ATI 5870 Crossfire Driver Issues with Alienware - Discussion Thread

I don't think there's much Dell can do about this. It is clearly an AMD driver problem and it's up to them to fix it. Dell can put pressure on them but that's really about it. This issue with wavy lines has been around for a long time.

 

I appreciate that but how come some people get it and others dont? (oh, and btw, sorry if i PM'd you without notice - apologies)
Oh, and the only thing Dell SHOULD have done about this is prior testing to ensure no problems exist before marketing or selling this configuration - people pay good money for stuff that works NOT stuff that doesnt if im right? - kinda like selling a brand new car to someone knowing it doesnt work right.......a fix would be good yes, but with no timescale to a resolution is not good enough in my humble opinion.

 

Well it does work it's just that some games tend not to be optimized properly for Crossfire. If you go back to my first post, you will see I linked to a solution someone put up that uses Rivatuner's D3DOverride program to enable triple buffering vsync. It largely solves the wavy line issue but at the cost of floaty mouse control. So far I have only had to use it in a single game (Singularity), the rest work fine with default Crossfire drivers and vsync off. Hopefully we get some input regarding this issue from Dell.

 

Thanks Joker, I will read into that but i do feel (especially as being new to AW and this level of computing) that people purchasing shouldnt have to look for workarounds...just my opinion but its fairly valid.

BTW, you mentioned earlier that you are sending feedback to AW regarding this thread etc.....is this likely to filter down to AW UK or is it primarily US as half the time i phone AW UK, they just say oh, we are completely different to AW USA....

Wouldnt mind a link or directions to the above if you could?

 

Dell has different market segments but usually fixes are universal so whatever they do in Miami/Austin will get filtered everywhere. I agree that workarounds should not be needed at all, especially for such a high end system. The problem is I have yet to find a single laptop that has high end components and doesn't have one issue or another. Give the rivatuner d3doverrider program a try, with triple buffering the floaty mouse of vsync isn't as bad as usual. In singularity I don't notice it at all but in some games like frontlines fuel of war, it's very noticeable.

 

Looking for a common theme among Alienware owners who complain about this problem I noticed that most are using 4Gb of ram and HDD. Is there anyone with 8 Gb ram and SSD having this same issue? In Canada they have discontinued the 4Gb option and only offer 6 or 8 Gb.

 

Thats interesting...i too was looking for some common ground to try and base this upon....as i dont know that much about how the various components of the laptop interact with each other, its hard for me to say wether one thing can or could cause such issues.

As its happening to US and UK owners, its unlikely that its anything to do with the MLK suffix on UK models.

As it seems to happen (for me anyway) with or without an a/c connected, that seems to rule out anything to do with external ground loops / interference via other power sources (but i could be wrong)

Odd to think that it could be caused my a 2+2 configuration of ram (4gb) but again , i wouldnt know the technicalities behind it....also seems odd to ditch such a popular configuration unless its something to do with making more profit by deleting the cheapest option....it has been my undestanding that ram is best configured using matching pairs and not a 2 + 4 = 6gb.......its why i went for 4 as 8 was a bit over my budget (and a cheaper upgrade later instead of Dell ram prices)

4gb is still a UK option as of today.....

HDD? - just how would this affect my screen?? - obviously it has an internal power source so maybe?? - also, does it affect people who have a SSD and also a HDD? - i mean obviously SSD means no moving parts so could the mechanical nature of the drives induce this lining effect?

Too much for me to diagnose....i will leave that to the experts....

Excellent hypothesis tho Falcon....and if it is true, i would be damanding an upgrade from AW to both 6 or 8gb and also a SSD!!

PS...Joker, wheres your post concerning your Rivatuner fix?

 

Hi Stevie

It is just hyphothetical brain storming and might be a moot point. Perhaps the cards are faster than their ability for HDD, CPU, and Ram to handle? SDD is more power efficient leaving more headroom for other components. Perhaps the extra Ram gives the games a boost and take some pressure off the CPU which makes the GPU run more efficiently. I am just guessing and don't want anyone to spend $1000 on a upgrade and than blame me. Perhaps when you tech comes to your house you could ask him this question and see if they can test your system with 8 Gb and see if that makes a difference. Than you have once less variable to worry about.

