600 series cards suffer from power saving problems?

[BrightCandle]

I have 2x 7970's and one of the major failings of the cards is the power saving technology AMD uses. In some games the crossfire never kicks in and the second card fails to wake up. I just found out in Windows (2D!) that the power saving is kicking me in the ass and causing graphical performance problems.

AMD isn't going to fix these problems, they have had poor power saving capability and wake up since the 4000 series of cards.

Do NVidia cards suffer from power saving sluggishness and oddness as well or is it completely transparent? How much control does NVidia give you over a pair of SLI cards in terms of power saving (such that if it did cause problems you can turn it off)?

[sykozis]

Originally Posted by BrightCandle

I have 2x 7970's and one of the major failings of the cards is the power saving technology AMD uses. In some games the crossfire never kicks in and the second card fails to wake up. I just found out in Windows (2D!) that the power saving is kicking me in the ass and causing graphical performance problems.

AMD isn't going to fix these problems, they have had poor power saving capability and wake up since the 4000 series of cards.

Do NVidia cards suffer from power saving sluggishness and oddness as well or is it completely transparent? How much control does NVidia give you over a pair of SLI cards in terms of power saving (such that if it did cause problems you can turn it off)?

I had no issues with my HD4850 related to power saving features...nor my HD7870. On the desktop, the card is supposed to operate at 2D clocks.

nVidia gives you an option of "prefer maximum performance" and "adaptive power saving". On the desktop, the cards will still go back to 2D clocks as they're supposed to.

[BrightCandle]

Only an eyefinity/crossfire/7000 series user will suffer from the problem I am seeing. In general the eyefinity users see more problems because they need more performance than the default clock speeds for 2D. That problem has been there since the 4000 series but you may not have noticed if you don't crossfire or use eyefinity, the two technologies I have problems with and the power saving. AMD is meant to ramp up the first card to full memory speed to compensate for the extra screen space but they have a bug where the second card is being called when it should be asleep and then it wakes up running on lower clocks than it needs to. It causes frame rate and input lag issues as well as very poor video playback. AMD has so far refused to fix the problem for 3 generations!

Any surround/SLI users care to comment on how power saving works for them?