Disabled Adapter with 4870s in Crossfire?

Ok I've been testing out my recently bought crossfire setup and it seems I get absolutely zero performance boost in Crossfire mode.

In Crysis benchmark I get avg 45 fps on very high settings with Crossfire enabled and disabled.

In TF2 I'm hitting ~100 fps with the lowest drop at 60 fps with crossfire enabled/disabled.

Company of Heroes with newest patch I do ~48-55 fps at 1024x768 and in crossfire thats not impressive. With the old version 1.0 I was hitting 250fps!! (apparently )
but again, same fps with CF enabled/disabled.

I checked the Graphics Hardware tab.. and this is what I see for 2nd adapter:



I know for sure that with crossfire enabled, the 2nd adapter should say "Linked Adapter".

My mobo is a gigabyte p45 but it doesn't have any settings (from what I've seen) that let you enable/disable PCI-e buses so I assume that its turned on.

GPU-Z reports that Crossfire is enabled but I don't believe it.. I think its just reading the CCC "Enable Crossfire" checkmark.

Also, in device manager both 4870s are running with no errors.

What the bloody ATI??? I should be smoking every game in this setup.

Does anyone have experience with this kind of problem?

um at 1024x768 you are not even going to stress a single 4800 series card let alone 2

or was mentioning that a setup?

What are your full system specs?

(bear in mind not all p45s are hte same. ASUS p5qs for instance on the top end perform about 6% lower then others. (has to do with all the ridiculous tweaks im sure...)

Neur0mancer said:

um at 1024x768 you are not even going to stress a single 4800 series card let alone 2
or was mentioning that a setup?

Click to expand...

that was just for company of heroes.. my desktop resolution is running at 1360x1024. My Samsung 19' monitor only goes up to 1680x1050 but for some reason, at that res with the 4870, the screen is all huge and not proportional.
With my old Asus laptop I could hit 1680x1050 hooked up to the same monitor and it would display properly.
I'll try CoH at a higher res and see what happens...

EDIT: oh yeah.. at 1360x1024 Im getting avg 270fps with max 360fps/ lowest 69fps with max detail. Still, with 1 or 2 GPUs its the same result.

Neur0mancer said:

What are your full system specs?

Click to expand...

-Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 3.00GHz (tried OC'n this sucker but this mobo keeps rejecting me.. my PC life sucks)
-Gigabyte P45-DS4P with bios F6 (newest)
-2x 2048MB OCZ DDR2 PC2-8000 (1000Mhz) ReaperX HPC 4GB Dual Channel - OCZ2RPX10004GK
-OCZ 750W PC Power & Cooling Silencer 750 Quad Power Supply (ATI Crossfire Edition) - ATI Red
- 2 X Extreme PC ATI HD4870 MAXX FPS Edition 815MHz Core | 512MB 3700MHz DDR5 (these are actually stock speeds)

A simple way to tell if CF is working or not is to run the 3d mark 06 pixel shader test with only one card...then run it with both cards...you will see anywhere from a 80 - 100% increase in frame rates if CF is working...

glock19owner said:

A simple way to tell if CF is working or not is to run the 3d mark 06 pixel shader test with only one card...then run it with both cards...you will see anywhere from a 80 - 100% increase in frame rates if CF is working...

Click to expand...

Thanks for the tip.. I just tried it out and there is no fps increase at ALL.
I get 800-810 with crossfire enabled/disabled.

I have Catalyst AI normally disabled but I tried it set at 'Standard' in Crossfire and I get the same result.

So I guess this means something is very wrong...
I'm running drivers 8.8 but I had the same issue with 8.7.

btw.. I just realized this. In the CCC, I can enable "CrossfireX" but I'm only running 2 cards so shouldn't it simply be "Crossfire" ?
I have 2 crossfire interconnect cables attached to both video cards. Could it be that CCC thinks its setup as a 3 or 4 GPU.?
I will try to change this later today and see what happens..

crossfireX is what it is with these cards. Old school cards use Crossfire. 2 different things.

I thought crossfire x is for 4 cards? standard crossfire is dual cards and crossfire x is for quad cards, mainly implemented for the x2 line of cards because it is already crossfired for 1 pcb board, then enabling crossfire x CCC to use another x2 card or 2x standard cards.

freestyla85 said:

btw.. I just realized this. In the CCC, I can enable "CrossfireX" but I'm only running 2 cards so shouldn't it simply be "Crossfire" ?
I have 2 crossfire interconnect cables attached to both video cards. Could it be that CCC thinks its setup as a 3 or 4 GPU.?
I will try to change this later today and see what happens..

Click to expand...

just enable the crossfire setup in CCC you should be fine.

Fireball_dbz said:

just enable the crossfire setup in CCC you should be fine.

Click to expand...

i did but no increase in fps
the 2nd video card is definately not enabled

I'm finding that 3Dmark03 is the better benchmark to see how well your quadfire is working. Run that and tell us your score.

Using games to tell if quadfire is working is a bad idea. Crysis sucks donkey balls for anything past 2 GPU's and even using 2 is questionable. COD4 is great and probably one of the best games to use quadfire on.

freestyla85 said:

i did but no increase in fps
the 2nd video card is definately not enabled

Click to expand...