 

Point taken Falcon,

I am going to talk to my account manager later today (hopefully). I emailed him last week with my concerns and it was supposedly passed to the relevant complaints department for them to address. That was Thursday.

I dont know what the outcome will be as yet but as mentioned to you, my strong preference is that this gets sorted for me via RA and not by tech support visits to replace various bits.....

They were outta stock on the gpu's anyway, that and the fact that they just wanted to send me a new one asap indicates to me that they obviously do think it is something to do with the cards...otherwise, why just issue a new card without diagnosis?? - unless they just give them away like confetti...

 

I can assure you... that is not the problem. That has not been the case in the X number of years SLi and CF have been in use.

 

Most games I am running are using 6-8 Gb of ram. I run the same games on both laptop and desktop and my logitech keyboard gives me a graphical representation of Ram usuage. I watch the usage constantly. Games like metro 2033 are ram and hardrive intensive.

I sympathize with people who have paid a lot of money for a product that doesn't work as expected. In 2007 I bought an XPS laptop for $5000 with the highest configuration at the time, 7900 GTX. Two months later Crysis came out, GPU's changed and my system was obsolete. Game after game was a disapointment.

Personally I was running 4Gb of ram on a 32 bit operating system as long back as I can remember. I would think running a high end system on NEAR absolute minimum ram today is a little counter intuitive. For those who want to try 8Gb you are better sourcing good quality ram yourself as Dells ram is middle of the road and expensive.

Unfortunately I have not found any good articles on Windows 7 64 bit, crossfire, and 4Gb vs 8Gb of Ram.

 

I have RAID 0 drives and 8GB of ram and recently experienced the wavy lines during the loading advertisements on a very black screen. It's not Ram or HDD bottlenecks.

 

I am running SSD and don't see the problem except for a split second with a game load. Once the game is loaded the Ram, CPU, and SSD seem to work flawlessly. The CPU, working in conjunction with software applications, sends information about the image to the graphics card. Any reduced bottlenecks in theory should improve throughput of information.

Some like Stevie are seeing the problem throughout games which may be very different from loading an advertisment.

 

Joker has an ssd if im not mistaken and sees the flickering.
If it were anything other than the cards then the problem would be far more widespread and on the 4870s aswell. The problem is clearly the cards.
I dont know why there is still a question about this as its unique to systems with the 5 series cards.
If someone had reported it on the 4870s then i could understand the speculation but as far as i know they haven't.

 

Yes Joker does have an Intel SSD. Not sure whether he games off of it or just leaves it for the operating system.

I am not sure how running an i7 920 with 4 Gb of ram vs 8 Gb will affect performance as some games do use more than 4Gb ram. If anyone has an article on the subject please post.

Nieither Dell or AMD even acknowledge the problem nor is the problem acknowledged in the media to any great degree, and the problem has varying degrees so not sure why some are so quick to know exactly what is NOT causing the problem.

Maybe some people just have bad cards do to production problems or maybe it is is a combination of factors. I believe Joker has 4870's and reported the problem. I believe the problem was reported by some AMD customers long before the 3xxx series cards as well. As far back as 2005 or even sooner. Just can't find any common consensus as to what is causing it.

 

To answer the question about 64bit OS and 4Gb of ram I could only find this article written in 2008 about Vista 64 bit. Vista 64 and Windows 7 64 are obviously not the same but the best article I could find on the subject of 4Gb vs 8Gb and 64 bit.

The article is about 10 pages long but one of the things they did point out is that:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/vista-workshop,1775.html

"The upshot is that it doesn't make sense to install a 64 bit version of Vista in order to better utilize 4 GB of memory simply because the 32 bit version would only recognize 3.5 GB. The problem is that while it is true that you would "gain" the missing memory, you would also immediately lose it to the system due to the 64 bit version's larger memory footprint. Thus, using a 64 bit version really only makes sense with larger memory sizes."

 

Another common theme among owners is their use of power. Perhaps the problem is exentuated by being close to the full capacity of the PSU. PSU of 250W is a lot for a laptop but there are a lot of components drawing from this. HDD, Raid, and Larger CPU, and even small CPU working harder could draw more current. This would explain the widely varrying results. HDD also adds a lot of heat to the system that the GPU must deal with. Smaller hardware options may also draw more current if they works harder to keep up.

