Ok. I'm at a loss here. This problem makes no sense to me.
Here's the deal. I have a big gaming rig with a 4960X CPU, Rampage IV black mobo and crucially, a total if 3 290X gpus, in the form of one ARES3 295x2 and one 290X 8gb, all of which are water cooled for low temp goodness.
Here's the problem, the rig works great with 1, or 2 gpus enabled (it does not matter which 2) but when all 3 are enabled, I get HIDEOUS staggering/low fps.
Let me explain what I mean by staggering because it's bizarre. Instead of of the frame flow being interrupted by brief freezes like you would expect, the frames jump back and forth, so a character walking in game for example is not only jumpy, but the character jumps back to where they were a few frames ago every few hundred milliseconds.
I've ruled out the games (skyrim is what I play primarily) as it seems to have an effect (although less extreme) in benchmarks too, with 1 & 2 gpu configs being much smoother than the 3-way option. I also used the benchmarks (unigine heaven and valley) to fiddle with V-sync to see if that was the culprit, but no. All gpus are also running at stock speeds to rule out OC issues. Whats more, the staggering happens even at launch in games (in the menu) before I've even loaded a save.
I've made sure I'm on the latest drivers (tried both beta and non-beta) and problem persists. Even tried removing all traces of the driver by uninstalling, then deleting any folders etc manually before re-installing.
I'm at a loss. I don't know what else it could be. Any help guys?
I will love you forever if anyone could help me :)
Could also be that the ARES is a custom built card and internally crossfired, then the third card has to go outside the ARES over PCI and to the next card. I don't crossfire but could this add time to the signal and cause stuttering?
Correct me if I am wrong, You are saying the ARES by itself works fine as a single or cross fire with itself. And the 290X works fine by itself.
Can you crossfire the 290X with one of the ARES cards? What happens?
Would it have been a better option to run all ARES cards? Just get 2 and have quad Crossfire rather than having one Ares with a custom board and internal crossfire and a regular third card?
Sorry if I am not making sense, just asking in the hopes it might help.
+1 , and if he xfire's with one of the ARES gpu's , it will just treat the ares as a single gpu solution , thus no stuttering .
The problem is probably the proprietary 295x2 , you might want to look into returning the 290x 8gb , but then your options are adding a second 295x2 or just keeping one 295x2 .
There are two cards. The ares and the 290x. the 290x is a secondary and the ares is the primary in the top slot were the desplay is plugged. I can actuvate, what I think is one gpu on the ares or one on the ares and the 290x, or both on the ares. The single, and two way options work fine. It's always difficult to tell which gpus are activated because the Catalyst menu just says "2 gpus: 0, 6" or "2 gpus: 0,7" or "3 gpus: 0, 6, 7".
When I x fire the 290 with one of the ares gpus, everything works great. Only when all 3 are enabled do I get the problems.
Possibly. I'm glad you pointed this out to me because I'm remember the 295x2 being an 8gb per gpu card, hence why I bought the 8gb version of the 290X to avoid bottle necks. Turns out you're right. The 295 does have 4gb per gpu not 8.
I might be able to procure a 4 gb modal. If I can, I will update the post with the results. Even if i can, It wont be a simple 5 min switch job with the w/cooling but that might at least eliminate other components in the system as the cause such as the ares, cpu or mobo.
On a completely unrelated note, were is your avatar from? It looks familiar but I can't place it. Looks really cool.
When I ran a crossfire setup I could usually get better performance by tweaking the crossfire profile in radeonpro. I believe AMD added some functionality to catalyst to tweak the crossfire profile, but radeonpro always worked best for me. Maybe you could play around with the crossfire profile and pick up better performance.
P.S: Skyrim never cooperated well with crossfire for me. Even though my fps was slightly higher with crossfire (~20%), it felt smoother with a single GPU.
Haha. Don't worry my friend, I am fully aware of that particular rule of the internet. I spend way too much time online not to. Plus a lot of my online buddies are artists... so... yeah
Are you running a accessory monitor or just a single 1440p monitor? I personally had a lot of trouble with crossfire when I had a second monitor plugged in.
Look at logans video from the GTX980 Sli, and check how badly the scaling is on 1080p even with the 5960X 8 core on 4.2Ghz, only a few games get an improvement over a single 980, but still the scaling isnt realy great. If you concider the investment. Because the scaling is nowhere near 100%. Only GPU bound games like Trine and Tombraider scale well on 1080p.
1440p or 4k is offcourse a diffrent story, Because you will get GPU bound in most situations. But i still think that anything above dual highend gpu setups, is a bit of a waste. Maybe on 4k triple or quad gpu setups may make sense.
Ok , a quick research and explanation of my past problem :
So , it works with 2 gpu's , no matter which , but 3 is bad .
This is ( probably ) why :
When one GPU : it communicates with no other gpu , thus no problems no matter what gpu is running .
2 Gpu's : there are only 2 combinations possible : either ares - ares , or ares - 8gb 290x .
This is fine , as the ares - ares are meant to work together , and the ares - 8gb 290x can work as if the ares was just one card .
Now 3gpu's : there is only one option : ares - ares - 8GB 290x .
The problem is that you are running xfire with 2 gpu's that use internal xfire with one that laggs behind as an external card .
I had this when testing asus MARS 760 with 4GB 760 , never got to extensively test , but the problems where enough to just get me to tell the guy to either keep the mars or get a 780ti .