When you click the box to enable CF you have to reboot before it takes affect...if you hadnt rebooted after checking the box and then running the test...it will still show as a single run...

glock19owner said:

When you click the box to enable CF you have to reboot before it takes affect...if you hadnt rebooted after checking the box and then running the test...it will still show as a single run...

Click to expand...

you sure about that? wouldnt CCC ask you to restart then?

I always knew that CF is known for being enabled on the fly just like SLI

(no rhyme intended )

OK guys some pretty interesting revelations I have to post. I got crossfire to work but with older drivers.

I decided to try out the 8.6 drivers for the hell of it.

I completely remove 8.8 and run drive sweeper to clean out all the files.
After rebooting I install 8.6 and reboot.

Now remember how my 3dmark06 pixel shader test at 1280x1024 was 800fps with 8.8 drivers?
With 8.6, and with CF DISABLED, I got 620 fps on the same test. Pretty bad I must say
Without having touched any settings in CCC, I go and enable crossfire then go back to running the pixel shader test.
Amazingly, my fps went to 1260-1280
I said to myself.."WTH!"
Now I try to reproduce my problem that I had with 8.8.
-I disable Catalyst AI and run the shader test again... 1260-1280fps..hmm ok no problem there
-I enable ati overdrive and up the core and memory on both cards to 835/935....this time I get 1280-1300fps..w00t
-Now its time to destroy Crysis. I run the GPU benchmark ... 40fps...
-I go to main folder->edit the system.cfg and change the r_multigpu val to 1 to enable dual gpu.....run the benchmark again and same thing 40fps... screw you nvidia Crycrap
-I still don't believe Crysis uses the 2nd GPU properly by the way
-Now I go back and run the pixel shader test still being in CF mode and I get...620fps..."WTHHHHH! just happened!" I was at 1260fps before!
-I turn on/off ati overdrive, catalyst ai, crossfire setup... nothing is working!
-Did Crysis somehow disable the 2nd GPU? I seriously doubt it...

Now I reboot the system and still being in CF mode, I run 3dmark06 again with the pixel shader test...
-I get 620fps...whats going on here..
-I go back into CCC and turn on Catalyst AI (it was disabled)
-After that, I run the test again and I clearly hear the 2nd GPU fan sound reaching a high pitch as it always does when CF is properly working.... 1260-1280 fps... "phew"
-I disable catalyst ai again... 620fps..
-I enable catalyst ai........... 1260-1280fps
-I run the Crysis benchmark again with AI enabled and in CF mode... still 40fps
-I go back to 3dmark06 and run shader test... 1260-1280fps


So there you have it... it apparently seems Catalyst AI is the problem at least with 8.6.
With 8.8 I tried enabling Catalyst AI and it did absolutely nothing so I guess I will try out 8.8 again and see if I can reproduce this.
I could stick with 8.6, but if I was getting 820fps with ONE card in 8.8, then in theory, I could get 1600fps with CF "properly" enabled.

ATI I love you and hate you at the same time

you are banging you head against a brick wall w/ crysis... it is poorly writen for multiple GPU's and many many many reviews have been writen to this effect and no matter what you do, crysis will suck.

I have heard windoz will only support 3 gpus.
Windoz does have alimit on the number gpus.
Doesnt windoz also have a limit on cpus.

I have the exact same problem with a pair of MSI 4870s in crossfire, using the BIOSTAR TPower I45. GPUZ says disabled as well. Using XP Pro x64.

johnm said:

I have heard windoz will only support 3 gpus.
Windoz does have alimit on the number gpus.
Doesnt windoz also have a limit on cpus.

Click to expand...

3 gpus? got a source? because windows XP states that it will handle 9 displays....kind of hard to get 9 displays without more than 3 gpus

i think the cpu limit is limiting the physical processors, not taking into account the cores. i believe xp pro will handle 2 physical processor (will do 2 quads too) but i think the OS would have to be a server OS in order to see more than 2 sockets?

glock19owner said:

When you click the box to enable CF you have to reboot before it takes affect...if you hadnt rebooted after checking the box and then running the test...it will still show as a single run...

Click to expand...

I found this thread on a search for why I was getting such low scores in AM3 and 3DM01 & 05 after I installed a second 4870 last night. I now cannot wait to get home and try this out as I did NOT reboot after enabling Crossfire in CCC, just ran the benchmarks. Needless to say I was bitterly disappointed with what I saw. This was on my Bench OS. I had first booted to my Normal OS and had a crash trying to load Crysys Warhead. After REBOOTING, and 1 notch up on the PCIe bus volts, Crysys loaded just fine and did scale very well with Crossfire working as it should.

I also wonder if just the reboot would have helped the OP of this thread whick happened during the driver uninstall/reinstall that fixed his problem?

Hi Feestyla85, i just have the same problem, my second graphics card say "Disabled Adapter" in CCC hardware information panel:



Have you resolve it for in this section say "Linked Adapter"?
Is this really a problem?

Cordially.