AMD Working on Drivers to Fix Micro-Stutter in CrossFire

AMD announced through its Radeon Twitter feed that it is working on better drivers that will improve CrossFire performance, with particular attention to frame latency issues. AMD calls this frame pacing. Supposedly, the driver will be available on or around July 31, 2013.

While this driver release might not be that exciting to single-GPU users, it is something over which users with multi-GPU setups should get passionately excited. The reason for this is that over the last couple of years, problems with frame latency in AMD Radeon CrossFire systems have gotten increasingly apparent and have been quite bothersome.

The problem in question doesn't have a scientific name, though the term "Micro-Stutter" is widely accepted. The problem is that while a multi-GPU system may pump out, say 40 FPS in a particular game, the frames do not come out with consistent timing between each other, thus appearing as if a much lower frame rate is being produced. Many benchmarking procedures now include frame latency testing, sometimes putting as much, if not more, emphasis on the topic of frame latency as actual FPS performance.

Niels Broekhuijsen

Niels Broekhuijsen is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He reviews cases, water cooling and pc builds.

  • frillybob101
    Old news but thanks anyway!
    Reply
  • teh_chem
    Only about a decade late. :)
    Reply
  • bhaberle
    Does this effect dual cards like the 6990?
    Reply
  • Spooderman
    I hope they actually do something with this. I love AMD, but they really need to fix their driver issues.
    Reply
  • eklipz330
    this generation of cards is nearly 2 years old, and they FINALLY got around to fixing it. smh. better late than never i suppose. i pity amd fans that went the dual gpu route over nvidias.
    Reply
  • faster23rd
    I wonder how this would affect mid-level cards on CrossfireX, like those CFX-ed 7770s in Youtube vids.
    Reply
  • ibn gozzy
    TOOO Late! I finally got sick of trying to run a tri-fire system (5970+5879) smoothly on tough titles. The tri-fire worked pretty well on games that didn't require lots of graphics muscle (Borderlands2 and Bioshock infinite) but on really demanding titles (Metro 2033 or last light or BF3, I had to disable it and just let the 5970 do all the work at high quality but no eye candy (low AA and AF). It almost seemed more of a gimmick with AMD cards and less functional. So now I have 2 NVIDIA GTX 780s in SLI and I'll never go back. BTW the AMD cards were H2O cooled but not overclocked cuz that seemed to make the stuttering worse. Can't wait to void the warranty on those 780s though.
    Reply
  • faster23rd
    I wonder how this would affect mid-level cards on CrossfireX, like those CFX-ed 7770s in Youtube vids.
    Reply
  • smeezekitty
    About time.

    BTW the comment up/down votes do not work AT ALL now
    Reply
  • brandonjclark
    Built-in dual GPU's don't exhibit micro-stutter. So, in the case of the 6990 and the like, no. Crossfire performance is still expected to increase, however. As a dual 6870 user, this is LONG overdue.
    Reply