I had heard that MSI Afterburner shows the memory usage of all your GPUs combined in a multi-GPU setup, instead of just the usage of the first one as it should (since in Crossfire/SLI the data is mirrored across two or more.) Lacking a good way (at least, that I'm aware of) for me to test this myself, I'd like to know if anyone here could confirm this one way or the other? Since I have two 7970s at 3gb each, if MSI Afterburner shows 1GB of GPU memory usage, is that 500MB per card or really 1GB? Thanks.
Should be one graph per gpu but they will be equal each will be using 1gb.Just how sli/crossfire works you don't add them together.
Yeah, I'm aware that data has to be mirrored across both cards in sli/crossfire so two 3GB cards don't mean you have 6GB of usable memory, just 3GB still. What I had heard was that MSI Afterburner doesn't measure this properly. So for example, if your game is using 500MB and you have two cards it would show 1GB of usage because it adds them together, even though that's incorrect. I'm monitoring this through a G13 and the program only has the option to show the GPU memory usage for GPU 1.
Unless things have changed, AB reports the total for both cards. So if it shows 1GB usage that really means 500GB per card...
It measures everything properly and as it should, those who spread such rumors have wrong understanding. Afterburner, GPU-Z or ProcessExplorer display (and will ALWAYS display) as much memory usage as the driver is allocating via Crossfire master GPU. And the driver allocates the equal ammount of memory for EACH GPU in Crossfire config to allow the data to be independently mirrored in each GPU address space. That IS correct. Your understanding is not.
There are 2 seperate graphs. If the cards are using 1gb of vram that is how much both cards are using, its not 500mb for each card as pill monster said.
There are no 2 separate graph in case of CF, only master GPU memory usage is to all monitoring tools and it sums memory usage for all cards joined in CF config.
I don't think I'm explaining myself correctly here. What I want to see is how much the game is using, not how much total memory is in use across all cards combined. As in, if the game is using 500MB and I have two cards, I don't want to see twice that, 1GB, I want MSI Afterburner to tell me the game is using 500MB. That's the information I want.
Not everything depends on your "I want". That info is NOT available to OS videomemory manager. All you can see on AMD card is how many memory is allocated by GPU via DirectX kernel (real GPU or virtual Crorssfire GPU, which consists of several physical GPUs and memory partitions).
Apparently this is a touchy subject for you, I apologize for bringing it up. Feel free to delete this thread.
