Witcher 2 Crossfire Performance

[RavenSEAL]

Hello,

As many may know, the Enchanced Edition of The Witcher 2 will be realizing soon, and to celebrate, I decided to get back into the game and start a new save file.

Annoyingly, I'm having issues with Crossfire. The FPS are all over the place between 30-60. I have the settings down to medium/high and obviously, I can tell something isn't right because my GPU usage is sitting around 60%~ for each card at their peak.

I've downloaded the latest drivers and caps, set a custom profile, disabled AA for the giggles. Driver wiped and re-installed the drivers. Patched the game to the latest drivers, etc etc.

Well, my in-game performance still sucks and the game is quite unplayable with the FPS roller coastering.

Any ideas what I can do? Only trick left is to change the name of the game to Fear.exe...(or so Goggle says), I'm hoping someone that experienced this issue has something to contribute.

 

[Soccerman06]

cpu limited?

 

[Jaydip]

What happens when u disable crossfire?Does it run fine?

 

[PrincessFrosty]

I always had problems with crossfire with this game, it had severe negative scaling issues which made it unplayable on my 5970 for about a month until it was patched, it was never quite right afterwards with FPS being all over the place.

I fixed it by moving to a GTX580 :>

 

[aaksheytalwar]

I wouldn't expect max settings and/or 60 FPS with 6870 CF especially with an AMD cpu, that too in Witcher 2. Even a single 7970 OC can't do that with Ubersampling enabled. And a 7970 OC is like 6970 CF which is like 50-80% faster than your setup and we are talking of 4-5GHz 2600k/3930ks here. So if that kind of setup gets 60 FPS, you would barely get 30 FPS with the same settings.

 

[Lepton87]

I wouldn't expect max settings and/or 60 FPS with 6870 CF especially with an AMD cpu, that too in Witcher 2. Even a single 7970 OC can't do that with Ubersampling enabled. And a 7970 OC is like 6970 CF which is like 50-80% faster than your setup and we are talking of 4-5GHz 2600k/3930ks here. So if that kind of setup gets 60 FPS, you would barely get 30 FPS with the same settings.

Even QuadFire is not enough for ubersampling but I don't see a reason to enable that. It's not a huge improvement in IQ, it's very minor improvement for huge performance hit.

 

[BrightCandle]

A pair of 7970's still struggles in this game to produce a smooth experience. The ubersampling is useless, I doubt there is a setup you can buy that can run with that on, but I find my frame rate is all over the place as well. I can see 120 fps in places and < 30 in others, making it very hard to choose a setting that applies everywhere.

Crossfire really doesn't scale well in this game, and I find turning it off in this game produces a more consistent smoother game at low FPS. This is one of those games that stutters quite badly with crossfire and I can't get it to behave.

 

[Blue Shift]

As many may know, the Enchanced Edition of The Witcher 2 will be realizing soon, and to celebrate, I decided to get back into the game and start a new save file.

Remember that CDProjekt upgraded all previously sold copies of The Witcher to Enhanced Edition for free when it came out. They've hinted at doing the same for The Witcher II. (The Enhanced Edition will be for PC too!) Why not wait and start your new playthrough after the upgrade?

Edit: Guys, The Witcher II doesn't run well in Crossfire setups for some reason.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

OP issue still there without CF?

 

[RavenSEAL]

Ubersampling, ssao and bloom are all off.

Will try with just one card and get back to you folks.

 

[Ferzerp]

What resolution?

 

[RavenSEAL]

1080p

 

[RavenSEAL]

I always had problems with crossfire with this game, it had severe negative scaling issues which made it unplayable on my 5970 for about a month until it was patched, it was never quite right afterwards with FPS being all over the place.

I fixed it by moving to a GTX580 :>

Hell, I've been meaning to go single card but I haven't had the chance to do so financially.

Overall, I'm extremely pleased for the performance/cost ratio of my crossfire. Again though, the trade off is that annoying **** like this comes out the blue every now and then. :\

 

[Ferzerp]

1080p

That does seem odd. I play at 2560x1600 (almost exactly twice the pixels) on a single 680 with everything maxxed except SSAO and Ubersampling are off. I never dip below 45 fps. Your two cards should be able to handle that no problem. You're at least 85-90% of a single 680 with that setup (with typical cf scaling).

 

[RavenSEAL]

Frames are solid with crossfire disabled. Slight dropoff on the max. The one gpu in used is getting smoked to 99%. All in all, negative scaling is clearly happening.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

Hell, I've been meaning to go single card but I haven't had the chance to do so financially.

Overall, I'm extremely pleased for the performance/cost ratio of my crossfire. Again though, the trade off is that annoying **** like this comes out the blue every now and then. :\

Yeah I agree and I just got fed up of it, because they'd removed the ability to disable crossfire from the driver control panel, and because they changed the Catylst AI function to no longer disable crossfire I couldn't even do that! So I was left with an unplayable game for god knows how long...

The switch wasn't entirely voluntary, the 5970 reacted badly to overclocking and started to artifact even at stock speeds so I was forced to "upgrade", quite frankly it was more of a side grade but the 580 has been way better, the games feel smoother even at the same frame rate, as is typical with crossfire, the additional VRAM is nice and it wasn't too expensive overall.

I wont be going back to multi-card setups until I absolutely have to in order to power 2560x1600, I don't see that being a problem any time soon quite frankly.

