Crossfire Eyefinity stutters, freezes, flashing pixels, etc.

So far they have run HL2 Episode One, COD MW2, and Operation Flashpoint Dragon Rising each for about 15-20minutes. They have three P2310H setup in EyeFinity + CF enabled. They used the Dell 8.70 driver that will be in the April block for all testing (Win7 Ultimate 64bit). The CPU (as noted below) is not the same.

In each game, all they did was to set the screen resolution to 5760x1080. They made no other game or graphic setting changes.

They saw no “grey pixilation”, no screen blanking during playback of each game. We did see minor ‘tearing’ which is expected and there is nothing we can do on that specifically. But the issue as described in the blog is (so far) irreproducible.

Please provide any other specific graphics settings (Anti Aliasing, VSync, etc)…the more detail, the more they can work to an apples-to-apples comparison.

So far they have run HL2 Episode One, COD MW2, and Operation Flashpoint Dragon Rising each for about 15-20minutes. They have three P2310H setup in EyeFinity + CF enabled. They used the Dell 8.70 driver that will be in the April block for all testing (Win7 Ultimate 64bit). The CPU (as noted below) is not the same.   In each game, all they did was to set the screen resolution to 5760x1080. They made no other game or graphic setting changes.   They saw no “grey pixilation”, no screen blanking during playback of each game. We did see minor ‘tearing’ which is expected and there is nothing we can do on that specifically. But the issue as described in the blog is (so far) irreproducible.   Please provide any other specific graphics settings (Anti Aliasing, VSync, etc)…the more detail, the more they can work to an apples-to-apples comparison.

Thanks for looking into this Chris.

I"m not using any special settings like v-sync or anti aliasing and I experience the screen tearing as well which isn't a big issue but the flashing pixels is what bugs me.

I'm assuming that Dell 8.70 is referring to Catalyst 10.2 which is the same driver I'm currently on.

I'll try to create a video of the issue tonight and post a link to this thread to let you see what's going on.

Do you have any ideas in the meantime as what it could be?

I'll also try reinstalling the drivers again tonight to see if it makes a difference but like I said the situation is hard to analyze because it only happens in crossfire eyefinity. When I turn off crossfire everything works properly at the resolution. The game also runs smoother.

Thanks for the support.

kiax0001

kiax0001,

Can you post your rig's specs?  I'm curious to know.

kiax0001,       Can you post your rig's specs?  I'm curious to know.

Sure

i7 920 @2.66Ghz (Currently running at 3.33Ghz because I downclock to stock and still had the same issue)

3 x 2gb 1333Mhz ram

2 x ATI 5870's in crossfire

Windows 7 64bit OS

3 x P2310h monitors in eyefinity (1920x1080 natives)

1x 500GB harddrive

original on-board 7.1 realtek audio

These are the basics. Let me know if I'm missing anything.

kiax0001

Nice...is the the Area51 with the 1kw psu or the aurora 875w psu?

Area 51 with 1kw PSU

kiax0001

The Dell 8.70 is not the same as the one on the AMD site (but close). The version of the actual driver on the AMD site is 8.702, which we tried today with all the same games with no luck seeing the issue. It is important to note that the release on AMDs site refers to the Catalyst Control Center level (10.2), not the actual driver level (which can be seen in the Catalyst Control Center information window once loaded or via the Release Notes (PDF) from the same download site. The next step we want to ask for was some sort of screen shot/picture/video of what you are seeing. Something to better understand visually.  I believe the dell driver would be 8.66. Can we get a confirmation on that or did you remove ours and went with the latest on the AMD site?

Download the Unigine Demo (DX11). After installing, when you launch the application, there are a series of pulldown menus. There are only 2 settings to change:
1. Make sure full screen is checked (radio box)
2. Change the resolution (bottom pull down) to 5760x1080
Then hit Run and see if the same pixilation happens.

 Nice...is the the Area51 with the 1kw psu or the aurora 875w psu?

Area 51 with 1kw PSU   kiax0001

Very nice...I was wondering if you might have power issues, which you don't.

This might help, new drivers just came out from ATI 10.3, you might want to check it out.

http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1253/1/

The Dell 8.70 is not the same as the one on the AMD site (but close). The version of the actual driver on the AMD site is 8.702, which we tried today with all the same games with no luck seeing the issue. It is important to note that the release on AMDs site refers to the Catalyst Control Center level (10.2), not the actual driver level (which can be seen in the Catalyst Control Center information window once loaded or via the Release Notes (PDF) from the same download site. The next step we want to ask for was some sort of screen shot/picture/video of what you are seeing. Something to better understand visually.  I believe the dell driver would be 8.66. Can we get a confirmation on that or did you remove ours and went with the latest on the AMD site?   Download the Unigine Demo (DX11). After installing, when you launch the application, there are a series of pulldown menus. There are only 2 settings to change: 1. Make sure full screen is checked (radio box) 2. Change the resolution (bottom pull down) to 5760x1080 Then hit Run and see if the same pixilation happens.