 

I understand that many of you are experiencing customer service issues. Unfortunate as it is, we're getting off topic. There is a thread about Dell customer service already. Let's try to get back on topic about the graphics card issues.

Hope I didn't offend anyone, it was not my intention

 

Not at all, i agree,it was off topic but it just came up.....sorry folks for the diversion.

 

Posts have been moved to the http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...placement-systems-warranty-repair-issues.html thread. Keep it on topic please.


When posting, be sure to include the driver version you are running. Although you may have posted it previously, this thread is now several pages long. No reason not to include it.

 

Like i said, apologies, will keep it on track from now on....

 

This is definitely a software issue like I said before. It has nothing to do with various hardware combinations. I was playing Alien Swarm earlier and with triple buffering turned off (it has the option in the game), the menu screen was flickering with horizontal lines like crazy. I pulled up fraps and saw the FPS was hitting 294+ which means the display simply isn't able to keep up with it since it's limited to 60 hz. ATi could fix this through software so Dell needs to get on the ball with them and get it done. BTW when I turned on triple buffering, the horizontal lines in the menu were nearly gone. In game, even with vsync off, the lines really weren't there but it still looked better with triple buffering turned on.

Edit: oh yeah I'm using the dell drivers for the 5870 cards.

 

Unless the games are coded to run as 64-bit, it's impossible for them to use more than 2GB of RAM. A 32-bit application can only address 4GB of memory space, and half of that is reserved for the system.

The majority of games are probably still 32-bit (for compatibility reasons - only 49% of Windows 7 installs are 64-bit) so I'd be interested to know what games you're running.

 

that would be interesting, since metro 2033 and and NTW never hit more than ~3GB for me, but ultimately irrelevant, since ram has nothing to do with the problem.

 

It seems like someone had said Dell or ATI was planning on releasing drivers that may fix the problem this week? Or did I just dream that?

 

there was a tweet by an AMD CAT dev team member that said CAT 10.7's are supposed to be released tomorrow. There's was no mention of a Fix for CF 5870 mobility users in the M17x within the fixes list however.

 

Is there hope that these drivers might still fix the problem?

 

Not Sure whether it has been mentioned but there is some serious micro stuttering or some other problem on the MOH beta.

 

maybe, who knows. Only the AMD Driver team does

 

Which driver you are seeing this 'microstuttering or some other problem' with? Dell driver, ATI provided driver? Version?

 

For starters, the game only utilizes one GPU.
I'm having trouble checking temperatures at the same time as running the game because it won't let me windows out, ctrlatldel, or even alt tab out.
average fps on low settings is around 60
average fps on medium is around 35
average fps on high is around 25
Detail looks surprisingly good on low so I've been keeping it on that, but also because on it and higher graphic settings everytime you turn the fps have a huuuuge drop. There have even been a few times where I won't have touched any settings but for some unknown reason the graphics drop to >10 fps.

Edit: Here's two comparison videos. Forgot the fps counter for the first one but it's at 59/60 constantly
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2OfpDSDd5o
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3mRKp4fFwY

 

Hi Nzgeek. Great questions!

Yes the majority of games (older games) produced over the last 10 years were aimed at the XP market (Dx9 or lower). Windows 7 is being adopted for business because of the legacy nature of XP, 64 bit for CAD, Photoshop, and Video, and due to the connectivity of Windows 7. This is pushing windows 7 sales higher. The typical workstation in a typcial company will not see any benefit from 64 bit systems as the vast majority of business users are emailing, word processing, and connecting to a database. Those are the 50% who are probably buying the 32 bit version. Gaming PC's are almost all being manufactured these days with Windows 7 64.

The games I play are Left4dead, Left4dead2, Call of Duty Modern Warfare, BattleField Bad Company 2. My logic is why spend a lot of money on a gaming PC to play a lot of older poorly coded games. If a game doesn't score 9+ I usally won't play it.

What a lot of people don't realise is that you take a hit on performance upgrading to 64 bit and than running on say 3Gb of ram as opposed to 6Gb. If you are going to run 4Gb of ram you might as well have stayed with 32 bit. Here are the benches to prove that point. (example is with Vista 64).

