My Crossfire Experience

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tristerin

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(my spend was only 6 bucks on an old bridge was given a PC with two HD 7850's 2gb)
My experience with this, and why I will never again Crossfire or SLI - Ive been buying AMD GPU's my entire life (sans owning a 8800gtx once) - they are losing a GPU customer - I will only be buying standalone NVIDIA from here on out.

1.) Easy to get started, remove old drivers after connecting bridge, reinstall drivers to latest Crimson and it recognized them immediately (as well as GPU-Z)
2.) Logged into Fortnite (I know Unreal Engine does not support Crossfire) and experienced immediate graphical issues. Unplugged my second monitor and my graphical issues went away. (I cannot explain this)
3.) Looked at multiple "lists" created of games supporting Crossfire or SLI - if you are into gaming on old games then there are quite a few out there that *now* support - but I don't play old games.
4.) I am leaving this crossfire setup in my PC unless I experience to many graphical issues only because I have it.

What I learned (even though I had already read it from numerous Forums) was that it doesn't work correctly. My opinion is that it was developed to sell old cards after the fact of being surpassed by new generations, and to get the rich folks to get two top end cards for the "bling" effect.



TLDR; Will only be purchasing top end NVIDIA for future builds, AMD cant hang in the GPU department and getting two cards doesn't actually matter.

 
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Mark RM

Mark RM

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Definitely only works for some games well, but really it's a good experience. I still have a tri-fire 390X at the shop slaughtering 4K gaming.

Ive' found over the years with xFire and SLI, that it just takes too much tinkering for joe gamer to make it work well and they're just not educated about what they're doing or what the results should be.

So I agree, multi card GPU setups are going the way of the dodo. And today's top end card still isn't the wizard at 4K gaming they spin it as.
 
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Barty1884

Barty1884

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Apr 16, 2015
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It doesn't sound like you're too surprised by the outcome, and you definitely shouldn't be.

CFx support (and SLI for that matter) is lacking at best - even 'good' scaling titles rarely see >+50% scaling, although there are exceptions.

CFx/SLI only makes sense for the top of the line card, when new these days.
When the single "best" card available doesn't give you the performance you want.


CFx/SLI users only make up ~<3% of the market from loose calculations based on stats/research, so support isn't going to be overly common/good these days.
http://www.fudzilla.com/news/graphics/38134-crossfire-and-sli-market-is-just-300-000-units

In 2015, 300,000 was the total user base for Multi-GPU setups vs a $21.7B market.
Assuming every user in that market had a $2,000 rig..... that's just under 11m users total, of which 300k user multi-GPU = 2.72%.



I'd be curious why you'd only look to Nvidia going forward? AMD will play in the top-of-the-line space in future, so I wouldn't rule them out indefinitely.
 
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tristerin

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Mark RM - count me into the group that isn't smart enough to know what to tinker with (smart enough to ask and use youtube but I wouldn't call myself a Techie) - and I agree it is going the way of the dodo, it just doesn't even make sense to me now lol
What games? Does it actually help with new games even though its not supported?
I did notice in Fortnite (played on Ultra before Xfire) that when I would "harvest" vehicles that now the paint peels as I swing my pick at it, rather than just looking like a dent with 1 card (which I found odd as well being unsupported by Xfire

Barty1884 - I was not surprised, however I had held out hope that perhaps these multitude of forum posts, all the information out there...was wrong lol. That maybe it was good and people were being elitist about the whole thing of two lower end GPU's or using anything OTHER THAN the best of the best in Crossfire/SLI config. And yeah not enough people do it, so it makes sense for the companies in general to not use resources on this other than to support the small niche market that would utilize those resources.

As for my NVIDIA stance, they just flat always benchmark better (at least in my limited experience of using google and cross checking bench marks), and actually hold more market share in dual+ GPU setups so that if I decided in the future to run a dual GPU configuration the support for that is double.

TJ Hooker - Im a noob so Id say yes but I once owned the HD 4XXX series BEAST of a dual GPU card (loudest jet engine Ive ever owned) back in the day and it never had issues (though I am positive Crossfiring two cards is not the same - correct me if I am wrong etc) running any game (back then)

Yes my issue is with multi GPU (crossfire/SLI) in general and that I am now in the Camp that thinks its pointless after my experience. Not worth the investment vs returns on investment.

 
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Mark RM

Mark RM

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What Games? A lot of games work with SLI/Xire, the issue however is if the games you play don't then why bother?

Tomb Raider or Battlefield both scale well and so does Andromeda which has really excellent crossfire and SLI scaling and it's based on the Frostbite engine , Cry Engine 3, URE 3 and some others do well.

