GregP

Well, this might not help much, but I can confirm that the snapviews are working properly for me in 1.1.1.1. I presume you've tried rebooting your computer, unplugging and replugging all peripherals, etc.? Sounds like you've got a stuck key or something.

Yes, I had a 6990, and in DCS one of the cards gets disabled, so it uses just one of them.

Exactly. Although I have to admit, it seems that wtfisgoingon has done the impossible ... he's got usage on both cards and better FPS with two cards than with one. Well my friend, consider yourself lucky ... all the rest of us are quite sure you are the only person in the world who's gotten Crossfire to improve your FPS in DCS. I'll have to have you build me a computer sometime. :) Bottom line though, is that 99.9999% of us cannot get it to work, and it seems to either be due to the DCS engine not really supporting it OR AMD not supporting the DCS engine. And I ask again my original question: Can SOMEBODY from ED answer this question for us? Anyone?

Nope, you're the Chosen One, apparently. :) But seriously though ... given all that I've read on this forum, very often people believe that Crossfire is working for them, because for whatever reason they get better results with it 'enabled' instead of 'disabled', but when they actually look at their GPU usage, in utilities like Afterburner, they discover that the second card was not in fact being used. So yeah: I'm really, really curious to know what's going on with your cards. Clearly you're seeing some kind of advantage ... but the odds of it being a result of a true Crossfire setup are just incredibly low, at least based on everything else I've read. Can you describe specifically what you mean when you say you have it working?

Yeah you seem to be the luckiest DCS/AMD fan ever :) -- to my knowledge, you are the only person who has ever gotten Crossfire to work in DCS. I tried your suggestion about shutting off Catalyst AI, by the way, but it didn't work for me. Are you absolutely certain that both of your 5770's are being used? Have you used something like MSI Afterburner to verify it?

Well, anything's worth a try to get CF working, but following the above process, I get no change in either GPU usage on the second card (0%) or FPS on my dual 7970's. Oh well....

Really? I didn't realize that. OK, will update original post.

This issue has been discussed to no end in these forums, and lots of DCS users have tried to contact AMD to ask if Crossfire support will ever be added to their drivers, but have never received a response. Could we get an official ED response to this question, as in all my searching through these forums I don't think I've ever seen one? Does Crossfire support of the DCS series depend on AMD updating their drivers accordingly (i.e. creating profiles for DCS), or is it the game developer that must work to enable Crossfire? Is there a specific technical reason why CF does not work in DCS? Or is the DCS engine basically "CF-ready" but the DCS series is just lacking proper recognition from AMD? I'm not looking to point any fingers, I'd just like to know how the process works and who we need to lobby to get this finally working. DCS users generally spend a lot more money on computer hardware than your average gamer, especially on video cards (there are already 46, at last count, DCS users who really want to be able to use Crossfire, as tabulated in this poll), and it's really frustrating that we can't get the maximum utility out of these expensive multiple-GPU setups in our favorite flight sim.

Yup, I've already tried that route, like so many others. But I think I'm now going to try to get some of the guys who run the hardware sites I frequent to ask on my (our) behalf, as they seem to have regular contact with AMD. Worth a try at least.

Sorry, I don't own FSX so I really couldn't say. I wish! No, I'm not running Crossfire in DCS. Believe me I've tried every single combination of CCC and Radeon Pro profile parameters that I could think of, and I'm convinced there's no way to do it. I'm running Crossfired 7970's in every other game, and even technically in DCS (because I'm not manually disabling Crossfire) but the second card doesn't get used at all.

Ah, OK, that explains it (sweet pit, by the way). Exporting stuff to a 4th monitor, and being smart about how you arrange the monitors within Windows, is different from what I'm trying to do (although it is what I used to be doing). My setup (pic here) is more like taking a giant canvas of the normal view in the cockpit and just dropping the lower left and right corners of it; this was the only way that I could use the touchscreen to interact directly with the cockpit instruments without having to use Helios. Although I tried and really liked Helios, ultimately what I wanted was something that felt more natural, and didn't give me two cockpit views. I think I've achieved that ... but at the cost, of course, of rendering this ridiculous 6400x2160 resolution. :)

How exactly did you manage to get a T-shape working with 4 monitors placed side-by-side? PeterP suggested here that a second viewport be created in the monitorsetup file, which I tried back in December but found that it killed framerate. I can't quite figure out how else to do it. Are you using SoftTH?

