ATI 5870 Crossfire Driver Issues with Alienware - Discussion Thread

Powerplay controls the clocks of the GPU so when it's disabled, they do not ramp up into 3D mode. That's why he saw the slowdown, it's expected.

 

Good to know that .... another thing, I appreciate that all these suggested fixes may well work but for a novice like me, its kinda a bit hard to understand....

I really was kinda hoping that with my "dream" laptop, it would plug n play right out thhe box without all this hassle.....i am sure as i get more confident in doing things with the system but WOW, for a newbie, its alot to have to get to grips with just to make it all work as i supposed it would!

 

All this information can be daunting for someone new to all this but I think this radeonpro program makes it fairly effortless and straightforward. Give it a try and I guarantee you will love it and it'll solve all the wavy line issues for you if you force vsync + triple buffering. Normally vsync alone is not a good solution because it introduces input lag and can cut performance in half. Triple buffering adds an extra back buffer and solves that so you get a BETTER image than with vsync off (no tearing), no performance loss and very little increase in input lag. Like I've reiterated before, it's a problem that has plagued multiGPU setups for a long time and I don't see it being fixed by some miracle driver anytime soon. Newer drivers + crossfire profiles may reduce it or even eliminate it in some games but it'll always be there.

 

Thanks Joker, i am just wondering however, if all these problems exist with crossfire applications, is it really worth having a crossfire setup....obviously being a newbie, i kinda looked at the price, thought...mmmmm yep, can afford that so it must be the best option.....as homer would say...D'oh!!!!!

Im beginning to think that i would be better off without crossfire......

(you know i gotta get my corporate issue resolved before i do anything else......)

 

I will confirm that this program works well. Thanks for the info Joker.

 

The performance gain is there and undeniable. So yes to me it's very much worth it.

Your welcome.

 

This is really weird but:

On my desktop PC (crossfire HD5850) NWN2 has really bad flickering horizontal lines.

On my laptop (crossfire hd5870m) NWN2 does NOT have any flickering.

I dont have vsync enabled either - so like, wth mang?

-Ash

 

ATI PowerPlay - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"desktop vs laptop" is the only paragraph worth reading really.
And i did say Drivers have the potential to fix the problem =P but the trick is, ya either gotta be really lucky or know exactly what's wrong. I got nothin.
Although, i'd say Batbay is on the right track. if you can manipulate it, you can fix it.
And Ash, this kind of thing is why i think it's not software directly causing it, but i could be wrong.

 

Because you're getting much higher framerate with your desktop so the flickering is more pronounced. Its directly proportional to how high the FPS goes. If you have a game that flickers and you pile on 16xCSAA + 16xAF and max settings and bring the fps down to 60 or below (to match the display refresh rate) you'll see the flickering largely disappear. It's just the way AFR works with these cards.

 

no 10.7's yet *tear*

 

GPU-74: ATI Catalyst? 10.7 Preview Driver for OpenGL ES 2.0 Support


These should be as current or even newer than the WHQL 10.7 build that should be released later this evening. I'm busy watching Torchwood right now so I haven't installed them.


Edit: Installed them and guess what? They work great! Still have to do the workaround=true part but aside from that, no more RivaTuner hack needed to get them to work like 10.6!

Edit 2: Horizontal flickering I was getting in Singularity is completely gone. Told ya guys, as they add more game support with each iteration of the Catalyst release the flickering will subside. It'll still happen in games that haven't gotten ATi's attention. Going to test more games later, back to watching Torchwood.

 

omg you're such a tease!

watching top gear right now, but will install right after

 

Well I just tested Bad Company 2, the game loads faster and there is no more flickering textures and any trace of horizontal lines I had in that game are gone.

Edit: Tested Alien Swarm and guess what? NO MORE HORIZONTAL LINES!! Man this makes me so happy! Every single game I had horizontal lines in has now been fixed. I can finally say my Crossfire 5870 setup is perfect at last. Took long enough but at least Dell delivered as promised with regards to getting reference ATi drivers working. Glad AMD got around to finally addressing this problem.

 

I can confirm that it works without the work around, which is a big thing, but it appears that their 'fix' for napoleon and empire total war is to just disable crossfire I have AI set to advanced and the secondary GPU is just not running.

 

Wait for an updated Crossfire profile release, it may address it.

 

I just reset crossfire via disabling/enabling, the issue is still there and I'l have to disable AI in order to reduce load times it seems.

