Widescreen Gaming Forum

I am not looking to do a whole rant here, just to point out my observations.

I have a 980x, Rampage III, 12 gigs of dominator ram, and two Sapphire Toxic 5870 2gb cards, running on three Dell U2410s. I am running 10.5 drivers on my Vista 64 OS and 10.6 Drivers on my Windows 7-64bit OS and I am getting the same stuttering. Additionally, I have disabled the PCI expess link power management (which helped with Just Cause 2).

It seems that the best possible eyefinity experience is had with only one card versus two in crossfire.

Even when I am hitting over 60fps with games like crysis, Just Cause 2 and Dirt 2, things just don't seem "fluid." However, when I only run one card I get much smoother performance. In fact, even when I am only hitting 30 fps with one card, it seems so much smoother than when I am hitting 60 fps with two cards.

I am just finding that the whole multi card thing is a bit overrated and I have SLId 8800 ultras, 280 GTXs and crossfired 5870s & 5970s. I mean what is the point of having 60fps, if it seems like its only 20fps? For the record, the stuttering seems to be much more pronounced on Eyefinity setups versus single screens.

Does anybody concur or deny these findings? If you are running two HD5000s in crossfire and eyefinity and do not have any stuttering what are your secrets?

I have read post after post about CF and EF not playing nicely.. it seems though that some people have it working fine.. it's got to be some hardware issue.. motherboard maybe? regardless, I'm really reluctant to try CF because I love my 5760x1080 res and I love my v-sync (the other thing that seems to break with CF and EF is vsync) and I don't want to spend the dough on CF only to have nothing but headaches.. which is what seems to happen to a lot of people..

so for now I am saying on a single gpu... going to swap my 1gb for a 2gb though.. and wait for some more drivers to come out before going CF.. I get decent performance with one card.. but I can't turn AA on and I have to disable DX10 shadows in LOTRO which sucks.. I was really hoping for some CF action so I could re-enable IQ features I have to turn off for performance sake.. but not if it's just going to cause headaches..

PS: Nvidia is about to come out with their drivers for their multi-monitor solution.. I am VERY curious to see how well theirs will work now that ATI seems to still have a lot of issues with CF and EF.

i'm waiting till i see how well or bad surround gaming is on nvidia. as it stands, i have 2 5970's with a 980x i7 and can score about 45000 on 3d vantage, but if i want to play games, then i have to disable cat ai which means i am only using 1 of my 4 gpu's just to get vsync to work, or i can leave crossfire enabled and get 150fps of stuttering.

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intel x79
2 way 780ti's under water
Intel 4760 extreme @ 4GHz
3 x 42 inch screens @5860x1080
16 gigs xmp ram @2200

I wish one of the gaming or tech websites would spare some time to investigate the root cause of this issue. At the very least, interview ATI engineers, and maybe Nvidia engineers, and figure out what is behind the stuttering in the first place.

Speculation centered on PCI-E bandwidth. But we know that has only a limited effect when we compare 8x to 16x on single-display configurations using either single or multi-GPU setups. Not only that - we also know that it has had that same limited effect for three generations of video cards.

So how can it be the case that bandwidth is the problem just because more monitors are in play? People have reported this EF+CF problem not just on x8/x8 (P55) chipset but x16/x16 (X58) chipset.

So something else has to be going on here.

i'm waiting till i see how well or bad surround gaming is on nvidia. as it stands, i have 2 5970's with a 980x i7 and can score about 45000 on 3d vantage, but if i want to play games, then i have to disable cat ai which means i am only using 1 of my 4 gpu's just to get vsync to work, or i can leave crossfire enabled and get 150fps of stuttering.

At the moment the only way to make good use of tri/quadfire with Eyefinity is playing OpenGL games or playing in DX9 mode. DX10 and 11 give stuttering even when fps is high. At least this is the case with the 8.74 betas I'm using atm with my 2 5970 TOXIC cards.

AMD does need to fix this and v-sync capping at wrong fps when using CF+EF while they're at it.

Only one game stutters like crazy with my setup (in sig, 1GB versions): Crysis Warhead. Every other game is stutter free @ 5760x1080.

[quote]i'm waiting till i see how well or bad surround gaming is on nvidia. as it stands, i have 2 5970's with a 980x i7 and can score about 45000 on 3d vantage, but if i want to play games, then i have to disable cat ai which means i am only using 1 of my 4 gpu's just to get vsync to work, or i can leave crossfire enabled and get 150fps of stuttering.

At the moment the only way to make good use of tri/quadfire with Eyefinity is playing OpenGL games or playing in DX9 mode. DX10 and 11 give stuttering even when fps is high. At least this is the case with the 8.74 betas I'm using atm with my 2 5970 TOXIC cards.

AMD does need to fix this and v-sync capping at wrong fps when using CF+EF while they're at it.

i've been back and forth to ato about vsync capping at 120 instead of 60, and i know planty others thatg have also been in touch with ati and we all got the same answer, Ati says that no body else has reported this issus and therefore dont acknowledge as a bug to be fixed

_________________
intel x79
2 way 780ti's under water
Intel 4760 extreme @ 4GHz
3 x 42 inch screens @5860x1080
16 gigs xmp ram @2200

well, Nvidia's beta driver is out and the word is that their solution rocks... very polished, only works in a multi-gpu env, no need for a DP adapter.. I think I am going with Nvidia from here... I have enjoyed eyefinity a lot but I am to the point where I really do want more gpu power and loosing vsync among other things isn't something I am willing to live with to get it.. so going to probably pick up some 470s soon..

hopefully picking up 2 480's this weekend.

_________________
intel x79
2 way 780ti's under water
Intel 4760 extreme @ 4GHz
3 x 42 inch screens @5860x1080
16 gigs xmp ram @2200

very interesting.

i bought a saphire 5850 because at £240 it was great vfm especially seemn as i can get good clock speeds. but yes, i wondered if ati would sovle this problem by the time i go crossfire, now this may be 6 months away but in my experience if ati havent solved something by the first few months then they never will


i will eventually sell 5850 and but 2x NVIDIA cards if stuttering is removed