I'm of course familiar with moving the monitors around within Windows to try to minimize overall render area but I could have sworn I already tried this with the T-shape and it didn't work ... can't quite remember why though. Worth a try again! Will do tonight. Thanks for the suggestion.

Even though Kuky's been having no end of problems with his 7970 in DCS, I decided to at least give it a try based on so many other positive things I was reading about this card. My setup had been a 6990 + 6970 in Crossfire (=Trifire), which of course didn't do anything whatsoever for me in DCS beyond what a single 6970 would do, but certainly helped in EVERY SINGLE OTHER GAME I OWN. :) But still, DCS performance is what has driven most of my upgrades lately, so I figured it was worth trying out the 7970. I bought two of them to completely replace my 6990 + 6970. I run DCS at 6400x2160, across three 27" monitors for the 'main' view and a single 22" touchscreen for the instrument view, arranged in a T-shape as shown here. I'm not going to get into exactly what graphics settings I have, because it's the difference in framerate that I'm so excited about here. With my previous setup, which was essentially one-half of a 6990 in DCS (which is clocked at 830/5.0, slightly slower than a single 6970's 880/5.5), I had tweaked my settings to get 24 FPS in a standard simple takeoff mission. To my surprise, when I dropped the 7970's in, my first test yielded 34 FPS, a 40% increase right off the bat! Having read about the 7970's great overclocking potential, I then went right for the max clocks allowed within MSI Afterburner: from 925 to 1125 on the core clock, and from 1375 (=5.5 GHz) to 1575 (=6.3 GHz) on the memory clock. Going into DCS, my takeoff mission now started at 40 FPS -- an overall 67% improvement in framerate! I couldn't believe it. And this on a card that runs cooler and quieter than both a single 6970 and my 6990 ... amazing! I'm using the 8.921.2 RC11 driver set, and as Kuky has discovered, there is no doubt that this is NOT a complete driver release. It's buggy, and does cause crashes occasionally, and not all the features of the 12.1 or 12.2 Catalyst releases are in there yet (the big one, from my perspective, being the lack of ability to use Crossfire in 3D on the 7970 yet). Some other test results of interest: rFactor2, 5916x1080: 6990+6970: 41 FPS 2x7970: 60 FPS (46% increase) pCARS, 5916x1080: 6990+6970: 36 FPS 2x7970: 46 FPS (28% increase) Deus Ex: Human Revolution, 5916x1080: 6990+6970: 74 FPS 2x7970: 90 FPS (22% increase) The Witcher 2, 1920x1080: 6990+6970: 130 FPS 2x7970: 143 FPS (10% increase) The Witcher 2, 1920x1080, 3D: 6990+6970: 36 FPS 1x7970: 50 FPS (cannot use Crossfire yet) BF3, 1920x1080: 6990+6970: 114 FPS 2x7970: 118 FPS (3% increase) Interesting that only BF3 did not see much improvement in FPS. Also, I should note that, in my quick testing, I did start to see some artifacts in some of these games, indicating that I need to scale back the OC a bit. But still, the OC from 925/5.5 up to 1125/6.3 only nets about 10-15% more FPS, so for most of these games there would still be a sizable jump going from the 6990+6970 to 2x7970's at stock speeds. Lastly, given the increases in DCS FPS that others have seen from the 7970 -- generally anywhere from 30-50% -- it's obvious that the increases we're all seeing are very much system-dependent. At 6400x2160, for sure the VRAM on my 6990+6970 was being maxed out, for one thing, so that additional gigabyte of VRAM on the 7970 probably helps there. Bottom line though: I am one happy Warthog driver. :)

EDIT: SOLD I just got this card two weeks ago from the original owner. He'd bought it new in April, and it has the full 3-year warranty. It's a beast of a card, insanely fast, but I recently upgraded to dual 7970's and don't have any need for it anymore. I've got the original box and all cables, and the card's in perfect condition, never overclocked. I'm selling it for $500 shipped within the US, and I'd prefer Paypal payment. My heatware is here.

