I bought a second R9 270x in hopes of improving my gaming experience, but it's been a headache for most of the time. There is quite an improvement with most games (BF4, GTA V), but the performance is horrid on certain games such as Watch Dogs or Dying Light. Dying Light is absolutely horrendous; the FPS ranges from 50 to 12, but averages at about 22. Changing the graphics quality doesn't seem to change the changing FPS as much. Does anyone else run into these issues with R9 270xs? Or maybe it's Crossfire?
Cheers Specs: CPU: AMD FX-8350 OC to 4.34Ghz CPU Cooler: Evo Hyper 212 Motherboard: Sabertooth 990fx R2.0 GPU: Dual Crossfire R9-270x (latest stable drivers) [No OC] PSU: Corsair 750m SSD: Kingston Hyper X 3K 128GB HDD: WD Green 1TB
you were better off just selling the first 270x and the money spent on the second one, on a much better R9-390. my very first PC build consisted of two R9-270x cards. ASUS Direct CU II Top editions to be exact. it was the biggest mess i've ever had to deal with. Chopping in games, screen-tearing, frame-rate drops the whole nine yards. the only cards worth crossfiring are the higher end ones, simply because everything is being handled through the PCI-e. no more bridge connectors.
I would probably say it's the crossfire though. 270x/7870s were notorious for having issues with Crossfire.
There's different settings for Crossfire in CCC, you can try tinkering around with the different profile settings. If it's not working well with the AMD pre-defined profile, give 'Optimize 1x1' a shot and see if it helps at all, otherwise you can always make a CCC profile for said games with poor XFire performance and disable the feature on those titles entirely.
I just dropped a 7950 in my rig in Xfire with my R9 280, the performance in some cases is excellent, sometimes it doesnt play nice and gives me some problems. This is why most times people will tell you to buy the most expensive card you can afford initially, and then later on add a second card if its something you feel like fighting with.
On the bright side you're now in a better situation as a whole ... You now have a fallback card to use in the event of a gpu failure, which can be a saving grace on an AMD build lacking an iGPU. You could also mess around with KVM and PCI pass-thru now which looks like a fun little project that requires two cards.
A lot of games, like Dying Light and Watch Dogs in particular, don't have good crossfire support. Go watch Totalbiscuit's port report of Dying Light. SLI does nothing. That is just the way it works. Multi-card configs have the potential for better frame rates, but they also have the potential for disaster. Depends on the game, the drivers, and which way the wind is blowing. You might want to considering selling and getting a better single card, or only using one card in the games that don't like crossfire and just be done with it.
You could also pop over to that thread and might be able to get rid of it for at least some of your money back, if you dont want the card at all after seeing the performance you've gotten.
Facepalm.......... Your crossfire system is fine. You will need to learn how to configure your graphic settings, tho. Sometimes you just don't win, depending on the game. Then it is best just to disable CF.
I do believe that both Watch Dogs and Dying Light were horribly optimized for AMD. (I think Tom's Hardware, during their performance review, found a 750 TI operating at the same level as an R9 280X - lol.)
But, yeah, adding a second video card doesn't always guarantee a performance boost. In some games, it gets worse. (I found that out the hardware, with Alien: Isolation.)
Anyway. If the drivers don't support it, or if the game isn't well coded for it, you're buggered. Sometimes, though, you can mess with some of the Crossfire settings in Catalyst Control Center to mitigate some issues.
Another issue is that there are some hardware limitations you do have to take into account. Two R9 270X's will perform quite well, but they still have "only" 2gb of VRAM. You have to be careful that you're not going over that amount by a gross amount, because that will cause poor performance as well.
Disabled the 2nd card and magically got better performance (60fps) on same settings (aka normal and low MSAA) in GTA V. Blew my mind how crappy crossfire actually was. Looking to sell the 2nd card now.
I would say the issue is more vram than the card per say. Something with 3 or 4 gigs of vram will grant you a much smoother experiance. 270 is the new low end standard for basic 1080p gaming. Moar ! Vram :) Should be a t-shirt or something. LOL
It is not that Crossfire is crappy. When it works, it works well. It just needs to be optimized - and the onus for this is both on the game and driver programmers.