Crossfire

[Kankkis]

Is it supported in BS2

[Griffin]

Many people have experienced much better performance with Crossfire OFF. I have no personal experience but you should definately try.

[kmw350]

I bought BS2 a couple of days ago, and so far framerates seem to be better with Crossfire OFF

[Kankkis]

i have 5970, it's one card crossfirecard, it's so no easy to turn off :(

There was in old drivers possible to turn it off with Catalyst AI setting but no this option available in newest drivers :(

[Luigi Gorgonzola]

Why should FPS increase by turning off XFire? Doesn't sound plausible to me as this would leave all the rendering stuff at a single card.

 

At least with a single monitor configuration, that is. Multiple monitors plugged in to different cards might do a difference.

 

Dual 5770, single monitor configuration here, XFire on and no real issues at all (I don't count in the white flashes as these seem to be related to the driver and not XFire).

[kmw350]

i have 5970, it's one card crossfirecard, it's so no easy to turn off :(

There was in old drivers possible to turn it off with Catalyst AI setting but no this option available in newest drivers :(

 

Might be worth loading the older drivers back in? You can still get them from AMD/ATI site. I've updated the drivers for my 2 x 5750s with just about every update in the last year, but am currently back at the January 2011 drivers because I prefer the Catalyst Control Centre to the new AMD Vision Engine. The performance seems to be just as good with the old drivers on the games I play (F1 2011, rFactor, BS2, Race On, Call of Duty).

[Kankkis]

I tested it and checked with Afterburner, both GBU’s working but only about 40% performance from max, so there is bad Crossfirescaling.

I got about 20-30FPS with medium settings and there is power in that graphics card, weird that A-10 is much faster than BS2

 

I have i7 920 3,66GHz prosessor.

[kmw350]

I tested it and checked with Afterburner, both GBU’s working but only about 40% performance from max, so there is bad Crossfirescaling.

I got about 20-30FPS with medium settings and there is power in that graphics card, weird that A-10 is much faster than BS2

 

I have i7 920 3,66GHz prosessor.

 

For me, BS2 runs badly at about 20fps with Crossfire on, but with Crossfire off it is 28 to 32fps, I have to have detail at medium but it is reasonably smooth, would be good to get more fps, but it is probably my slower cpu (AMD Phenom 9600 quad 2.3) rather than the gpu.

BUT I am also running Eyefinity 3 monitors so it's pretty good considering that :)

Edited January 9, 2012 by kmw350

[EtherealN]

I too, get negative scaling with crossfire on:

http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=83269&page=5

 

I really hope they fix this and optimize the game better. It looks like a nice sim, but plays like crap infused with chunky peanuts.

 

Runs fine on my rig. :P

Anyhow, seriously, crossfire scaling is all over in AMD's court. They need to implement support for the product.

[Slayer]

Crossfire or SLI, neither really scale well for the DCS series. Game is CPU bound and all that extra graphics power goes to waste. If you run 3 monitors though its a different ballgame. Then you need the extra horsepower to run such huge resolutuions.

[BIGNEWY]

Runs fine on my rig. :P

Anyhow, seriously, crossfire scaling is all over in AMD's court. They need to implement support for the product.

 

EtherealN has anyone from ED spoken to AMD/ATI ? I have been tweeting ATI going on there forums and filling in customer service request's and so on about crossfire support for DCS but never get a response from them.

 

Has there ever been any discussion with AMD / ATI about a crossfire profile for DCS at corporate level?

[Kankkis]

Yes, Crossfire performance is really poor.

I can play A-10 allmost all maxed but i don't understand why BS2 is so much heavier. It's same engine?

Edited January 10, 2012 by Kankkis

[Slayer]

Yes, Crossfire performance is really poor.

I can play A-10 allmost all maxed but i don't understand why BS2 is so much heavier. It's same engine?

 

It's the same engine but the graphics defaults are slightly different. Also in a helicopter you spend way more time closer to the ground so the level of detail is greater thus the performance hit.

[aviaholic]

Also got 20 fps with crossfire on and 30fps with crossfire off... (both A-10C and BS2)

Buts its weird - running on 2700K @5ghz... Max details, mirrors off.

[average_pilot]

Game is CPU bound...

I disagree, CPU is also underused as much as GPU with black shark. May it be more exact to say that is bus bound? It seems like CPU and GPU spend their time waiting for each other rather than crunching numbers and poligons.

(althought is a good way of keeping power consumption low :P)

Edited January 13, 2012 by average_pilot

[EtherealN]

You're talking about Nvidia's SLI running fine, right?

