So I got my second 6870 for crossfire and I just wanted to be sure I get everything correct because I've never used a crossfire setup before.I see that on AMD's driver page they have AMD Catalyst Application Profiles.Do i need to install those to fully use crossfire or any need for them at all?
 

DM186

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No because your 1st card when the fan climbs your 2nd card will also. As to your first question if you are refering to as the same as the Nvidia controll panel. Yes you need it but I don't know a lot about crossfirex or the AMD/ATI cards. Sorry if I am not a big help. Good luck to you.
 
Oh okay.So the 2nd card is just a entire duplicate of the first card.So any settings you make for the first card will be duplicated to the 2nd.Alright gotcha.

Yah I'm still having some troube figuring the profiles out.I was playing BF3 before and I was only getting 40% usage from both cards.After installing the profile it boosted them to around 70% so it looks like it works somewhat.I'm still not seeing them both maxed out so that leads me to believe my processor is bottlnecking or I've also heard of 1GB of VRAM being a cause for performance loss in BF3.
 

hapkido

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You will need/want CAP. Most games will work without them, but some won't work well.

As far as afterburner, I'd hold off on overclocking and even fan profiles until you're more used to your setup. You should be able to specify seperate settings for each card, but in my experience, it's not easy.
 
So you just download the CAP and that's it? It self-configure's?

I'm not planning on O.C.ing because the BIOS is locked on one of the cards and it's a reference cooler.Just gonna leave them at stock.

Onto my next question then,does anyone have any guess' as to why the cards are only seeing 70% usage in BF3? As a single card it was always 100% maxed but with crossfire they both hover around 70%.
 
I have a Phenom ii x4 965 @ 3.8ghz.CPU usage is about 95%.I was looking at the benchmarks and I haven't seen any difference between my CPU and say a 2600k.I believe BF3 just likes multi core CPU's not speed or arch.

It's strange though because I was in a server with only 10 people in it and both GPU's were maxed out and I was getting really good FPS.
 

hapkido

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Install CAP and see if that helps. You don't need to do anything special. Just download, install, and restart.

For BF3, you can use the 12.1 preview driver too. There are supposed to be some performance tweaks that aren't in the release build.
 

hapkido

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I'm pretty sure it's not the VRAM. I have a similar GPU setup and my cards operate 100% in BF3. My total system RAM usage is about 4.5GB while playing.

Try these:
Catalyst 12.1 Preview
11.12 CAP 1

Run the uninstaller to delete the driver and profile off your system and reboot. Install the preview driver and reboot. Install the CAP and reboot.

Go into BF3 and use the recommended settings, but turn off motion blur and vsync (because they're stupid). See how it plays and what your GPU and CPU usage is at. Now turn down your settings one notch and see what your usage is at. Now turn up your settings one notch above recommended and see what your usage is at. This will give you an idea of what your computer is doing.
 
Well I tried your suggestion but it didn't seem to work.Still topping out at 60% on each card.I'm really thinking it's a CPU bottleneck but I still don't know yet.I know that AMD released a patch back in Oct. that greatly increased crossfire specificly for BF3 so it's not like it's not optimized already.
 

hapkido

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If your CPU is at 95%, but your cards are only at 60%, that means your CPU is limiting you. As always, kill any processes you don't need. But you can probably turn UP your settings and see the same framerate if your GPUs aren't being fully utilized.

Edit: What resolution are you playing at?
 
1600x900.

Yah I tried the method of settings you suggested before and it seems that whenever I increase it to Ultra the GPU usage either stays the same or declines.Decreasing the settings to low or medium brought increased GPU utilization.So I think it's safe to say it's either the VRAM or the processor causing a bottleneck instead of a Crossfire bug or driver related.

But what's troubling is that from this review of CPU utilization in BF3 my Phenom ii x4 965 looks more like a dual core.The 980 is only at 70%.

http://www.techspot.com/review/458-battlefield-3-performance/page7.html
 

hapkido

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You're not going to be able to run BF3 at ultra. And it's not the VRAM holding you back.

If medium gives you the best results, play at medium. It's as simple as that.