Crossfire is a nightmare!

[sgtsmokey]

I got two R9 290s and I thought Crossfire would be amazing, well it is... as and when the game supports it, oh and if the driver has a profile!

I try to have Crossfire enabled most of the time, a lot of games I play don't have a profile, so only one GPU is mostly active. And when it does have a profile its a game to see if it makes the game worst or better. 

Alien Isolation's profile makes it amazing, something like 180 fps at 3k.
Battlefield 4 Mantle + crossfire, 100+ (cant remember, only played through Origin trial)

Assassins Creed Unity - 1 card 60fps, crossfire 20fps

Watch Dogs - same

Call of Duty Advanced Warfare - Crossfire = BLUESCREEN

I have 189 Steam Games. Most of them AAA titles.

http://steamcommunity.com/id/kaniboy86/games/?tab=all

But I can only find about half a dozen games with crossfire profiles that still work. That is another problem too. When they fix driver issues or release a new graphics card the old crossfire profiles break and become forgotten.

Next time I am not going to bother with crossfire, in fact due to my game production stuff I am being pulled towards Nvidea and intels rendering capabilities over AMDs gaming abilities. So I may experience SLi in the near future. Plus I also wanted to put this out there in case anyone was thinking of getting two mid range cards for crossfire over a high range card.

Not saying a R9 290 is mid range either as it runs things like Far Cry 4 at 1080p 60fps alone

Please note that I do have bottleneck issues on my 8320, but I have found through research my issues I am having is mutually shared with about every combination of crossfire out there.

[R_Golden]

Dual card solutions are usually very cost innefective. There are issues with dual cards, that's why I always recommend a better single card.

Edit: I wouldn't go for SLI either unless you're really greedy for top performance ;p

[dandrix]

Single high end GPU over SLI/CF anyday bro.

[Kc7vwc]

Just a side note, that motherboard only has a 4x slot for the 2nd GPU. My wife is currently using it as well. Last year we were running 2x 7850s for a bit, and it was very marginal improvement.
And I'd agree, single GPU for most situations.

[sgtsmokey]

When I got my first R9 290 there was only R9 290 and 780 out. I did choose 1 single card over two mid range cards. i listened to someone when they said buy the best card and not two mid range cards, they also said you could get another card later, which is what I did lol.

I do plan to change my CPU and MOBO soon for a i7 5820k and try to get a motherboard that has two full 16x bandwidth PCi slots.

And yes I do have this hunger for power and will get sli in the future. After i replace my CPU I will change the GPU for something better (probably the best out at that time) and then when i suffer bottlenecking upgrade the CPU again. And this is how I build my computer, I dont build one rig every 5 years, I change parts or add more every 5 months . Its a race to stay on top for me.

With what I have I can play every title I have on its highest settings at 30 fps / 60 fps / 100+ fps. There nothing I cant run, the point of this post was to make people aware that Crossfire and SLi is not an automatic power boost as i once first thought.

[Najuno]

When I got my first R9 290 there was only R9 290 and 780 out. I did choose 1 single card over two mid range cards. i listened to someone when they said buy the best card and not two mid range cards, they also said you could get another card later, which is what I did lol.

I do plan to change my CPU and MOBO soon for a i7 5820k and try to get a motherboard that has two full 16x bandwidth PCi slots.

And yes I do have this hunger for power and will get sli in the future. After i replace my CPU I will change the GPU for something better (probably the best out at that time) and then when i suffer bottlenecking upgrade the CPU again. And this is how I build my computer, I dont build one rig every 5 years, I change parts or add more every 5 months . Its a race to stay on top for me.

With what I have I can play every title I have on its highest settings at 30 fps / 60 fps / 100+ fps. There nothing I cant run, the point of this post was to make people aware that Crossfire and SLi is not an automatic power boost as i once first thought.

Just as a side note on your upgrading plan... the 5820K will not allow you to use PCIe 3.0 x16/x16. This CPU has 28 native PCIe lanes. If you wanted to do that you´d need a 5930K. But it won´t be necessary a 5820K with PCIe 3.0 x8/x8 is perfectly fine.

 

Other than that I use SLI for a long time already. I had times, where I went back to single GPU solutions, because I am super sensitive to MicroStuttering. But the cards from nVidia are perfectly fine nowadays.

I think it is save to say that titles like AC:U or WatchDogs are so poorly optimized that it´s a shame, these games made it on the market in the condition they are.

I run also into games H1Z1 i.e. that has no profile. I can either create a SLI profile for that or run it on one card. To run games like that one 1 card is fine with me. But I can understand, a missing CF profile in AAA titles is annyoing.

[WaitForMeImOnDialUp]

hmmmm something doesnt sound right advanced warfare works very well in crossfire for me. watchdogs i got about 20-30 fps increase. did you check the box in ccc for enable crossfirex for applications that have no associated application profile? i dont know why but that seemed to make a difference in some games for me. you could also uncheck framepacing that seems to give a boost too.

 

there are some games that get almost double fps with crossfire. bf4,dragonage inquisition,dying light are some that i have.

 

crossfire gave me a HUGE boost.

[JustCallMeVlad]

Single high end GPU over SLI/CF anyday bro.

 

 

970 SLI > 980

[Bhav]

^^ Totally.

[dandrix]

970 SLI > 980

If i was 4K gaming, id go with 290X CF.

[Kc7vwc]

My only other drawback to XF/SLI, is the requirement for true fullscreen. (Unless that's changed since late 2013 / early 2014?) Windowed, or even Windowed Borderless does not work.

Check any game not performing well & see if it's in Borderless mode.