Hey Chris,

Thanks for clear response. Last night I installed ATI's 10.3 preview driver and it looks like everything is working now. Here are the exact steps I followed to get it working again in case anyone else experiences this issue.

1). Uninstalled both ATI 5870 display adapters in device manager (I do this instead of using catalyst manager to uninstall because I experience a BSOD which seems to be common with Windows 7)

2). Uninstalled ATI catalyst control using the Express uninstall option to remove all ATI related components

3). Reboot to safe mode and deleted the ATI folder (I think one of the problems with 64bit processors is that it places the ATI folder in Program Files (X86) directory and it doesn't remove this folder properly using the Express Uninstall option because it only looks in the Program Files directory.

4). Ran driver sweeper application to remove any remaining ATI files/registries.

5). Reboot and installed the 10.3 preview driver.

I don't know if the new driver fix the problem I was having or whether there was some sort of driver conflict. To answer your question Yes I did remove Alienware's pre-installed driver because I believe the dell driver is old and doesn't support crossfire in eyefinity. Only the new AMD drivers do (9.12 HF, 10.1, 10.2, etc.) I will try your unigine demo tonight when I get home to see if the problem still exists. Initial tests however are good because the flashing pixels are gone (still see a few but very minor and un-noticeable), and the game freezing seems to be gone.

Chris, can you and your team try running crossfire eyefinity at this resolution for Crysis and see if you experience any stuttering and low framerates? Turn crossfire option on in Catalyst, run the test, and then try it with crossfire disabled and see if you experience the stutter and low FPS. I know off hand Crysis doesn't like crossfire but we shouldn't be seeing any stuttering and low fps. Running Crysis in eyefinity crossfire with all settings to medium yields 50 fps with one ATI 5870 and yields a "stutter" and 25 fps with crossfire enabled.

Thanks to you and Spoon-Fit for all of your help and support and I'll keep you posted on the unigine demo results.

kiax0001

Hey Chris,

I ran the Unigine Heaven benchmark and it works properly with no pixelation problem. It can't get through the entire test however. In the middle of the test it freezes and the program exits. Any ideas? Are you running the same Unigine benchmark?

Thanks,

kiax0001

The Unigine Heaven ran fine on my XPS 730x/Windows 7/GTX280.

Engineering asks -

As for Crysis, I have a couple of questions for the customer before looking into this (because I do not believe we have an original Crysis game here to test with, but we do have Crysis Warhead).
- Is the FPS issue seen in Crysis, Crysis Warhead or both?
- If using the original Crysis only, has the customer run all patch updates?
I ask because I believe the latest patches will want to update to the 3D Engine used in Crysis Warhead (it may want to update the customer to the new game too, not sure, it has been a long time since I tried anything around the original Crysis). It is quite possible the Crysis + CF might have issue. Some older games had/have problems like this, requiring patches to directly add better support for CF. Crysis itself is notorious for random performance, especially in CF mode.

Hey Chris,

Trying to revive an older thread because I'm still having some issues with crossfire and eyefinity.

The pixelated issue I was having was resolved as mentioned before.

The only issue I'm having now is that every now and again when playing a game the computer will lock up and freeze, the screen will flash black, and come back to the game; sometimes even minimizing the game to the taskbar.

I don't know how else to explain it but I've read online that this means the graphic driver is resetting itself when this happens. Its happened to me on the unigine demo, modern warfare 2, just cause 2 etc. I don't believe its a software fault because its happeneing in more than 1 application. The issue is also very erratic. Sometimes it happens in a few minutes and other times it can happen in 30min-1hr. It is noticeable and it only happens in crossfire and eyefinity.

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks.

kiax0001

I do not think it is hardware. You can contact support and have them replace the video card. But, my guess is the replacement will have the same issue.

Chris,

Can you think of any other reasons why I would be experiencing this? It doesn't sound like your side of support is having the same problem and that I'm the only one.

I've run out of ideas as to how to fix this issue. The other thing I was going to mention is that Half-Life Episode 1 & 2 didn't have this issue. It could maybe be because Half-Life runs on DirectX 9 which works just fine in eyefinity. Newer games that run on DX 10 and DX 11 have this issue. I've updated all of my DirectX components and I'm not missing anything driver wise so I'm fresh out of ideas.

Please provide some alternative suggestions if you think replacing hardware will result in the same issue.

Thanks,

kiax0001

I do not think it is hardware. You can contact support and have them replace the video card. But, my guess is the replacement will have the same issue.

We cannot replicate the issue on our end. Putting in another video card is a simple check.