Need some Crossfire Help + Tips

[GustavoGimpel]

System specifications:

AMD FX-8350 Overclocked to 4.7Ghz
Corsair H100i
G.Skill Ares 8GB (2x4GB) 2133Mhz CL9
2x AMD Radeon R9 280X XFX Black Edition (Factory Overclocked)
NZXT Hale90 1000W 80+ Gold
NZXT Phantom 410
Samsung SSD 840 EVO 120GB
Seagate Barracuda 1TB 7200Rpm

So, I previsouly had only a single R9 280X and was willing to push this system to it's maximum potential for as long as possible, and found an used card of the exact same model for really cheap, so I bought it to Crossfire with the one I have, since my PSU can easily push them.

After hours bashing my head against the wall trying to install the latest Crimson drivers and getting black screens and crashes, I had to remove the 2nd card, use DDU to clean it all up, install the driver and only then install the new card. The problem is, only a hand full of games natively supports crossfire and I've seen multiple threads on the web saying to use a custom profile or to force crossfire on some games that it should work just fine, but I can't seem to find these options anywhere.

Do I need to use custom drivers or older Catalyst or even Crimson drivers? I tired using RadeonPro but it had too many glitches and crashes all the time. Also, are there any other tips for making this crossfire setup more useful?

Is there any way to eliminate graphics glitches caused by crossfire? Eg.: The Witcher 3 runs fine at 70-80 fps on a ultrawide 1080p monitor with everything maxed out, but the game water looks really funky and keeps glitching on me.

And also, please no comments like "sell these cards and buy a single more powerful" or "your system is old, your should get a new one", those are no options for me.

Thanks in advance

 

[10tacle]

As I understand it from a friend who runs an AMD GPU, support for forcing Crossfire stopped after Crimson 16.x for games that did not have a Crossfire profile set up. Try downloading and running drivers prior to 16.x and see what happens. The problem with that however is that you might lose optimal performance support for games that came out with newer driver revisions.

And I know you put a "please don't" disclaimer up, but I'm going to say it anyway: the idea of multiple GPUs is a dying concept. Game developers are slowly moving away from officially supporting them or having terrible scaling. And in the case of Nvidia, official support for 3 and 4 way SLI died with Pascal. It's a shame because I've been using multiple GPUs in SLI and Crossfire for nearly 20 years in my builds (my last Xfire build had HD 4870s so it's been a while since I worked with it).

 

[GustavoGimpel]

As I understand it from a friend who runs an AMD GPU, support for forcing Crossfire stopped after Crimson 16.x for games that did not have a Crossfire profile set up. Try downloading and running drivers prior to 16.x and see what happens. The problem with that however is that you might lose optimal performance support for games that came out with newer driver revisions.

And I know you put a "please don't" disclaimer up, but I'm going to say it anyway: the idea of multiple GPUs is a dying concept. Game developers are slowly moving away from officially supporting them or having terrible scaling. And in the case of Nvidia, official support for 3 and 4 way SLI died with Pascal. It's a shame because I've been using multiple GPUs in SLI and Crossfire for nearly 20 years in my builds (my last Xfire build had HD 4870s so it's been a while since I worked with it).

I've already made up my mind that I won't try any more Crossfire/SLI in next builds, it was my first and last try unless developers and manufacturers bring back support for it, but since I'm kinda stuck with what I have for now, I have no plan on upgrading any component for the next 2, maybe 3 years, so I'm trying to push the most out of this system, and I'm aware the 8350 cannot push a bigger graphics card properly.

I'll try to download drivers prior to 16.X but how do I configure it? I've seen there are some Crossfire settings as AFR and others. What other configurations are there and should I set them up? Thank you for your help

 

[10tacle]

Well like I said it's been years since I ran Crossfire, but maybe this thread will help from 2015. Scroll down about half way and look for the instructions from the user "neurotix":

http://www.overclock.net/t/1565467/can-you-force-crossfirex-in-any-game

I'd recommend reading the entire thread though as some are saying AFR improves performance, others say it decreases performance. All depending on the game. This is what happens when you get into unofficially supported territory.

 

[GustavoGimpel]

Well like I said it's been years since I ran Crossfire, but maybe this thread will help from 2015. Scroll down about half way and look for the instructions from the user "neurotix":

http://www.overclock.net/t/1565467/can-you-force-crossfirex-in-any-game

I'd recommend reading the entire thread though as some are saying AFR improves performance, others say it decreases performance. All depending on the game. This is what happens when you get into unofficially supported territory.

Thank you for your help. I downloaded previous versions of the Catalyst driver and messed around a bit. I saw some people claiming the 15.11.1 driver being a good crossfiring driver so I'm trying it out now. Some games I managed to improve fps with no glitches whatsoever, some games went down on performance a bit. The main advantage I saw is the hability to set individual profiles for each game, so if the game doesn't work well with cf (like CS:GO), it disables it based on the profile. On the latest Crimson driver I have to manually turn crossfire on and off depending on which game I wish to play, and sometimes turning it on or off crashes the driver and I have to force reset the system...

This should give my build a breath for a while, thank you again.