7850 crossfire no performance increase

[jam3so3]

Hi, i am new to toms hardware and this is my first thread. i recently installed a second 7850 and am seeing no difference in fps. i play battlefield 3 frequently on ultra 1920x1080 and get 45-60fps solid with one card and there is no difference i am seeing with crossfire. i have xfire enabled in ccc and current drivers. any help to improve my chances of a performance gain would be greatly appreciated. I am sorry if this thread has come up before but i have looked arround for a while and found no solution. oh and i ran 3dmark and got 500 more than a single 7850.

 

[clutchc]

What motherboard do you have? If your 2nd PCIe X16 slot is only X4 electrically, that is probably your problem.
Also, what driver version are you using?

 

[kookie3010]

Hi, i am new to toms hardware and this is my first thread. i recently installed a second 7850 and am seeing no difference in fps. i play battlefield 3 frequently on ultra 1920x1080 and get 45-60fps solid with one card and there is no difference i am seeing with crossfire. i have xfire enabled in ccc and current drivers. any help to improve my chances of a performance gain would be greatly appreciated. I am sorry if this thread has come up before but i have looked arround for a while and found no solution. oh and i ran 3dmark and got 500 more than a single 7850.

have u tries CF in other games?have u check your bridge?Also as the guy above me said,check ur 2nd slot.

 

[jam3so3]

What motherboard do you have? If your 2nd PCIe X16 slot is only X4 electrically, that is probably your problem.
Also, what driver version are you using?

Asrock 990fx extreme3, hat three pci express x16s (x16,x16,x8). I downloaded the recommended drivers on amd's website a month ago along with a fresh install of windows and other drivers.

 

[jam3so3]

Hi, i am new to toms hardware and this is my first thread. i recently installed a second 7850 and am seeing no difference in fps. i play battlefield 3 frequently on ultra 1920x1080 and get 45-60fps solid with one card and there is no difference i am seeing with crossfire. i have xfire enabled in ccc and current drivers. any help to improve my chances of a performance gain would be greatly appreciated. I am sorry if this thread has come up before but i have looked arround for a while and found no solution. oh and i ran 3dmark and got 500 more than a single 7850.

have u tries CF in other games?have u check your bridge?Also as the guy above me said,check ur 2nd slot.

If I look in gpuz during game, my second card is on and the clocks do jump up to its operating clock and it says crossfire is enabled. I have used it in a few other games, but there is no real difference. I am thinking about ditching crossfire and picking up a 7950 since you can get one for $210

 

[james77]

What is your processor? Maybe you are experiencing a CPU bottleneck.

 

[jam3so3]

What is your processor? Maybe you are experiencing a CPU bottleneck.

Amd fx8120 @ 4ghz

 

[clutchc]

Be sure you are not gaming in a Window. CF only works in full screen. Also, it will depend on the game you are playing. Not all games are CF aware. One other thing, be sure you have downloaded/installed the Catalyst game profiles from the AMD site.
http://sites.amd.com/us/game/downloads/Pages/crossfirex-app-profiles.aspx

Edit: One more thing... be sure you don't have vertical sync turned on in the game or in the CCC. That will limit your frame rate to your monitor's vertical refresh rate; 60HZ on most monitors.

 

[jam3so3]

I do play in fullscreen and have tried with vsync off and on and they are identical, although I haven't downloaded a crossfire profile yet, I will try it and see what happens, thanks

 

[clutchc]

Even if the Catalyst Profiles is not the answer to your issue, always use the latest profiles whenever you install the driver. Unlike Nvidia who doesn't separate the driver from their "profiles", AMD keeps them as a separate file.

 

[jam3so3]

I installed the profile with no issues and played battlefield, it was about the same besides maybe 1-4 fps, oh well maybe it is just me, thanks for the response though clutchc.

 

[clutchc]

I installed the profile with no issues and played battlefield, it was about the same besides maybe 1-4 fps, oh well maybe it is just me, thanks for the response though clutchc.

Is it just that one game you experience it in? If not, you could try swapping the cards around and see if it is a card issue or the MB. You may have a faulty MB. Try the bridge from the other card. Are you using driver ver 13.4 or the beta driver 13.10?

 

[jam3so3]

13.4 and I have swapped Around the cards and crossfire bridges, maybe I won't see a large difference with crossfire untill I get some games that have better dual gpu optimization.

 

[clutchc]

One other thing... if you start to notice micro-stutter with those cards in CF, try the beta 13.10 driver w/frame pacing. I have a 2nd machine (i7-875K/HD 7870 OC Crossfire) and have been using the beta driver. M-S is almost non-existent in the games I've tried.

 

[jam3so3]

I will give the beta a try and see what happens, thanks.

 

[abuzz]

dude i will say simply no to crossfire at this moment , so if u can sell ur 7850s then sell it as soon ,and try to buy 7970 hd as its very cheap these days.

 

[jam3so3]

One other thing... if you start to notice micro-stutter with those cards in CF, try the beta 13.10 driver w/frame pacing. I have a 2nd machine (i7-875K/HD 7870 OC Crossfire) and have been using the beta driver. M-S is almost non-existent in the games I've tried.

you were right i cant feel the microstutted in bf3 as much id not at all, it feels allot smoother, thank you very much for the helpfull replies. i took another look at 3d mark after reinstalling the drivers and fiddiling with my computer a little and my gpu score was around 13500 where as with one card it was around 6500-7000.

 

[clutchc]

So, are you saying the beta driver made the improvement? That's a 100% improvement over a single card according to the 3DMark bench you ran.

 

[jam3so3]

So, are you saying the beta driver made the improvement? That's a 100% improvement over a single card according to the 3DMark bench you ran.

Yes, maybe my drivers were messed up, or maybe the other driver just wasn't utilizing the second card, but whatever it may have been, it is fixed now according to the Benchmark.

 

[clutchc]

Glad to hear. Keep tabs on the AMD driver website. 13.10 is already the 2nd beta they released to fix m-s. The 1st m-s fix beta driver only allowed the 2nd slot to operate at X1 bandwidth. 13.10 fixed that. So there may be more "fixes" released before the beta driver becomes official.

 

[jam3so3]

Oh, one last thing, when I go on can you run it, it says that I only have 3gb of v ram but I have 2 2gb cards, is that because in crossfire only 3gb is useable or is it detecting it wrong?

 

[clutchc]

What is telling you that you only have 3GB of VRAM? You should have 2GB VRAM not 4GB. VRAM is not gang-able between cards. Each card only uses its own VRAM for rendering a frame. Sometimes system RAM is sometimes added in to the total because the CPU has to allocate memory resources to receive data from the card(s).