 

In contrast to lozz's results i just tried napoleon and crossfire was working (checked with gpuz). The loading times were still abysmal but the flickering is mostly gone. If i look really really closely i can still make it out but for the most part i can live with it now. Probably still use radeonpro though because its fantastic.

 

crossfire works, it's just when it does you have to put up with ridiculous load times. Even alt-tabing into the game will result in a 2-3 minute wait. I can get 25-30FPS full quality settings so it's not bothering me much having it disabled. Other than I'm wasting my other GPU. The game actually stops responding(according to task manager) for the big part of the load time I found out.

The one thing I haven't seen in a long time is the 'invisible men' distortion, which is a good thing too

 

Yes the invisible men thing was the killing blow in the other drivers as it made the game totally unplayable. Thank god it's better now and hopefully we'll see a crossfire profile in the not too distant future.

 

LOL yeah, I can deal with a single GPU, I can't deal with not being able to see infantry!

edit: FFXIV benchmark still running in single GPU mode as well.

 

Yippie no more lines / waves / flickering \m/ 10.7 Beta FTW!!!

 

So is this now a non-issue with the 10.7 release? 10.7 corrects it without Joker's third party profiles app?

Its ironic, isn't it? With NV, we saw performance issues with SLI due to non-valid SLI profiles. Just had to wait for NV to update or workaround using nHancer. LOL.

Glad to see the issue is corrected. I am removing this from sticky status. Figured it was a driver issue and NOT a HW issue.

 

Yeah its doing good except for the system freeze when returning from sleep mode where the screen goes black and i've to do a hard reboot , it'll b helpful if some one can confirm this.

 

disable powerplay and try resuming from sleep again - driver issue I bet (src=google)

 

Disabling power play does not resolve the issue. My problem didn't start after sleep mode though, all I did was boot on battery power. After disabling power play it won't even boot into windows any longer.

edit: trying the WHQL release now.

 

unless im missing summet i cannot install these drivers, it goes throught the install but zooms through the install and dosent install the driver .. i got 5870cf

 

I'm still having the battery power problems with 10.7's, and now normal boot just BSOD's before I can't even get to the login page (which means I'll have to reinstall the drivers *again*) I wouldn't suggest installing 10.7's until the issue is identified and corrected.

 

I mention this as it was seen with the 4870. In any event, looks like the 10.7 has a resume bug also.

Be it NV or ATI, that resume from sleep has plagued laptops forever from one driver version to another... some have it, some dont *SIGH*

Joker and a few others had no issues with 10.7 so perhaps its your install Lozz. Let us know how the reinstall goes.

 

It's not a resume problem(or at least that's not what I'm doing to create the issue). At no point did the laptop go into sleep mode (infact it's disabled). When I shut the computer down, and then unplug the A/C and start on battery power I can get onto the desktop and then aprox 20seconds after the computer freezes, at which point even reconnecting the a/c and doing another hard-boot does not stop the freezing. The only way to correct the problem is to reinstall the drivers. I've attempted to disable power play, but that just results in the laptop BSOD'ing at the windows loading screen during a normal boot. Safe mode works just fine.

 

Lozz, my powerplay suggestion was to the post which was above mine. I was suggesting it for the black screen when waking from sleep - not booting under DC and freezing as you descibe. Not sure about that one.

 

Does it do it in single GPU mode? Part of me wonders whether its something do to do with any tweaks Dell might have made to the VBIOS, and the cards are having some sort of clock related issue on battery power, which then causes something in the drivers to go a little...funny.

 

Lawl, we posted at the same time haha! didn't catch that.

couldn't say, didn't try that, after the 8th uninstall/reinstall, it gets old.

 

No worries - how you resolve it. Check with Joker.

Also, lets stick with the 10.7 thread from now on. I'm going to close this thread since it was originally opened to discuss the flickering everyone was seeing with the previous drivers. If anyone needs to have it reopened or a general discussion created on crossfire for the 17xR2, PM me.


Please continue 10.7 discussion as it relates to the 17xR2 here:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m17x/503428-get-your-catalyst-10-7-non-whql-here.html

Thanks.

 

Oh and btw have you tried the 10.7 beta floating around or just the WHQL. Sounds like the betas might be newer; they might have some fixes in that'll help?

At least you're making some sort of progress with the M17x crossfire issues, even if they're not gone!