 

[psolord]

Hello,

As many may know, the Enchanced Edition of The Witcher 2 will be realizing soon, and to celebrate, I decided to get back into the game and start a new save file.

Annoyingly, I'm having issues with Crossfire. The FPS are all over the place between 30-60. I have the settings down to medium/high and obviously, I can tell something isn't right because my GPU usage is sitting around 60%~ for each card at their peak.

I've downloaded the latest drivers and caps, set a custom profile, disabled AA for the giggles. Driver wiped and re-installed the drivers. Patched the game to the latest drivers, etc etc.

Well, my in-game performance still sucks and the game is quite unplayable with the FPS roller coastering.

Any ideas what I can do? Only trick left is to change the name of the game to Fear.exe...(or so Goggle says), I'm hoping someone that experienced this issue has something to contribute.

I did a custom (camera recorded of course) benchmark of Witcher 2 on my 5850 Crossfire system, in June 2011.

THE WITCHER 2 1920X1080 ATI 5850 Q9550 @4.0GHz - YouTube

THE WITCHER 2 1920X1080 CROSSFIRE 2X ATI 5850 Q9550 @4.0GHz - YouTube

Back then Crossfire was working great. Single card gave 45fps for the session I run, Crossfire gave 79fps. A 75% scaling and that is with some cpu limits popping up in Crossfire mode.

Of course you are running a newer version of the game with newer drivers, so it wouldn't be out of the question that AMD did break something in the newer releases. Still Crossfire once did work pretty decently.

I'll try to take a look again, although this system is currently semi-decommissioned.

 

[RavenSEAL]

Yeah I agree and I just got fed up of it, because they'd removed the ability to disable crossfire from the driver control panel, and because they changed the Catylst AI function to no longer disable crossfire I couldn't even do that! So I was left with an unplayable game for god knows how long...

The switch wasn't entirely voluntary, the 5970 reacted badly to overclocking and started to artifact even at stock speeds so I was forced to "upgrade", quite frankly it was more of a side grade but the 580 has been way better, the games feel smoother even at the same frame rate, as is typical with crossfire, the additional VRAM is nice and it wasn't too expensive overall.

I wont be going back to multi-card setups until I absolutely have to in order to power 2560x1600, I don't see that being a problem any time soon quite frankly.

I wouldn't mind switching to a 6970 or a 580 if I can cut even, maybe even willing to lose a few dozen bucks.

 

[aaksheytalwar]

A 680 oc will be at least 30-50%+ faster than 6870 cf even with good cf scaling. And min fps wise 680 oc will be 50-100% higher. This is without accounting for CPU differences. And whether it is 7970 oc or 680 oc it doesn't make a difference. And without ssao and über sampling even my 6970 single could max out at 1080p without aa but ultra

 

[RavenSEAL]

I did a custom (camera recorded of course) benchmark of Witcher 2 on my 5850 Crossfire system, in June 2011.

THE WITCHER 2 1920X1080 ATI 5850 Q9550 @4.0GHz - YouTube

THE WITCHER 2 1920X1080 CROSSFIRE 2X ATI 5850 Q9550 @4.0GHz - YouTube

Back then Crossfire was working great. Single card gave 45fps for the session I run, Crossfire gave 79fps. A 75% scaling and that is with some cpu limits popping up in Crossfire mode.

Of course you are running a newer version of the game with newer drivers, so it wouldn't be out of the question that AMD did break something in the newer releases. Still Crossfire once did work pretty decently.

I'll try to take a look again, although this system is currently semi-decommissioned.

Yeah, the first time I played the game, I didn't encounter any problems.

 

[RavenSEAL]

So there is nothing anyone can add?

 

[blackened23]

So there is nothing anyone can add?

Assuming you have the latest driver and CAP, try selecting "use AMD pre-defined profile" in the crossfire mode at the bottom of the 3d settings with everything else set to application preference, edge AA off, mlaa off. Also, what level are you playing? As far as I remember the intro level (for the king) doesn't get 100% gpu on both because its treated as a cinematic / intro, but once you're past that level its fine. Anyway, I wasn't using your same GPU but it seemed fine on this end with 95%+ utilization throughout the game, barring the intro level.

What GPU utilizations do you get beyond the first "level" after you enter the prison and start talking to Vernon Rosche? It should be good from that point... If its low it could be cpu limited, I am not sure though.

 

[RavenSEAL]

Assuming you have the latest driver and CAP, try selecting "use AMD pre-defined profile" in the crossfire mode at the bottom of the 3d settings with everything else set to application preference, edge AA off, mlaa off. Also, what level are you playing? As far as I remember the intro level (for the king) doesn't get 100% gpu on both because its treated as a cinematic / intro, but once you're past that level its fine. Anyway, I wasn't using your same GPU but it seemed fine on this end with 95%+ utilization throughout the game, barring the intro level.

What GPU utilizations do you get beyond the first "level" after you enter the prison and start talking to Vernon Rosche? It should be good from that point... If its low it could be cpu limited, I am not sure though.

I just entered the monastery plaza.

 

[Lepton87]

4-way CF worked just fine for me in this game and believe me 4-way CF has way more issues than 2-way CF.

 

[OVerLoRDI]

I had scaling issues like your described but I fixed them by cleaning and reinstalling drivers. From your op, it looks like you already did that...

Is the performance the same with crossfire disabled?