Crossfire and battlefield 3

[swilczak]

I have two powercolor 6790's in crossfire. which works good for all of my games except for Battlefield 3. When I play Battlefield 3 the screen flickers, and just looks terrible, so bad that I can only play it with crossfire disabled, which means I have to use low settings. I have my crossfire profiles up to date and configured correctly, and my drivers are all up to date. I tried repairing the game, and re-installing drivers. I'm running the AMD 970 chipset with the FX 6100, 8gb ddr3 1866. Can anyone help with this issue? Thanks in advance

 

[Guest]

sell your 6970s and get either a 7970 or a gtx 680. no more dual card issues, no more microstutter.

 

[swilczak]

I would do that if I could come up with the rest of the money I need for one of those cards, but I'm on a really tight budget.

 

[Pinhedd]

BF3 is one of the most horribly coded games I've ever seen. For months it would go apeshit if I had my second display turned on, had a VM open, had Hydravision installed, etc... I haven't even tried playing it with my 7970s, got too frustrated with it before.

Unfortunately the 6790 is a midrange card and midrange cards have no business ever being put in crossfire.

 

[swilczak]

The 6790 is listed on wikipedia as a performance card, and videocardbenchmark.net as a high performance card. It's 256 bit, gddr5 so it can do a lot more than just play high def videos. The benchmark for one 6790 by itself is 3 times more powerful than the video card that's in an xbox 360. Of course there are better cards out there, but this one should perform better than it does.

 

[cuecuemore]

Do you have the latest Catalyst Application Profiles installed?

 

[swilczak]

What is the latest? I installed the latest ones about 3 months ago, unless there have been new ones released since then.

 

[cuecuemore]

12.7 CAP 3 is the latest. Just grab them off the AMD driver page.

 

[swilczak]

I already tried that, doesn't work

 

[loops]

Get MSI Afterburner program...install.

Run it to show gpu use/memory use/ temp

In BF3 type: ` render.drawfps 1

Get into a large outdoor MP map....track the FPS and GPU use...

Try other drivers and track....

Report what you find here.

Other question: did you have any other gpu card installed in this rig before that SLI set up?

Have you tried a fresh windows install?

 

[swilczak]

Thanks for the help guys but I'm just gonna give up and use my other 6790 in my other desktop that's hooked to my living room TV. I thought crossfire would be something cool to try, but never really expected it to work well. I've read about countless crossfire problems online.

 

[killerhurtalot]

BF3 is one of the most horribly coded games I've ever seen. For months it would go apeshit if I had my second display turned on, had a VM open, had Hydravision installed, etc... I haven't even tried playing it with my 7970s, got too frustrated with it before.

Unfortunately the 6790 is a midrange card and midrange cards have no business ever being put in crossfire.

I would disagree with that... GTX 5/660 series and the amd 6/78xx series has always been great in SLI/crossfire... great for people who don't got the money now but want to boost performance like a year or two down the road...

 

[Glacier]

sell your 6970s and get either a 7970 or a gtx 680. no more dual card issues, no more microstutter.

Agreed. SLI and Crossfire are more trouble then they are worth!

 

[chase3567]

I have two powercolor 6790's in crossfire. which works good for all of my games except for Battlefield 3. When I play Battlefield 3 the screen flickers, and just looks terrible, so bad that I can only play it with crossfire disabled, which means I have to use low settings. I have my crossfire profiles up to date and configured correctly, and my drivers are all up to date. I tried repairing the game, and re-installing drivers. I'm running the AMD 970 chipset with the FX 6100, 8gb ddr3 1866. Can anyone help with this issue? Thanks in advance

Did you overclock your processor?

 

[Pinhedd]

The 6790 is listed on wikipedia as a performance card, and videocardbenchmark.net as a high performance card. It's 256 bit, gddr5 so it can do a lot more than just play high def videos. The benchmark for one 6790 by itself is 3 times more powerful than the video card that's in an xbox 360. Of course there are better cards out there, but this one should perform better than it does.

It's still a midrange card by today's standards. It's at the top of the midrange cards but it's a midrange card none the less. Comparing it to the 360's GPU is kinda silly because there's 5 years between them and 360 games are known for having poor image quality by today's standards. That doesn't make it a bad card though.

I would disagree with that... GTX 5/660 series and the amd 6/78xx series has always been great in SLI/crossfire... great for people who don't got the money now but want to boost performance like a year or two down the road...

Midrange cards often have at least one extreme deficiency which makes them unviable in crossfire/SLI. In the case of the 6700 series they have half the ROPs as are on the 6800 and 6900 series. The lack of ROPs mean that they will have a hard time flattening deep images at high colour depths. This means that high image quality on midrange cards tends to introduce microstutter where it otherwise wouldn't be noticeable on high end cards.

 

[swilczak]

Did you overclock your processor?

I did try that because I thought it might be a bottleneck problem. I overclocked it to 4.0ghz, and didn't have any change in frames per second, and the screen still flickered the same. I have yet to notice any difference in anything from overclocking.

 

[swilczak]

Best answer selected by swilczak.