Crossfire "Microstutter" Lag Spikes

[jjb8675309]

I wanted to know from anyone who has actual experience and testing the 6000 series ATI cards in crossfire, ... Do minimum FPS spikes or microstutters occur as often as with past ATI series? Do you have to wait for and download a custom ATI profile for most games to work in crossfire??Do some games work out of the box?? what are some games that you play currently that you are able to use crossfire with (and did it require a custom profile)?? Specifically how does it run in terms of minimum fps and microstutter and how often does it occur??

I am green to crossfire and have heard that there are numerous driver and profile issues for certain games in crossfire and I would like to get to the bottom of this before purchasing any 5 or 6 series card, because if not i will probly wait for a nvidia gtx 570 or something.ci

 

[bystander]

I had 5870's crossfired for almost a year and never had any micro stuttering. While most games had good improvements due crossfire, I did have a couple games which didn't support crossfire or sli as I later researched. I also have a couple others which I disabled crossfire due to other clitches (water flickering or some wierd shadowing issue). Those same games give my SLI setup issues too.

You do need to download profiles as they come availible, but for the games I played, I didn't notice a big difference, but I do know some games do get improved by hearing others experiences. Nvidia doesn't require you to download profiles, but there definately seems to be large improvements in some games after downloading new drivers. I assume that means they include the profiles into the drivers. I don't know why ATI doesn't do that, but it only takes a few seconds to download the profiles, so it's not a big deal.

The issues I had with the 5870's was the VRM's overheating. The newer models have likely fixed this issue, as I don't see people complaining about the vertical line issues nearly as much now. They also don't seem to manage a 2 monitor extended desktop setup as well. I would occational flickers on the screen (the 2nd monitor) which was annoying for me.