6990 Quadfire issues

[davexxsmith]

Hi,

I recently bought a second 6990 to make 6990 Quadfire and i'm having issues. Compared with other systems (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imT6-CkOYZM). While he had 1566 as a score our rig came out with approx 1100, our fps was also less than 40. I've also been noticing that since i put quadfire on I wasn't getting much of a performance increase, if any. In metro 2033 I was looking at peoples rigs for example, some guy had 3x6950's and a i5 processor. He was also running eyefinity on a higher resolution and was getting approx double the FPS that we achieve.

We have ran some benchmarks on our system.
On 3D vantage 11 we got:

Score: 8804 with 1 6990

Graphic: 9782
Physics: 6953
Combined: 6521
Test 1 FPS: 41
Test 2 FPS: 50
Test 3 FPS: 60
Test 4 FPS: 29
Physics: 22
Combined: 30

Score: 13464 with 2 6990's

Graphics: 17675
Physics: 9757
Combined: 5995
Test 1 FPS: 59
Test 2 FPS: 101
Test 3 FPS: 120
Test 4 FPS: 59
Physics: 30
Combined: 27

The card settings where the same on both but the CPU had been overclocked from 3.4ghz to 4.5ghz

On Haven benchmark 2.5 we got:

Score: 2026 with 1 6990

FPS: 80
Min FPS: 12
Max FPS: 186

Score: 3844 with 2 6990

FPS: 152.6
Min FPS: 23.9
Max FPS: 328

The card settings where the same on both but the CPU had been overclocked from 3.4ghz to 4.5ghz.

From the benchmark results it shows that we have almost doubled our performance score, but in games we do not see this. The reason we bought another 6990 was so we could play games in eyefinity smoothly, but it's not playable in it's current state. We are also aware that our second 6990 is running on a x8 PCIe but we where informed that it would only cause a minimal performance decrease.

My system spec is as follows:
I7 2600K Sandy Bridge OC to 4.5ghz
HD 6990 Quadfire (HD 6990X2)
Corsair AX1200 PSU
Asrock Z68 Extreme4 mobo
G-Skill Ripjaws X DDR3 1600Mhz 16GB
Corsair H50 Cpu cooler
3x 23" monitors using resolution 5760x1200

 

[Ninja Pants]

Firstly, your benchmarks are basically exactly in line with what one would expect from your rig.
Secondly, in terms of the ~1% loss due to x8 vs x16 this would only be noticeable in your benchmarks and would equate to maybe 2-3FPS in game at most.
Thirdly, scalability when adding GPU's does not result in linear performance increase so do not expect twice the frame rate over just one 6990. Beyond two GPU's the added performance rfom each additional GPU is less and less.
Forth, some games are known to struggle with quadfire, metro 2033 seems to be one of them, you may have to play with crossfire disabled.

Stupid question I know, but I will say it anyway, are you running the latest drivers?

 

[davexxsmith]

Hi

yes we have checked and re running the most up to date drivers.

I was just surprised that i cannot run 3 monitors in eye infinity with this setup. Eye infinity looks really good and what the hell do you need to get descent performance with 3 monitors.

Some sites seem to run it all ok but i cant.

 

[Ninja Pants]

What do you mean you cant run 3 monitors with this setup? You should be getting great performance with that rig. Even a single 1GB 6870 is enough to run any game (except GTA4 because it was coded by blind monkeys) at 6048x1080 (yes I have tested it, I don't recommend it but it does suffice).

I wouldn't expect to max EVERY single game out (maybe not more than 4x AA on these very few exceptions), remember you still only have 2GB VRAM with the 6990 and your refreshing a HUGE amount of pixels with eyefinity but you should be able to get damn close with good FPS.

 

[davexxsmith]

Hi

on eyefinity setup we ran L4D2 and were getting about 120fps, as soon as we move it drops to around 60fps and was very choppy.

AVP was only getting 30fps and dropped down to 7fps when in any action. We have CCC set to let the game control AA and AF and we never go above the X4 anyway. To be honest we haven't found any game that runs ok on the 3 monitors. I just don't understand how we get good benchmark results and yet poor gaming performance.

Is there any games you can recommend that you get good performance in?

I disabled crossfire on AvP and went from 7 fps to 60 fps, I don't mind disabling crossfire for some games but i'd like some games to have better performance.

 

[Ninja Pants]

That is strange, on this rig i'm running crossfire 6990-6970 at 6048x1080 and on L4D2 I run with everything maxed, 8xAA, 16xMSAA and averages over 100FPS.

Have you ran the second card on its own? Although it seems unlikely given everything seems to be error free, wouldn't hurt to rule out hardware fault. Cause to be honest I'm really not sure what is happening that you could drop FPS like that when enabling the second card.

 

[davexxsmith]

Hi

We ran some benchmark checks ( heaven DX11 2.5), on each card in turn, only had the 1 card in at a time in the x16 slot. Ran checks with 1 monitor 1920x1080 and 3 monitors 5760x1080.

Card 1(old) , 1 monitor score 2030, 3 monitors 730.
Card 2(new), 1 monitor score 2074, 3 monitors 754.

So both cards seem similar and working ok.

Did complete wipe and new install, win ultimate x64 (new copy). Had a nightmare with drivers not installing correctly but after numerous attempts it went ok. Havent OC CPU yet so now back to 3.4ghz.

Ran L4D2 on max settings on 3 monitors, never got FPS <100 and it ran smoothly.
Ran AVP on max settings on 3 monitors, it ran very smooth, couldn't even run this before the wipe.
Also tried dead island on highest settings FPS >90 all time and some stuttering but not to bad.

Ran Heaven banchmark 3 monitors score 1314 and on 1 monitor 3809.

From the games we tried the performance does look better in eyefinity. Will let you know.