Crossfire

[Norellicus]

I have two Radeon HD 4770s plugged into an ASUS p5kc mobo; one in x16 slot one in x4 slot. They're both receiving independent 5v poles from my 750w PSU.

I have the little crossfire bridge thingies extended between both of them.

Device Manager shows two pieces of hardware, with unique hardware IDs and memlocs, but sharing the same IRQ.

CCC taskbar manager shows 4 independent "HD 4770" entries that can be selected/configured for desktop cloning/extending/resolution/colors/blah, but the advanced options (acceleration, ATI AI, etc) only show one device in the dropdown select box.

Crossfire is enabled in CCC.

But when I look at the CCC adapter summary, it lists them separately as "enabled" and "disabled"...is this normal behavior? Am I actually running crossfire?

I can pump WoW graphics up to max with the exception of shadows, which may be still more than what I can expect from this pair of cards+my core2duo, but I don't have any other terribly 'modern' games to attempt to push out high performance with. It just feels...underwhelming, what I've gotten out of what games I have (mostly Valve games, and WoW. Having high shadows really adds a hell of an aesthetic to wow so the higher I can push that and not choke the happier I'd be.), particularly compared to the minor difference between what I was getting with my old GTS 8800 and what I'm getting now...and I'm getting mixed signals from the information I can glean from google about establishing whether or not crossfire is actually running.

So any indicators or tests you can point me to would be appreciated.


Edit: I'm doing a reformat tonight for some unrelated issues and just because it's about time I got a clean start, so if there's a specific method I should go about introducing these devices to windows on a fresh install to ensure it works properly (I followed the included installation guide which was actually pretty clear about process, but you never know), I'm all ears.

[CoronA1979]

I can tell you that I am not particularly knowledgeable w/ ATI+Crossfire from the get go.. However, I do run an SLI setup in my rig and from all the research and information I have read on message boards and what not that a CPU can severly bottleneck your GPU's performance.

A good example would be on the EVGA boards (My motherboard and GPU are EVGA so I frequent there) there is always alot of discussion about people being "underwhelmed" and usually the responses I see handed out are that the person's CPU needs to be overclocked or just flat out need a better CPU to reduce the bottleneck.

With that said, what is your CPU clocked @? Have you OC'd it @ all? A c2duo I am not sure about what kind of bottleneck it would/could create on a dual gpu setup. I know I probably didn't help much but your thread never got a response so I took a stab best I could.

Have you check on any ATI forums/Brand of GPU forums for any kind of support from the community there?

[Headspace]

Crossfire



you'll get stuck in the




crossfire

[CoronA1979]

Also, it should be noted that a dual gpu setup (atleast my nvidia SLI) in FFXI does not bode well. I got HORRIBLE fps and artifacting with SLI turned on in XI. I know you are referring to WoW I just figured I would throw that out there.

I ran WoW for limited amounts of time on my PC w/ max settings and had pretty good FPS, all things considering. Again though... my dual gpu setup it Nvidia, not ATI.

Have you tried updating your drivers?

[Olo401]

I believe it's supposed to be running on a single interrupt when you've got Crossfire/SLI enabled. That's the idea behind it - you have two GPUs but they're running as if they were a single unit.

The other thing that might be an issue is that the second slot is running at 4x. Don't quote me on that though I'm not too experienced on this front.

[Norellicus]

I believe it's supposed to be running on a single interrupt when you've got Crossfire/SLI enabled. That's the idea behind it - you have two GPUs but they're running as if they were a single unit.

The other thing that might be an issue is that the second slot is running at 4x. Don't quote me on that though I'm not too experienced on this front.

Yeah, the IRQ leads me to believe that it's actually working, I'm just not sure heh. From what I've read the 16x/4x slot doesn't matter too much, just means both cards are running at 4x (which may also be contributing to the "underwhelming" effect).

After reinstalling with updated CCC (10.2) and shiz it still says "Primary adapter" and "disabled adapter" so I think that's just how CCC reports it in XP.

I have the CPU overclocked some, but it causes some real stability issues when I try to push it to even what Tom's Hardware has documented they pushed it to (I bought this unit specifically because of their builders guide for the overclock capacity heh). I've considered upgrading it but when I do it'll likely be a big overhaul and I'm not terribly inclined to do that right now.