AMD Frame Pacing: Any word on DX9 support?

[USER8000]

Skyrim at 4k and Eyefinity is for few.

Come to reality forum members, the whole world is still on 1920x1080!!

Agreed,but enthusiasts on hardware forums make a much bigger noise!

 

[desprado]

Agreed,but enthusiasts on hardware forums make a much bigger noise!

yes but Next Gen is on 1080p and and that is the target market of every developer.

 

[Tarvaln]

Thanks for all the info guys. The reason I was asking was due to Skyrim.

Since the last time I played I updated from one 5850 to two 7950's. I'm running 14.6 beta drivers. Playing at 1920 x 1080 on one monitor. I have two hooked up but I only play in one. No Eyefinity enabled. Second monitor is set on Extended mode.

I can say from personal testing that my Skyrim still has micro stuttering with my 7950's in Crossfire. It's a little noticeable outdoors but very noticeable indoors. Especially when I am turning in a narrow hallway/path in first person view. When I turn off Crossfire it goes away.

I assume there is no way to smooth it out without turning off Crossfire. But if anyone happens to know of a way I'd like to hear it.

I am currently using ENBoost ans SKSE 1.7.0 alpha for the memory management.

Thanks again.

 

[Headfoot]

Yeah, I think the "solution" is to turn off crossfire. I ended up going with a single 290 instead of upgrading a 7950 to a 7950 CF for issues like this. The 7950 is fast enough that a single one should be enough for almost anywhere in the game even with mods. If you're noticing dips below 60fps, try and overclock the primary 7950 to the limit. Those cards have a ton of headroom

Bethesda really needs to step up their engine development. Skyrim when it released didn't even use SSE instructions, which is why performance was abysmal on anything but highly OC'd Sandy at the time. I remember going from 30 fps to 60 in Markarth when I switched from Phenom II to 2500k. The engine uses, at most, 2 cores which is pretty weak for a game this late in the game. Eyefinity is completely broken in stock Skyrim, UI is completely whack and scaled very strangely. And the 3 monitor issues have been persistent and broken in the same manner since Oblivion to Fallout 3 to Fallout NV to Skyrim. No fixes through all those iterations of the engine. Some parts are so broken that even my fully modded for eyefinity Fallout NV still has a few persistent and unsolveable issues

Love the game, but Bethesda really needs to work on the basics in the engine. Modders can and have done nearly anything else, but they can't rework the fundamentals like threading and architecture. I don't expect it to change with Fallout 4 but I'm sure it'll still end up being a ton of fun

 

[Tarvaln]

Yea, I had to use turn off crossfire and run the game in borderless window mode (thanks to ENB) in order to smooth it out completely.

I agree with you about Bethesda. It seems, especially with Skyrim, that they may have a "release it and let the modders fix it" mentality. I don't even think they give most of those guys credit. I'm not sure though.

I hope in the next TES release it's a little cleaner but I doubt it will be. Letting modders fix stuff is pretty cost effective. I'm sure the guys at the top of Bethesda know that.

 

[BrightCandle]

While the engine isn't the best what with the physics mess and a reasonable amount of poor cpu usage patterns making it less than smooth, the microstutter is 100% AMDs fault. Back just 1 year ago every game was like that, so it shows they have come a distance since then but its appalling it was like that for so long. Skyrim is a popular game still and AMD has left its most enthusiastic purchasers (crossfire users, nothing says love like buying twice) to rot. Isn't a nice way to say that this is not acceptable behaviour. You can't get what you paid for. That sort of business decision should make people think about what these companies get away with.

 

[blackened23]

Indeed, you shouldn't tell your most loyal customers that spend the most money on CF and EF configurations to screw off. Fact of the matter is, those guys spend the most money on hardware, more than others. Aside from that, it isn't like this only affected crossfire or only eyefinity. The fixes came in a few phases and all of the phases took YEARS to fix. Those phases included single screen frame pacing, single card frame pacing, so on and so forth. This affected pretty much everything at first, but has been mostly rectified after years of pestering. This is why spending money on software development is important. Despite the hardware always being good, the experience isn't good unless the software backs it up. And during the Tahiti era, the software was horrible. They've come a ways since then, but not to where they need to be.