Left 4 Dead : Gaming In 64-Bit: Tom's Tests, Microsoft Weighs In

"In a repeat of what we saw in Grand Theft Auto, shifting to a 64-bit platform results in lost performance in Left 4 Dead at both 1680x1050 and 1920x1200. It’s only when you step up to 6 GB that the speed is recovered—though the 6 GB platform is not any faster than the 3 GB, 32-bit configuration."

P.S. With a 32 bit OS and 4Gb of ram you are utilizing about 3.4 GB. When you switch to Windows 7 64 I believe you recover the missing ram but speed drops with 4Gb as per article I posted above.

P.S. With Windows 7 64 bit, Dx11, closure of XP, and GPU price points crashing, you will see a lot more titles using more Ram. This reason is rather obvious, Windows Live Games will push the Ram to push windows 7 sales. If Legacy games is anyones thing than 32 bit is your king.

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/

 

Yes you did read this. Sounds too good to be true.

 

There's nothing too good about it. AMD has committed to monthly driver updates for a long time now. 10.7s come either this week or next. The tweet about the 21st came from one of the employee's on the Development team..it's not like some fanboy is taking a guess at when they're coming out.

 

Folks, please take the game discussion/32 vs 64 bit to the owners lounge. Any further OT posts will be removed.

Questions on this, PM me. Thanks.

 

Dell does not suport Catalyst Mobility monthly Updates. In fact they strongly oppose them and recommend you not use them as they are generic and do not offer support for their proprietary features. The number one Alienware technical support call I have been told is people trying to install generic drivers. Go figure the marketing departments tweet, who would have thought? If you are new to this discussion I suggest you contact Dell/Alienware/AMD and clarify this point yourself before purchasing a system based on gross misinformation.

 

Is that to say that using any other driver than Dell drivers is not recommended by Dell? - surely if they are ATI cards, they would work with ATI catalyst updates???

 

Dell telling people not to use anything except dell drivers.. who would have guessed that. It's easier for tech support to suggest to only use Dell tested drivers than to guess at troubleshoot problems on untested drivers all the time, it's as simple as that.

there are no 'proprietary' features in the M17x's 5870s. The only slim chance exception is the HDMI audio driver, however, this can be installed via the dell driver package separately from the 10.5's, and since the new AMD drivers don't over-write this function anyway, it will continue to work correctly. Technically you could argue the 5870's in the M17x R2 are 'proprietary' since only Dell cards have the 10.6 problem, but this has never been more than the drivers not automatically recognizing the cards and installing the update, which is why most people are so upset, since it's such a simple problem. There's nothing special about the way they work compared to any other 5870.

 

So, does that mean that ati catalyst 10.7 is released and tested by some of you more experienced guys, that they will work more efficiently thatn dells own stock variety? - i am confused slightly as obviously dell have got their own drivers for these cards which seem to limit thhe performance capabilities....from what i have read, it seems that this is only going to be "unleashed" by ati drivers??

Maybe its a case of a newbie getting the wrong end of the stick but everyone seems to want to update from dells own drivers to ati, surely the reason behind this is that people are finding that dell drivers limit the cards?

 

Could people experiencing the horizontal lines flicker try setting catalyst AI to "advanced?"
I always do this with my crossfire setups and I have never seen the issue.

Apparently, unsupported games (no crossfire profile) run in 'scissor' mode crossfire, which scissors the rendering into top and bottom half instead of first frame/next frame.

When running this mode the cards will automatically shift the line of separation up or down depending on how much rendering needs to be done.

If you are running crazy high fps this line will be shifting up and down much faster than your refresh rate - when you think about this, it could in fact cause horizontal flickering.

Obviously, AFR wont have this problem, so setting catalyst AI to advanced should get rid of this problem, if im right about what causes it.

Give it a shot and report back here.

-Ash

 

I will give it a go tomorrow given the chance and report back......

 

AMD monthly updates offer limited support for system vendor specific features. They are NOT compatible with some Alienware features. No suprise as Alienware has some of the most vendor specific features on the market. Since Catalyst was released eons ago, some Dell laptops work sometimes with Catalyst Mobility and other times don't. It depends the exact hardware configuration relative to a specific Catalyst driver release. Laptops are very proprietary and have many custom specific features. The main reason there are so many problems with Catalyst is that they conflict with Dell specific drivers. With the high number of problems that Alienware customers are currently experiencing and the high number of replacements we are hearing about, it is wishful thinking that M17xR2 5870 CF will be included in the release tomorrow. I suspect that people waiting on new GPU replacements will have a better chance of Calayst working or customers with older 4xxx series cards.

