Question about gaming and crossfire

[CyberDog]

Hello

I have a question about crossfire.

My system has DFI ICFX3200-T2R, C2D 6750, 4Gb memory and HD 3870 512Mb

What is my problem is that games does not run smoothly with 1280x1024 resolution. So would I have much gain about second HD 3870?

Yours
Tero

[Elvellon]

You'd be better off with a single faster card, really. Especially if one 3870 gives you unplayable framerates.

[CA_Steve]

What's games are you trying to play? At 1280 x 1024 there may be another limiter to your system than the game card...

[AZBrandon]

You'd be better off with a single faster card, really. Especially if one 3870 gives you unplayable framerates.

I'd have to agree with this. If you really want to be done with it, buy a 4830 and call it a day; it's got something like 3 or 4x the 3D power as the 3870, IIRC and crossfire generally only gives you another 40 to 70% more 3D power versus a single card from most of the benchmarks I've seen. A few SLI implementations show 80-90% gains, which is what you'd hope for, but it seems like crossfire never delivers that kind of performance.

[CyberDog]

I'm playing Race Driver Grid at the moment. It runs smoothly with all settings low, but I would like to have eye candy...

[CA_Steve]

I found this review of GRID with 3870 performance and a 6850 running at 3GHz.

Here's another from bit-tech.

I don't think it's your video card - esp as you are just running at 1280x1024...or at least this baseline performance shows what you should be getting. Is your hard drive stuttering a lot? Maybe the files are fragmented - that will really slow down a game. I just don't think it's a "replace the video card" problem.

Finally, the 4830 is a tad better than the 3870's performance at your given resolution. Maybe 10-20% faster. Not worth replacing your card for.

[CyberDog]

Ok. That helps a lot. I don't think it's the HDD. I have a Samsung F1 750 and a Grid disks iso located at the install folder on windows at the beginning part of HDD. And I just defragged. I have tried to shutdown all not necessary processes but it doesn't help. Maybe I try to overclock some. (If I get to BIOS, board has a bug...)

What I noticed last night is that on night time racing where road surface is wet (lot of reflections) and different lights the game stuttered almost unplayable...

[CA_Steve]

One more thing you can try - run the free Futuremark benchmarks and then compare your system to other equivalent systems on ORB. PCMark05 basic and 3DMark06 can be used to create a baseline. Don't sweat the details too much on ORB, but if your scores are within 10-15% of like-spec'd systems, then it sorta tells you there isn't a system problem.

So, with that out of the way, it could be:
- old video driver? clean out the old driver and install a newer one.
- cpu bottleneck? try overclocking by a small amount - say 10-20%. See if you get a similar increase in frame rates.
- gpu bottleneck? replace the card....but at 1280 x 1024, most games are CPU constrained, not GPU constrained.

[CyberDog]

Ok. I managed to overclock to 3.3 GHz at my CPU. I'll do comparisons with the results to ORB and between overclock and not.

Thanks for the help. I post results when I have time to do the comparison.

[CA_Steve]

nice overclock...also I thought of one more thing

Try dropping your screen rez to say 1024 x 780 and see how it affects framerate. If framerates go up quite a bit, then it's a gpu limitation. If they don't, then it's somewhere else. (I'm assuming either the game has a way to monitor framerates or you have access to fraps).

[Cryoburner]

What level of antialiasing are you using? If you have AA set to some excessively high level like 16x, try dropping it to 4x, and see if that helps.

[CyberDog]

I'm not using AA. There is some setting similar to AA at game setups but what one review said Grid does not use AA. It's hard to test different setups at Grid because game chooses settings randomly like I had nothing to do with it... There might be some other flaws in my system...

But NFSU Carbon or Pro Street didn't run smoothly with candy either.

[sjoukew]

If cpu's and gpu's do overheat they clock down to prevent damage.
You should make sure all your temperatures are OK, all fan's are spinning as they should and there are no dust clouds in your computer case.
Also update all device drivers for your motherboard, vga card etc. That can also help.
Virusscanners, spyware scanners etc can also be really irritating, maybe one of those is bothering you.

[CyberDog]

Temps are more than ok. I have always used newest drivers. But there is something weird. Right now when I tried to uninstall and reinstall Ati drivers it give errors and catalyst control center didn't installed properly. I try to solve that problem. If I cant I just simply format C and reinstall windows. That should do the trick

I have no time for this weekend to do that. Maybe next week.

[CA_Steve]

Whenever you update your video driver, you should:

- uninstall the existing driver
- run a driver cleanerto remove bits and pieces the uninstall process left behind
- clear your cache and temp files (C Cleaner works well for this and cleaning registry)...it overlaps some of what drivercleaner does..but, what the heck.
- install the new driver

[CyberDog]

I have always removed old driver before installing the new one. Haven't used driver cleaner at every time thou. Never used CCleaner for that... Good to point thou.

[CA_Steve]

The few times I've had updated drivers fail to run it was because the uninstall process didn't do a good enough job cleaning out the registry, etc.. your mileage may vary

[CyberDog]

That is certainly true. I actually run CCleaner registry cleaner at now and then, but never thought that I should do it right after uninstalling a driver.