OK so I've had a look at somebody else's example file, for a different joystick, and indeed there are "combos" lines further down that allow assignment of specific DX buttons to specific commands. But the entire structure has changed from 1.1.1.0 ... ED, I love your sims, but damn these sweeping undocumented changes are REALLY getting irritating.

No one else has run into this problem? Everybody else has just copied their 1.1.1.0 Warthog lua file over to 1.1.1.1 and it runs with no problems?

Mitch is back! Woohoo! Always loved your skins. Thank you, sir!

Apologies in advance if I'm overlooking something obvious. I only yesterday finally installed 1.1.1.1 (new full install) as I hadn't had the time back in December. I spent quite a bit of time months ago modifying my "Thrustmaster Combined.lua" file such that I could get all the buttons and switches working the way I wanted. My need to do this was necessitated by the fact that: 1) I want to program my WH via TARGET, so that I can make use of its advanced programming functionality 2) I want to be able to use TARGET to pass in DX button/axis codes to DCS, which I then manually assign to sim functions within the corresponding lua file, like this: [196] = { ["combos"] = { [1] = { ["key"] = "JOY_BTN4", }, -- end of [1] }, -- end of ["combos"] ["up"] = 576, ["name"] = "HOTAS MIC Switch Forward", ["category"] = "HOTAS", ["down"] = 575, }, -- end of [196] So, with 1.1.1.1 I copied my controller lua files back into the correct folders, start up DCS, go into a flight ... and my throttle doesn't work. When I go back out to the GUI, I see that the axes somehow never got assigned. I assign them, go back in-sim, and now the throttle works but no buttons on the throttle work. I then exit the game, go look at my Thrustmaster Combined.lua file, and I see that it's overwritten everything I had in there (yes, of course I had a backup :)), and now there's nothing but lines like this: {down = iCommandPlane_Altimeter_ELECT, name = "AAP CDU Power Switch", category = "AAP"}, {down = iCommandPlane_AAP_CDU_Power, name = "AAP CDU Power Switch", category = "AAP"}, {down = iCommandPlane_AAP_EGI_Power, name = "AAP EGI Power Switch", category = "AAP"}, With no obvious way of assigning DX buttons/axes to functions. So obviously my question is, how is this done? Clearly something big changed in 1.1.1.1.

EDIT: SOLD I just bought two of these last month new from Amazon for $350 each: http://www.amazon.com/Radeon-XFX-6970-Graphics-Card/dp/B004GCIZ5A/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1327680213&sr=8-1 But now I've replaced one with a 6990, so I'm looking to sell it. It's in perfect condition, never been overclocked, and because I registered it within 30 days, the normal 2-year warranty has been extended to a lifetime warranty. I'd prefer payment via Paypal. My heatware is here.

OK, that makes sense, because in running in windowed mode, you're basically disabling CF. Which is consistent with what most others see: turning CF on lowers FPS. For some reason I see identical FPS both with and without CF, though.

OK, thanks for those pictures. Are you then applying those CCC settings to a DCS profile by choosing DCS.exe and then 'saving' at the top? I'm pretty sure that in windowed mode, CF gets disabled -- that's why you're seeing load on only one card (this should be true for all games). When you say you're getting better FPS in windowed mode -- do you mean, compared to running CF in fullscreen mode? Or compared to running fullscreen with CF off?

At least in the latest 12.2 Preview drivers, with Trifire there is an option to use all 3, just 2, or only 1 video card. It's fairly simple: under 'Gaming' and 'AMD CrossfireX', if you have 3 video cards, you'll see an option to toggle between 3 and 2 of them. Then, if you want to use only one GPU on a dual-GPU card (like the 5970 or 6990), just turn Crossfire off altogether -- that will allow use of just one GPU.

BIGNEWY, You appear to have done the impossible -- getting Crossfire working. Can you explain exactly how you have CCC set up? I've tried every possible combination of settings that I can think of, and no matter what I do, I get 0% utilization of my non-primary cards (this is true for both Crossfire and Trifire, since I'm running a 6990 + 6970 combo).

PoleCat, You're quite the salesman :) as I had never heard of this device before but am now seriously considering buying it. Would you be able to give me rough dimensions of the seat cushion? I'm trying to figure out how nicely it would fit on top of my Playseat.