 

No, I'm talking about getting high framerates, stable, at high graphics, with my single 560Ti, in response to your statement that it "plays like crap". ;)

 

I'm personally skeptical of SLI and crossfire in general, it is prone to too many problems and in some cases can introduce microstutters. (Which applies to both two-card and single-card SLI/CF solutions.) Of course, when the driver support works as it should, it's awesome, but for me it's just not worth the money when a single 560Ti lets me max out almost everything I play, including DCS. (If I played Battlefield 3 and such I might have wanted something more powerful, but I don't.)

 

BIGNEWY, I'm not one that would know what contacts ED has with nVidia and AMD. I'm fairly sure there are contacts, but as you might understand it's hard for something like DCS to compete for their coding attention compared to stuff like BF3, Rage, Skyrim etcetera. I would imagine that whoever handles that communication at ED is fighting uphill, but again I don't have any actual information on that.

 

Average_pilot, if you only look at things like CPU-load monitors you'll get a false look at the load. You can bottleneck on CPU without showing 100% CPU utilization very easily in many ways - the obvious one is that you have idle cores. But there is also such things like if there, for a period of time, is a lot of floating-point but very little integer to do; in this case the integer cores would lie unused while the FPU's are working their proverbial rears off - yet since the integer cores are free, this could report as very little CPU utilization. (This is usually not a huge problem, but as a theoretical example.) Further, regarding video cards, if you have slow vRAM or similar memory issues, you can end up bottlenecked at those memory interfaces, causing the graphics card to not have the data it needs. I have seen some of the cheaper "extra-vRAM" cards do weird memory implementations to bolt that extra vRAM on cheaply - or simply use cheap, slow, vRAM.

[Slayer]

I disagree, CPU is also underused as much as GPU with black shark. May it be more exact to say that is bus bound? It seems like CPU and GPU spend their time waiting for each other rather than crunching numbers and poligons.

(althought is a good way of keeping power consumption low :P)

 

Let me put it another way. It's code bound...Not multithreaded enough to fully take advantage of multicore processers nor does it work well with Crossfire or SLI because it can't feed the cards fast enough. Just take a look through the endless performance and tweak theads. After you hit a certain point with graphics cards there is really no additional FPS to be gained.

 

Taking my I7 920 and overclocking from 2.66 to 4.0ghz does give considerable FPS improvement through. Switching from a quad core to a 6 or 8 core will yield no improvement.

 

Maybe some day they will release the DX11 version that they were working on with A-10C and we will have some eye candy to acutally push these cards hard.

[average_pilot]

People with mighty machines are having just a few more fps than people with modest machines. There is a serious bottleneck and it is not computational because even running in a single core it isn't used beyond 50%. CPU is spending more time idling than doing its job. So I don't think that it's a question of turning it into a multi-threaded simulation.

 

ED has been dragging that bottleneck over many years in their engine(s), so it must be really buried into the engine architecture if after all this time latest revision still performs that bad.

 

Power consumption can be a very good indication of how much a game is taking advantage of the hardware. For example, Rise of Flight is capable of overheating my power supply and turn it off abruptly (it's a very cheap one and can't output the watts that is suppose to, but that's another question). With Black Shark everything stays rather cold.

[aviaholic]

Ok, 12.1 released. And its cool - I dont need turn off crossfire everytime. Real working option "CrossfireX mode for 3D applications" in "3d application settings" - you just need notice warning: "THIS SETTING APPLIES ONLY TO USER-DEFINED APPLICATION PROFILES" - 1st I missed it, on 2nd try I saved new application - dsc.exe

[BIGNEWY]

I tried as well, still getting lower results with crossfire on : (

[BIGNEWY]

posting just to report I am seeing high fps with crossfire after playing around with profiles, however the clouds and TGP / ABRIS now jump around like a teenager on an acid trip.

 

I am currently trying different AMD profiles using the 12.1 ccc and will post again if I find one that works

 

FAKE EDIT1:

Annoying to see Free Falcon has a ATI crossfire profile, but no support for DCS

 

FAKE EDIT2:

 

After trying many profiles and different settings if DCS is in crossfire mode 1x1 or ACR Friendly it will flicker.

 

back to using just the one card on DCS :(

Edited January 27, 2012 by BIGNEWY

[P1KW]

i have 5970, it's one card crossfirecard, it's so no easy to turn off :(

There was in old drivers possible to turn it off with Catalyst AI setting but no this option available in newest drivers :(

 

Window mode is a half, but valid, solution for 5970 or 6990 users. :megalol:

 

Greetings

[BIGNEWY]

I did not try window mode

 

I have a HD5770 and a HD6770 in crossfire, and it seems to be working, getting 50 - 75 fps and no flickering.

[GregP]

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).

[GregP]

i have 5970, it's one card crossfirecard, it's so no easy to turn off :(

There was in old drivers possible to turn it off with Catalyst AI setting but no this option available in newest drivers :(

 

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.