a problem, is there any software to overlay gpu clocks over the top of games, along with temps as well if possible
Click to expand...
definitely not any software that has support for the 4870s yet.
Rivatuner has monitoring functions for temps, speeds, etc, but i'm not sure if RT has the ability to display that in an overlay. I know it will show you a graph though. That's the way I was testing during the aforementioned 3870x2 days. I would see peaks and valleys on the graph for the clock speed during the game.
 
Frostex said:
Quick google shows that the issue you're talking about is the clocks reverting to 2D (desktop) speeds?

Could be a problem, is there any software to overlay gpu clocks over the top of games, along with temps as well if possible
Click to expand...
oh but just FYI. I use Everest to monitor temps, clock speeds, activity, etc, and it displays those values on the LCD screen of my G15 keyboard, and I've noticed no issues with improper powerplay behavior. Again though, I haven't tested with Conan.
 
Frostex said:
Just quickly add my own crossfire woes to this thread, I have 2 Sapphire 4870's and I've noticed a few problems so far.

AoC I have running in 2560x1600 with high settings selected and a few things tweaked and get about 30-40 fps in Old Tarantia and about 60-70fps in a lot of other areas, but theres awful slowdown in some areas, the cards just go nuts and drop to about 5-10fps and really struggle, and then after a while or looking in a different direction the speed goes back up.

Visually not a lot is going on thats obvious, it's almost as if the culling of objects for performance is failing and it's rendering the whole map for short periods of time, I have no proof to back this up, thats just how it "feels" to me.

Also 3DMark Vantage first GPU test goes batshit crazy, the water flys up in huge unnatural columns.

Anyone else had these problems?
Click to expand...

I watched my buddy play AoC on his 4850 with max settings @ 1680x1050. Same thing, slow downs then ran perfectly.

You may not remember the Doom 3 versus the 6600 issues. The 128 meg 6600 GT could play doom 3 at maximum settings, but would get the odd chop. That was because it had to recache / cache the new/next set of textures. The 256 meg edition didn't have those issues.

Its the same thing here. I noticed the game wasn't textured right during the chop / slow down (a lot of objects were untextured). The only conclusion you can come to is that the 512 ram isn't enough to run such high res textures. I think the only solution is to either turn down the draw distance or lower the texture quality a bit on such high resolutions.
 
I have a funny feeling you're right at least in some of the cases, I may try dropping view distance from 3500m to something like 2000m

Still some of the choppy areas are just continually choppy and dont let up, The Lotus Swamp is a good example, you can look in certain directions for 10 mins and it still renders at 5fps, then rotate your view 20 degrees and it shoots up to 70

I've just installed the hotfix that I only found out about today, see what that does.
 
Ok just quickly report back on this.

Simply by tweaking the settings I have this game running very smooth.

Turns out that world shadows completely flaw the frame rate even on high end setups, I went from about 10fps in some places to about 60-100fps by switching shadows from "Everythnig" to "people only"

Everything else now is max, 2560x1600 with 4xAA 16xAF (yay for AA at this res :D) and bloom, view distance the max 3500m, the only things that arent max are the grass distance slider which is on 100m and ground high quality distance slider on 100m, and particle distance on something like 500m and thats only because the max settings for them sliders are a joke to begin with :p

30-40fps in OT and 60+ fps mostly elsewhere, 100+ fps in quiet areas.
 
Hey brother, I've got a 4870 and I love it. Was thinking of getting a second for Crossfire. You said you've gotten Crysis running in Crossfire; what are your settings and average framerates?

I would love to play DX9, all on High, at 1920 x 1080, but the 4870 can't quite do it (almost). Maybe in crossfire?

My setup:
E6400 @ 3GHz
4 GB RAM @ 1066 MHz
ATI 4870
 
Grimspoon said:
It says:

The Catalyst Control Center is not supported by the driver version of your enabled graphics adapter. Please update your ATI graphics driver, or enable your ATI adapter using the Display Manager.

Any ideas?
Click to expand...


Don't know if you got this fixed, but the issue arises when Windows updates the drivers to some older version during the driver install process.


What I had to do is disable my network, uninstall the drivers, run driver cleaner (in safe mode), then install the latest driver.
 
Garret Jax said:
Hey brother, I've got a 4870 and I love it. Was thinking of getting a second for Crossfire. You said you've gotten Crysis running in Crossfire; what are your settings and average framerates?

I would love to play DX9, all on High, at 1920 x 1080, but the 4870 can't quite do it (almost). Maybe in crossfire?

My setup:
E6400 @ 3GHz
4 GB RAM @ 1066 MHz
ATI 4870
Click to expand...

Any updates with the Beta 8.8 drivers?
 
I'm not sure if anyone still looks at this thread, but i thought i should post as i originally experienced many of the issues pointed out in this thread and have managed to solve most of them, and it may help people who have similar issues and stop people who stumble on this thread becoming discouraged about going crossfire.

-First of all vantage corruption with crossfire, is caused by not restarting after crossfire is enabled or disabled. if using vista and you turn crossfire on or off you must do a full restart of the PC before running crossfire. This issue is also seen on 4870 X2 cards, instead of restarting let the entire vantage benchmark run even if corruption is seen and after it is finished reboot the PC and vantage should display normally.

-Secondly corruption that is noticed in games when using crossfire is often caused as a previous poster stated, by incorrectly configured "Catalyst AI" setting, when using crossfire "Catalyst AI" MUST always be turned on and set to STANDARD. in any other setting texture corruption is often noticed especially in distant textures at the edge of the games draw distance.

As to Crysis crossfire performance my rig with the specs in my sig using crysis benchmark tool at 1680/1050

Very High DX10 gets between 42-45 FPS and 40-42 FPS with quality adaptive anti-aliasing on in CCC

High DX10/9 gets between 50-55 FPS

I have no idea why the reviews indicate much lower performance of crossfire in Crysis (maby they are being paid by NVIDIA ;)) screen shots can be provided if requested

I hope this is of some help to people :)
 
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