Hi All, Firstly i am a fan of ATI .. have owned ATI cards all the way up to the 5970. Then switched to nvidia 480s -> 580s. I must admit the reason i changed was drivers (3 screens and crossfire at the time was not so good) and not the performance of the card. My brother has bought dual 7970s which have been waterblocked with swiftech komodo blocks. I have not used his machine much but not matter what settings / drivers he uses he does not seem to get a good run without troubles. It crashes on the desktop , crashes in dirt 3 , odd crash in max payne 3 although better. This is all without overclocks. One card seems better than two if he disables crossfire although its not ideal. Hes got that sick of it hes looking at selling the cards and either buying a single card or SLI. Hes offered me the cards cheap, so its pretty enticing as i have 2 GTX580 hydrocopper 2s atm. So i'm wondering is the devil i know better than the devil i dont ??? I run 1 screen , 2560x1440 and i'm not too fussed on Physx etc.
12.8 + 12.7 cap 3...is ok for many games...but not everything...you will have superior performance, but much more bugs... some games need urgent fix from amd...btw dirt3 + mp3 are ok for my system...crossfire is improved but not stabilized yet... until hd7990 is out or hd8xxx show up crossfire will be dying day by day...
I did not try DIRT2/3 but have tried MP3, Alan Wake and Alan Wake American Nightmare, BF3 and a whole bunch of other games on my main rig, with CFX enable and EF mode @6048x1200. No crash, BSOD or anything major whatsoever. I'm presently gaming on my FX8120 BE + SLi GTX670 rig right now as the H100 on my main rig is leaking, awaiting the local distributer to restock before I RMA the cooler. So, as of almost a month back, I'd had no issue with CFX and EF.
I have another system to the one in the left side of this post: Core i5 2500k + 6970 x2 in crossfire, and I must say CFX is working much better today than just a year ago. Great improvement in driver stability and performance upgrades to games.
From what i'm gathering from here is most likely its not up to par with SLI and hence any performance benefits will come at cost of compatibility and more headaches. I'm going to pull one card out of my brothers rig and see if that fixes most of his issues , i'll pass on buying them off him as i really don't have a gaming reason to upgrade yet (all games at 60fps bar 1 and thats settlers 7 due to SLI not working .. ).
No, Crossfire is fine. It's when you get to Tri-Fire and Quad-Fire the major problems arise. Two-way Crossfire works great for me. No major issues. Just some games take some tweaking if they have no profile. Usually then I just use AFR mode and game away. I don't get why people run into so many issues honestly. I know flash has an issue right now, but it's flash not AMD. Adobe has even stated to downgrade to 11.2 because of it.
To be honest, I've not had any real problems recently, and that's saying something. It used to be an everlasting battle to get things working, but with apps like RadeonPro, it's easy enough to force different driver versions/profiles to get things working. Many of the games that I had massive issues with to get running on >1 GPU I now run fine by forcing whatever profile I have to. It's only the odd game (****ing Saint's Row 3) here and there that causes me frustration. And that's using a 5850 + 5970.
flash 11.4 updated for me today profiles are in CCC since 12.1 CF works in a lot of games, some dont scale so well, some flicker, some you force a profile yourself, some you would disable CF... & a lot of games with something as powerful as a 7970 dont really need another card for single monitor usage
crossfire is working awesome , and allways has for me and all the clients i have built systems for , like another user said , i don't get why people have so many issue's :gape: , if amd/crossfire has soo many driver/crossfire issues i sure wouldn't of had so many crossfire combo's myself i've had 1900 cf . 1950 cf , 3870 cf , 4870 cf , 4890 cf , 5870 cf , 5870+5970 tri-fire , 6990 + 6970 tri-fire , 7970 crossfire
Forgot to mention that I have a third system with a HD6990 and have not encountered any issue thus far, played the same games as my other rigs without anything going wonky.
Currently I've not had many issues with my two 6870s, I bought 1 card when it 1st came out and the 2nd card more or less half the price of the 1st card last xmas(2011). I have always installed latest drivers and all beta's that come out have been good, found the caps that come out work okay otherwise I've used radeon pro to get crossfire working. Only snag I've hit at the moment is not getting Tera Online to utilise Crossfire no matter what i do its the same perfomance as using 1 card in fullscreen mode and same if I put it into a window mode, even though tera online has its own FPS gauge I run Afterburner also and shows no different in FPS. I did read somewhere either on this forum or another forum to try using Mass Effect 3 profile in CCC but it made no difference in fps. The moral is, if you can afford the latest top of the range gfx card go for it no matter if its AMD or Nvidia they both have there advantages and disadvantages but both manufacturers produce great single gpu's. If like me you can't afford 2 expensive cards at a time, then go for 1 now and 1 later. But replacing 2 decent cards with another 2 decent cards that may not get you more than an extra 10fps I find a bit of a waste of money when perhaps you could go for a 680, 690 or wait for amd 8000 series.
I'm getting ready to pop another MSI 6970 lightning I picked up. Good to hear crossfire has improved....
If you're one of those who have to buy all their games on release day because you can't wait to play them then I would stick to one card. Otherwise CFX is fine.
