M18x Video Drivers

what about the application profiles, are you using them?  Is crossfire working for you in skyrim?

Oh yes. The one's on ATI's site wont even install properly on my M18x.

Thanks for the reply,

Are there any difference between the drivers listed on that site vs. the mobility drivers that you can download on the "individual downloads" tab from AMD's site?

By the way... make sure you follow what the website says and install and run the latest Driver Sweeper after uninstalling your current driver before installing this new driver. Cheers.

This is why there are driver mods out there to compensate for many of the laptop vendors lack of updating. Dell is not the only guilty one in this.

Only one place to go for the M18x and ATI drivers is Hardwareheaven.com. Guru3d drivers never seem to work on my M18x. Here's the link. They are at 11.10 right now and I am sure 11.11 will soon come. I have been playing Skyrim with silky FPS on these drivers from Hardwareheaven.

www.hardwareheaven.com/.../206549-ati-mobility-catalyst-11-10-display-drivers-notebooks-31-10-2011-a.html

I use the RadeonPro utility to see Crossfire usage and according to RadeonPro crossfire is working perfectly in Skyrim. My FPS is very smooth in high settings. Ultra high I have not tried yet.

www.radeonpro.info/.../Downloads

Another fantastic utility for your dual 6990 setup is MSI Afterburner. It is very much like EVGA's NVidia Precision utility. You can overclock your chips (be careful of course) and see your GPU temps, Crossfire utilization, etc. very slick util. Beta 8 is the newest and don;t let Beta scare you off. This is solid.

I am getting average 55 FPS @ 1920x1080. I hit the "high" button and then turn antialiasing off since @ 1920x1080 antialiasing does very little except destroy your framerate and pump up anisotropic filtering to the max at 16. With those settings I usually stay at 60 FPS with the vsync being on and I can drop a slow as 40 on very busy battles, etc., but very briefly and no noticeable choppiness really.

Here is that link for Afterburner. A must have util for ATI users. Even though it says MSI it works on every ATI config I've seen.

http://downloads.guru3d.com/MSI-Afterburner-2.2.0-Beta-8-download-2799.html

Thanks for all your help, those 11.10 drivers from hardwareheaven worked great!  Although I get better FPS with crossfire disabled in Skyrim.  I was reading that crossfire isn't fully supported yet for skyrim.  A new CAP is due soon to fix that.

thanks again,

Ed

Wow. You are right. Disabled Crossfire and my FPS went up dramatically. Isn't that interesting how with Crossfire enabled both GPUs are being used, but not efficiently. Both utils show both GPUs being used, but it actually hinders performance. Thanks for the tip and I guess we'll just have to wait for a driver update, but hey, I am not complaining. The performance we're getting in Skyrim on just one 6990M is extremely good anyway.

By the way... heads up... go back to the link I gave you at Hardwareheaven.com... they just released the modded 11.11 today. Cheers.

UPDATE: You may want to avoid 11.11 for now on the M18x. I am having BSOD problems with that driver. Has to do with the atikmdag.sys file.

sorry, I didn't see your above post

How did you even get them to install?  I've tried this with no luck at all:

http://www.alienwarearena.com/forums/topic/7628/hardware/-guide-proper-amd-ati-driver-install/