[CrossfireX] How to configure and use crossfire?

cmsamo

I have just upgraded to CrossfireX (two AMD R9 290 Double Dissipation cards) and having upgraded the PSU, installed the cards, gotten the latest drivers, either I've done something wrong or Crossfire is a waste of time?

I'm running the 4k samsung monitor and noticed that with the single R9 290, I could not run games such as Dragon Age Inquisition at 4k resolution and max settings. Having set up crossfire I'm not seeing any improvement. In fact the game looks and runs worse with all kinds of artifacts and tearing on loading.

Are there any special steps I need to take or tweaks that need to be applied to make CrossfireX work? I enabled it in the Catalyst Control Centre. Google searching suggests that Crossfire enabled games require profiles. Are these profiles automatically included in driver releases?

I've tried other games (Arma 3, Star Citizen, SWTOR, WoW, Diablo III) and I'm just not seeing any graphical improvements or frame rate gains.

EDIT - I should add my system specs:
-
Core i7 2600k 3.4Ghz
16GB RAM
ASRock Z68 Extreme4 mobo
2 * 4GB XFX R9-290 Double Dissipation gfx cards
Catalyst Version 14.12 Omega

Gaslight

At 4K VRAM may be your limiting factor more than anything, and Crossfire doesn't help you with that. Doesn't explain the artifacts though. You did connect the Crossfire bridge between the two cards, right?

cmsamo

The R9-290's apparently don't need the Crossfire bridge. There's nowhere to connect it. The tech in the store told me there was no bridge required and a quick google before fitting the cards seemed to confirm it.

tsmvengy

Just throwing some thoughts out there:
Maybe you need to upgrade your motherboard BIOS.
Does crossfire have to be enabled in the BIOS?
Are the cards in the correct slots on the motherboard (there are 3 big PCI-E slots)?

BouwsT

I will also say that DA:I artifacts like a SOB in multi-GPU applications (It's unacceptable on my two GTX 680's). There should definitely be some performance increases with Crossfire, but i'm going to second Gaslight in saying that 4K at max texture quality might be a little much for a 4GB card (contrary to what makes sense, the GPU's do not pool memory resources... At least not yet...).

Gaslight

cmsamo wrote: »

The R9-290's apparently don't need the Crossfire bridge. There's nowhere to connect it. The tech in the store told me there was no bridge required and a quick google before fitting the cards seemed to confirm it.

Hm! Interesting. That's progress, I guess. I've always found those bridges a little ridiculous, you look at the flimsy little things and it's hard to believe they actually do anything; they seem like an engineer's practical joke.

But back to your issue. The other games you mention, are you playing them at 4K also? Star Citizen I don't know about, but the others are all old-ish or not known (as far as I'm aware) for being particularly demanding on hardware. If you're playing at 4K, then again, VRAM may be the bottleneck; at lower resolutions I would expect to see some increase in performance.

cmsamo

Thanks for the feedback guys. I did find that I had connected the monitor cable to the wrong card (the 2x PCI express slot is supposed to be the primary for the monitor). I also re-installed the ATI drivers and re-enabled crossfire in the settings. It seems then that I was being a bit unrealistic in my expectation that $700 of gfx cards would be able to handle 4k games at max res

I played War Thunder last night in 4k and got great frame rates at max detail, so I guess I'll keep experimenting on a game-by-game basis.