Time Spy and Crossfire

Discussion in 'Videocards - AMD Radeon Drivers Section' started by THEAST, Jul 15, 2016.

  1. THEAST

    THEAST Guest

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    Has anybody here had any success with multi-GPU between non-identical cards (like HD 7950/7970 or 280/280X) and the new 3DMark Time Spy DX12 benchmark? Or even with identical cards with GCN v1.0 architecture?

    On my setup with HD 7950 + HD 7970 CF, the benchmark only uses the master card regardless of whether Crossfire is enabled or disabled in the driver. Apparently the benchmark does not explicitly support multi-GPU configurations (unlike AotS) and leaves load balancing to the driver, which means CF should be enabled in the driver to work, but it is not working in my case. I'm not sure whether it is because the driver does not support this type of muti-GPU on GCN v1.0, or it is not working for me because my cards aren't identical.

    P.S. I am using Crimson v16.6.2.
     
  2. lexer98

    lexer98 Guest

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    Upgrade to the last beta driver and try forcing AFR through the AMD control panel. :)
     
  3. THEAST

    THEAST Guest

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    I did actually try forcing AFR, but it didn't work. Does that work for you in Time Spy? CF works fine in Firestrike out of the box.
     
  4. lexer98

    lexer98 Guest

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    Sorry, I don't have the CFX anymore ....
    But I remember that Rise of Tomb Raider with the new patch for DX12 multi-gpu the CFX also doesn't work, so IMO is driver related
     

  5. spyre

    spyre Guest

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    That isn't true with the latest ROTTR patch Crossfire works with DX12. Overall FPS with 1 480 card is 48fps, with 2 it is 89fps at 2K resolution.

    DX12 requires the app to implement MGPU it isn't handled by the drivers anymore.
     
  6. Paulo Narciso

    Paulo Narciso Guest

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    Time Spy dx12 benchmark only supports multigpu if crossfire is enabled in the driver. So not all cases are the same.
     
  7. spyre

    spyre Guest

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    Obviously Crossfire needs to be enabled, but the app has to actually support it natively for it to be used in DX12. It isn't something that can be forced.
     
  8. THEAST

    THEAST Guest

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    I am not sure about RotTR, since I don't have it, but AotS needs crossfire disabled in the driver for multi-gpu to work in the game and in that case, even when one card is from AMD and the other is from Nvidia, multi-gpu will work. The case of Time Spy seems to be completely different, though.

    @spyre, your system spec says "AMD 6990 and 6970 TF"; are you still using those cards or have you updated to 2x RX 480? If you haven't upgraded yet and you have tried Time Spy, are both of your cards used properly in that benchmark?
     
  9. albertfu

    albertfu Guest

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    In the same boat here.

    290X+290X+290, only combination of crossfire that actually scales is 290X+290X.
    290X+290 or 290X*2+290 doesn't scale, only main GPU is used.

    Tried to force crossfire profiles for 3DMarkTimeSpy.exe, doesn't work...

    Maybe have to wait another release of Crimson
     
  10. THEAST

    THEAST Guest

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    Ouch, then it seems the cards have to be 100% identical. Time to submit a bug report to AMD.
     

  11. albertfu

    albertfu Guest

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    Indeed, but by the time it's fixed, there won't be any place left for my crap PC on hall of fame LOL
     
  12. THEAST

    THEAST Guest

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    Well, these days I mostly report issues to AMD so that I wouldn't feel guilty for not doing so, not because I actually expect them to fix it, LOL.

    I just hope that the same scenario does not repeat in actual DX12 games because then my setup will be even more useless than it already is...
     
  13. albertfu

    albertfu Guest

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    Can't agree more

    GCN + multi GPU should show some promises in DX12 era, but with this kind of bug some users will just see their PC gimped (like you and me
     
  14. ultraex2003

    ultraex2003 Master Guru

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    same here bro !!

    290+290x cfx is broken with time spy
     
  15. albertfu

    albertfu Guest

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    Maybe we have to wait another driver release to get this issue fixed

    Crossfire being more tolerant was one of selling point of Crossfire, but this time...
     

  16. mtrai

    mtrai Maha Guru

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    I am just throwing this out there. Alrighty there are some issues with how FM 3dMark implemented this see here where an FM 3dMark dev commented:

    http://steamcommunity.com/app/223850/discussions/0/864958451702404648/?ctp=23#c366298942105468869

    "FM_Jarnis [developer] Jul 15 @ 2:49am
    Originally posted by xinvicious:
    hi, can i use integrated & Discrete GPU for explicit multi-adapter in timespy benchmark? in my afterburner monitoring my IGPU clock speed shown 0MHz.
    my result btw http://www.3dmark.com/spy/25265.
    thanks!

    No. Time Spy Uses Linked-Node Explicit Multi-Adapter. This is "true" DX12 multiGPU, but it means identical cards only.

    Explicit multi-adapter across any kind of cards is exceedingly complex problem. We strongly doubt any games will actually use it. Problem is, how do you split the work across several different GPUs with no clue how they perform?

    In theory you could do it so each GPU gets the exact same work, but then the performance would be limited by your slowest GPU. So iGPU + dGPU would be the speed of 2x iGPU - which would almost certainly be slower than the dGPU alone."

    Not sure if this what is affecting Xfire as my R9 290X is on the way back from RMA.
     
    Last edited: Jul 18, 2016
  17. albertfu

    albertfu Guest

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    Thanks for info !

    In traditional CF scenario, xxx Pro + xxx XT's combination's performance is somewhere between xxx Pro CF and xxx XT CF, so I assume that the driver is capable of using full potential of all GPU in heterogeneous CF configuration. (xxx can be anything like Tahiti, Tonga, Hawaii, Fiji)

    But if Futuremark wants to implement this kind of restriction in their Time Spy benchmark, which is not the case in older 3DMark (Fire Strike and older ones), there is not much AMD can do to cure this situation.

    We may hope for the best, but...
     
  18. THEAST

    THEAST Guest

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    I did complain about this issue on 3DMark's forum before posting here on Guru3D. One of 3DMark's devs gave this reply:

    I highly doubt 3DMark is deliberately breaking CF on no-identical cards, this is most likely an issue with AMD's driver which might or might not be fixed in future.
    Needless to say, even with 100% identical cards, a certain degree of extra buffering and synchronization will be required to correct frame pacing since even if the cards are exactly the same, they will not be rendering frames as exactly the same intervals. I don't see why the same thing could not be done with non-identical cards, at the cost of worse scaling.

    The same way it has been done for many years now: AFR.

    By the way, any of you guys have RotTR or any of the recent games (other than AotS) that support multi-GPU on DX12? If the same thing is happening even in games, and AMD can't/doesn't fix this, this would be really bad news.

    I bought my (open box) 7970 for dirt cheap very recently, I could have as well bought a 7950, but they were the same price and I thought with AFR, I would get better performance with 7950+7970, compared to 2x 7950, (and I do) but it seems I might have cheated myself out of working DX12 multi-GPU by that decision.
     
  19. albertfu

    albertfu Guest

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    Thanks for the info, I happen to have RoTR and can test it in DX12 (installed Win10 last week just for Time Spy), will post GPU usage results here once I get time.
     
  20. THEAST

    THEAST Guest

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    That would be great, thank you.
     

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