What I mean by simple tinkering; If you take GTA V for example on the Tri Fire setup, I locked all the GPU's down to 900Mhz and picked up an extra 30% vs letting them do their own thing and getting the frame pacing handled on the fly as the bloody things flew and down with their various thermal loads. Who does this though? I mean a few people tinker and tinker but most people don't.

But seriously, I'm agreeing with you , multi card setups are a thing of the past. It can take a lot of work researching, reporting and working around multi card bugs and the Trillion dollar gaming industry wants the low hanging fruit. They don't want to spin their wheels helping us with multi GPU setups , no profit in it - and as shareholder, I agree.

Most of the problems I help people with here are basic mid range and low end cards and they just want to play their game and they find that hard enough already. It either has to be dead simple, or not done at all.
 
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tristerin

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Mark RM - long story short(ish) I was given this PC and actually want to tinker with it and learn this kind of stuff because if I blow it up...so be it lol:
Case: Cooler Master HAF XM
MOBO: ASUS M5A99FX PRO R2.0
CPU: AMD FX-8350
Cooler: Corsair H115i v2 AIO
RAM: 4x4gb quad channel Corsair Vengeance DDR3
PSU: Corsair HX850
GPU: 2x Gigabite HD7850 2gb cards

Since it was given to me I want to learn how to Overclock (don't care if I burn the thing up tbh) etc - do you recommend MSI Afterburner for tweaking the GPU's? And do you have a suggestion perhaps on a good read I could do before delving into messing with this for improved Xfire performance? Like where to start in that process?
My goal is to learn on this and then replace the mobo, cpu, ram, gpu's when Im done learning (absolutely love the case - I keep that HOT 8350 VERY cool under 100% load, very impressed with its cooling) (I just put together a Ryzen 7 1700 computer for my wife after I was given this, she wanted to upgrade from her AMD 1090T setup lol)
 
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Mark RM

Mark RM

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Crossfire won't magically fix that low performing CPU in a lot of games. In fact, I can see where you'd be CPU bound in a lot of stuff and not actually be able to take advantage of improved performance with crossfire or SLI at all.

In any case, there's an entire section of Tutorials and guides written here and on other forums. Some are friendly places, some not, but most will help.

Best guide here
http://www.overclock.net/t/1348623/amd-bulldozer-and-piledriver-overclocking-guide-asus-motherboard
also
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MckeAmnDeTk

for GPU's remember to do ONE AT A TIME, take the other out while you work until you figure out what both cards can handle
https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/threads/how-to-overclock-a-7850-past-1050mhz.18389760/



 
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tristerin

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Thank you very much - Im looking at this as an opportunity to be comfortable messing with these settings (Ive been gaming for 20 years on PC) as I have never overclocked or messed with a single stock setting lol - that way at minimum when I read these boards and people use terminology I may be able to start understanding OR the event I do it with the stuff I replace in a couple months (waiting for March when the new GPU chips are mentioned to see if that drives GPU prices down) I will be at least a "shade tree mechanic" in a sense rather than someone who pops the hood on the car and doesn't know what an Intake is (me atm lol)
 
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tristerin

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Just got home, after installing drivers last night confirming that everything in Xfire was working through the AMD Radeon Settings software - it is no longer on my PC. Every search in my win bar yields nothing, no ATI files in my program files, nothing.

Not sure whats going on but Ill dig into this - google search yields no results of common issue. Another chalk up to issues with this crap lol

EDIT - found the folder on my main drive in the first AMD folder - however when I click the application its asking me to install it again.
EDIT 2 - Went into Setup, and it asked me to reinstall, and it uninstalled my drivers. It asked if I wanted .1 or .2(optional) install and I selected the .1 (same as last night) and it finishes by saying successfully uninstalled. Double click same icon its now doing a fresh reinstall.
 
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B

bystander

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I spent a few years with Crossfire and SLI. It definitely takes a lot of tinkering. It eventually just gets frustrating. What is worse, is that in most cases, the game does not feel as smooth at the FPS you get, as it should. I'd say you need a minimum of 30% higher FPS (assuming over 60 FPS) to feel as smooth as a single GPU. And some games simply won't support it well, or at all.

The only good thing I recall from SLI was it seemed to perform smoother than a single faster GPU in 3D Vision, but with 3D, one GPU is dedicated to one eye, and the other is dedicated to the other (3-way doesn't help/isn't supported).

I agree with the sentiment, only use SLI/CF when you can't achieve the performance with 1 card.
 
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Mark RM

Mark RM

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You should be using DDU to unistall your drivers and then doing a fresh install from the download from AMD

 
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T

tristerin

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Just now was able to get on Toms - I did not do a complete uninstall but will do that tonight. The second "install" that was an actual "install" picked up everything right where I left off the night before (xfire recognized etc - when I turn my PC on tonight I will see if this is a daily issue and do the full uninstall etc etc and advise!)

THANKS!
 
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