AMD's initial lack of frame pacing affected everything: single card, single screen in addition to crossfire eyefinity. Crossfire eyefinity DX9 happens to be the one that AMD decided to not fix, but these other issues with frame pacing existed for years on AMD's end until two websites proved they existed, even for single card 1080p configurations. Some will defend anything, but I can't find anything tasteful for leaving these bugs to exist for years until websites pester AMD to fix them. Funnily enough the 7990 launched with almost no frame pacing at all, which is pretty stupid for a dual GPU graphics card. So delivering products that were broken in terms of software out of the box? Oh but these buyers that spend 1000$+ on hardware don't matter because they're running higher than 1080p. That's what i'm reading. Alrighty. Whatever. But at least AMD did fix (most of them) them years later, although it took them way too long.

 

[3DVagabond]

In the end, there is a finite amount of resources. How much do you use to fix a buggy game with a poorly optimized engine?

 

[desprado]

In the end, there is a finite amount of resources. How much do you use to fix a buggy game with a poorly optimized engine?

Crysis 3 and Farcry 3 are buggy games? They work wonders for SLI but it is a nightmare for my R9 290 crossfire.

 

[3DVagabond]

Crysis 3 and Farcry 3 are buggy games? They work wonders for SLI but it is a nightmare for my R9 290 crossfire.

Completely off topic. Please read the title of the thread again... DX9!

In regards to what you've brought up though here's what [H] had to say about crossfire vs. SLI in those titles...

Crysis 3 is especially demanding at 4K resolutions. Even high-end dual-GPU solutions are not fast enough to give us a playable gameplay experience at the "Very High" game settings at 3840x2160. We tried to run all three combination of cards at SMAA 1X, SMAA MGPU 2X at "Very High" settings and it just wasn't enough. We had to back down to "High" game settings, which is one level below the highest possible settings in the game.

The new AMD Radeon R9 295X2 was able to run at "High" settings at SMAA MGPU 2X AA setting at 3840x2160. This provided a smooth gameplay experience with exceptional performance. The two AMD R9 290X video cards in CrossFire was also playable at this same setting, and it was just slightly slower than the R9 295X2.

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti SLI setup was once again the slowest. We had to back down from SMAA MGPU 2X and use SMAA 1X setting instead. At SMAA MGPU 2X the performance was simply too choppy and slow. It seems that CrossFire is actually smoother in this game now, compared to SLI. We experience less stutter and choppiness on both AMD configurations compared to the 780 Ti SLI configuration. This made the game feel more playable, at lower framerates on the AMD configurations.

We have found that Far Cry 3 is one game that seems to make the R9 290X reference card in performance mode throttle the most below 1GHz. This is certainly the case at 4K. The two reference AMD R9 290X CrossFire cards in performance mode has to be backed down to "Very High" quality in the game, which is one complete level below the highest "Ultra" settings.

The new AMD Radeon R9 295X2, with its water cooling, was able to play at the highest "Ultra" settings. In fact, performance is even slightly faster at this higher setting. This shows how well water cooling is working, keeping the GPUs at 1018MHz without fluctuating while gaming. This has made a big difference in this particular game over the R9 290X.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti SLI was once again the slowest comparison. We had to drop the in-game quality level by two levels, down to "High" settings. Once again we felt this game was more choppy, and less smooth on SLI versus CrossFire. The performance at "High" on 780 Ti SLI is similar to AMD R9 295X2 on "Ultra" settings.

Maybe you need to check your system as your problem isn't universal with these games?

 

[BrightCandle]

We call it 'fixed' but there do still appear to be cases where crossfire still stutters. We see it occasionally in pcper results where there is a steep dip down on the frame rate results in a few games or more variance, more so on the 7000 series cards than the 290. They still have some edge cases to work out even at normal resolutions on dx11. I am hoping they will announce serious functionality to address microstutter with their next generation of cards.

I can't fault the amd hardware, but I lost out big time on crossfire with the 7970s, and comparatively my 680s have been near flawless. AMD has a problem with driver quality, most know that, the impact on its customers is the reason they don't dominate the market. It only takes one sour experience to turn a customer away for their next purchase. Dx9 is now well past the point of fixing, I guess, but this does bring into question how well do and cards work with older software. Recently I have been playing arma2 and the amd users are reporting white pixels on the trees and bushes, an anti aliasing error that was there when the game came out and is still there. They just don't fix stuff that is broken unless a website calls them out on it with a scandal. Its a ridiculous way to run a business.

Not that Nvidia is any better. I still have a bug with them they haven't even opened, 9 months after I raised it. I had to go through a review site just to even get them to look at it.