 

such as? please elaborate.

 

Dell ATI Drivers vs Official ATI Drivers? - Alienware Forum - Alienware Club - Dell Community

Vendor specific features: Stealth, Alienfusion, RGB LCD, Alientouch, Aliensense, 5870 CF, HDMI, Blue Ray, audio and every other piece of Dell software/hardware

Not compatible: Proprietary information.

 

Most of those features are in no way related to the ATi display drivers. AlienFusion, AlienTouch and AlienSense are provided by the Alienware Control Center. The RGB-LED screen is just another screen as far as the graphics card is concerned. The Blu-ray drive is just another optical drive, and the HD audio uses a fairly common chipset.

The only Alienware feature that may require driver support is stealth mode, as this will lower the clock speed of the graphics card in order to provide extra battery life.

Almost all of the big-name system manufacturers add some tweaks to the stock drivers. Usually these tweaks are minimal and the reference drivers usually work just fine. For example, Dell have added HDMI audio support in their drivers, which the reference drivers don't support. If you never use HDMI or DisplayPort then you'll probably never notice the difference.

As Lozz has said, the main reason that system suppliers say to use their own drivers rather than the reference set is that they do their own testing on their drivers, but not the reference ones. If something goes wrong with their own drivers then it's up to them to fix the problem. If you're using reference drivers then you can't expect support.

As far as the problem with the CF5870's goes, it looks like Dell have modified the 5870 BIOS for whatever reason. It may be for power saving, or to reduce heat, or whatever. The point is that something has made them incompatible with the reference drivers. It's possible that ATi will add a tweak to their reference drivers which will allow them to work with the Dell-variant cards, and it's also possible that these drivers will solve the flickering problems. However, nobody will know until those drivers are released (hopefully in the next day or so).

 

Not sure what they tell you blokes in the retail Que to close the sale but those of is in the Corporate Que have much better access to higher level tech support. Cry me a river but I must know something of the subject as I pointed out to the forum BEFORE catalyst 10.6 release that 10.6 would not work with Alienware 5870 CF. One of the specific points made to me by Alienware was that the DELL/Ati Catalyst Drivers were specifically written to support the Alienware RGB LCD monitor, HDMI video, HDMI audio, Stealth Mode, Dells version of 5870 CF, ect ect. Yes something made them incompatible, otherwise the largest GPU maker in the world would not have forgotten about the largest PC Gaming laptop in the world. As I reported almost two months ago, Dell had a hard time writing the CF drivers. No suprise here.

http://en.community.dell.com/owners-club/alienware/f/3746/p/19333306/19700337.aspx#19700337

 

Setting it to advanced does nothing. Even with AFR supported the problem persists. Right now if you guys are having severe flickering, the best fix is to download rivatuner, turn on it's d3doverride program and set it to detect your D3D games that flicker and run them with triple buffering.

 

That had me thinking too....i was kinda wondering why such a large graphics card mfctr had missed out Alienware (king of gaming laptops) fo support with its very own mobility flagship cards....hmmmm

 

no where does it say in that thread they had a hard time modifying them. The extent of their modifications are including the HDMI audio driver...and in the 10.5 case, including the device ID for their cards, which don't exist in the 10.6, which is why they won't install.

those features are in no way related to the 5870's in the M17x.

the cards were incorrectly coded from foxconn with the incorrect device ID, which is why when you try to install 10.6 drivers, it will fail. Not because it's a totally different PCB design requiring completely new drivers. They're the same 5870's everyone else on the earth uses(aside from being low voltage), the drivers just can't see them because the Device ID they use is different.

They might tweak it for the RGB LCD monitor so the color isn't distorted when you install new drivers and disable the internal AMD overdrive feature in the driver panel.. but otherwise that's about it.. the HDMI driver as I stated before is a separate .inf file that Dell packages with their 10.5 drivers. It's not going to suddenly stop working when you update CAT drivers. Stealth mode does not adjust GPU clock speeds, except to say that it caps them, which does not require any modifications to the drivers at all. so it has nothing to do with the 5870s, nor does anything CC related.

 

Joker,
where do I find the d3doverride program within Rivatuner?