Using CrossFire - not a problem indeed but need help !

[cihancemaloglu]

hi everyone. I have a motherboad which is complatable with crossfire ( ASUS A8R32 - MVP DELUXE ) it has ati express 3200 crossfire feature in it. I also had one X1600XT since today. Today I have two X1600XT which are exaclty the same. As far as I know, any cable or connector is not needed for x1600 series. so I installed both of them to the motherboard. I uninstalled the old drivers and catalyst software, and installed the newest ones. CrossFire mark appeard in catalyst and I checked it. then I started call of duty 2. There is a frame per second indicator in the game and I realized nothing has changed as I installed the second graphic card. I didn't even touch any other setting in catalyst except crossfire mark. what do I need to do in order to increase fps ?

 

[Rik]

If crossfire is like sli then you wont see an increase in fps!!! But if you increase the screen resolution of the game you will be able to go a long way before you get a decrease in fps compared to running the 1 card!!!!

Basically, running the 2 cards means far less speed loss at high resolutions!!!!

 

[cihancemaloglu]

any other ideas ?

 

[Rage_3K_Moiz]

How high have u pushed the settings in the game? Try maxing out the antialiasing and anisotropic filtering settings and you'll probably see little change in performance, which shows that Crossfire is working properly.

 

[cihancemaloglu]

I didn't change anything. Everything stays as default. and increasing antialiasing decreases fps !

 

[Sharkfood]

Today I have two X1600XT which are exaclty the same.

This sounds like the problem.

You need at least one Crossfire Master card for the compositing engine to work. The flag in the drivers does no follow-up on this and assumes you have a Crossfire edition + normal card. (this has been slated to be fixed).

 

[cihancemaloglu]

maybe you can have a look at this link: http://ati.amd.com/technology/crossfire/howitworks.html

so two x1600xt's are fine to enable crossfire, no master card needed, am I right ?

 

[Sharkfood]

According to that chart, if you're going to pull off pci-e compositing without a master, you need the Xpress 1600 chipset. Odd since the 3200 has basically the same capabilities...

One surefire way to test if Crossfire is indeed working would be to download 3dmark2001se or 3dmark03 (the free version of 2001 allows just the tests you want whereas the free 3dmark03 you'll have to run all the tests) and run the single and multitexturing fillrate feature tests. Run these without crossfire enabled then with it checked. You should also reboot the PC between settings for good measure.

While not quite 2x the fillrate, with Crossfire enabled there should be a massive improvement in fillrate. This synthetic test will at least isolate if you have Crossfire truly working.

 

[cihancemaloglu]

okay I will give it a try and turn back to you again