Guild Wars 2

I apologize if this has been discussed. I searched through the forums and didn’t find any posts that seemed to address this.

System specs:

• Core i7 2600k (conservatively OC’ed and liquid cooled)
• ASRock P67 Pro3 SE mobo
• 32 GB DDR3-1600 (PC3-12800) CL9 RAM
• Intel 330 120GB SATA 6Gb/s Solid State Drive (I have hard drives for data storage, but the game runs on the SSD)
• Dual HIS Radeon HD 6850 1 GB Graphics Cards

I made a rather surprising (to me anyway) observation yesterday and wondered if anyone else has seen the same thing.

I needed to use my second monitor to look up some skill/trait info. So I switched from full screen to windowed full screen so I could have the game up as well. Then I noticed something odd. When I’m in windowed full screen and Crossfire is not engaged, I am getting higher FPS (roughly 10 FPS higher) in the game than I do when I’m putting the load on both GPUs. Logically, that didn’t make sense to me so I switched back and forth a few times to see what was different. What I noticed is when I’m in windowed full screen and only loading one GPU, my CPU load increased by a very small amount, only a couple percentage points.

I’m actually a little disappointed in this finding. What’s the point of having dual video cards if the performance is actually lower? The second GPU is loaded when I’m running full screen, although not as much as the primary GPU. I’m not pointing fingers at the game or at my system. I’m just puzzled as to why this is and if anyone else has seen similar performance? I haven’t yet tried this experiment with any other game, but I may to see if I get similar results. Any thoughts on how to put more load on the secondary GPU and get the frame rate increase one might expect from dual GPUs in Crossfire mode?

I should note, as I’ve just been reading some other posts concerning CPU/GPU usage, what I’m seeing would seem to fly in the face of the “CPU is your bottleneck” problem about which so many post. In my case, I’m actually getting better performance by putting more load on the CPU. I suppose, if the game is optimized to use the CPU more and I’m trying to NOT use it, I’m not running my game to use the hardware for which it’s optimized. Maybe that’s why I’m seeing what I posted above.

Loading the game on the second gpu might increase the cpu overhead which means you might get less fps.

It is not advised to crossfire this game because the graphics are very optimized

OC your cpu will get a much better chance of getting better fps in this game than crossfire

^what a load of garbage lol. OP do you have the latest drivers from amds website as well as the newest CAPs. Also are both of your video cards in the right pci slots? If one is in a 16x slot and one is in an 8x slot, they will both run in 8x hense it will be slower in xfire. You can download gpuz to find out what speeds they are both running at.

I was actually looking at the PCI-e link after my original posts. I noticed on my GPU monitor gadgets that one was at x16 and the other at x4. Pretty sure that’s where the problem lies. Now I’m trying to figure out how to resolve it. I’ve already switched the cards between slots, so the issue must be with the slot. I’ve blown it out with canned air and it looks clean. I’ve looked for settings in the BIOS and can’t find any that relate specifically to PCI-e link. I also went into my Windows power profile and ensured that power management for PCI is disabled.

Any other thoughts?

Moonstruck.3612:

I was actually looking at the PCI-e link after my original posts. I noticed on my GPU monitor gadgets that one was at x16 and the other at x4. Pretty sure that’s where the problem lies. Now I’m trying to figure out how to resolve it. I’ve already switched the cards between slots, so the issue must be with the slot. I’ve blown it out with canned air and it looks clean. I’ve looked for settings in the BIOS and can’t find any that relate specifically to PCI-e link. I also went into my Windows power profile and ensured that power management for PCI is disabled.

Any other thoughts?

Interesting. I’ve taken a look at your motherboard and if you listed the right one, you only have 2 pci-e slots and they both are 16x slots, so that shouldn’t be the problem. Are there any power saving features in the bios that you can find that are enabled possibly? I did a quick search on that motherboard and a guy had a problem with the card going to 8x, and he said he fixed it, it was a powersaving feature. http://forums.tweaktown.com/asrock/49615-p67-pro3-down-pci-e-8x.html

Yeah, I looked at the power saving settings. They’re disabled. I just checked the AMD driver versions and found that I don’t have the most recent one from last month. I’m downloading CCC 12.10 and the associated CAP to see if that makes any difference in this issue. But, given that the problem didn’t move with the card when I swapped them, I’m not sure that’s going to resolve this issue. We’ll see.

*Edit – Just looked at that post you linked. It’s interesting that he notes the issue happened after he installed an Intel SSD. I wish I’d noticed my PCI link before I installed my SSD. Probably has nothing to do with the issue, but I thought it was an interesting coincidence with his post.

Well, now that’s introduced a whole new issue. My system crashed with a BSOD during the CCC installation. Oh joy. Now I get to sort that out.

Try the 12.11 drivers instead if the 12.10 give you trouble

Moonstruck.3612:

I apologize if this has been discussed. I searched through the forums and didn’t find any posts that seemed to address this.

System specs:

• Core i7 2600k (conservatively OC’ed and liquid cooled)
• ASRock P67 Pro3 SE mobo
• 32 GB DDR3-1600 (PC3-12800) CL9 RAM
• Intel 330 120GB SATA 6Gb/s Solid State Drive (I have hard drives for data storage, but the game runs on the SSD)
• Dual HIS Radeon HD 6850 1 GB Graphics Cards

I made a rather surprising (to me anyway) observation yesterday and wondered if anyone else has seen the same thing.

I needed to use my second monitor to look up some skill/trait info. So I switched from full screen to windowed full screen so I could have the game up as well. Then I noticed something odd. When I’m in windowed full screen and Crossfire is not engaged, I am getting higher FPS (roughly 10 FPS higher) in the game than I do when I’m putting the load on both GPUs. Logically, that didn’t make sense to me so I switched back and forth a few times to see what was different. What I noticed is when I’m in windowed full screen and only loading one GPU, my CPU load increased by a very small amount, only a couple percentage points.

I’m actually a little disappointed in this finding. What’s the point of having dual video cards if the performance is actually lower? The second GPU is loaded when I’m running full screen, although not as much as the primary GPU. I’m not pointing fingers at the game or at my system. I’m just puzzled as to why this is and if anyone else has seen similar performance? I haven’t yet tried this experiment with any other game, but I may to see if I get similar results. Any thoughts on how to put more load on the secondary GPU and get the frame rate increase one might expect from dual GPUs in Crossfire mode?

This is perrty much a nobrainer your motherboard is not made for xfire. you have 1×16 slot and 1×4 slot (read the specks next time)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157249
Expansion Slots
PCI Express 2.0 x16 2 (x16, x4)PCI Express x1 2

zerk.9701:

This is perrty much a nobrainer your motherboard is not made for xfire. you have 1×16 slot and 1×4 slot (read the specks next time)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157249
Expansion Slots
PCI Express 2.0 x16 2 (x16, x4)PCI Express x1 2

Wow, you know, unfortunately you’re correct. I bought the system pre-built with the dual cards in Crossfire mode. Never looked at the slot specifications before I bought it. Lesson learned. Grrrrr

Oh well, I’ll resolve that when it’s time to upgrade the mobo & CPU. Until then, I guess I’ll live with it.

Thanks for all the help.

Moonstruck.3612:

zerk.9701:

This is perrty much a nobrainer your motherboard is not made for xfire. you have 1×16 slot and 1×4 slot (read the specks next time)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157249
Expansion Slots
PCI Express 2.0 x16 2 (x16, x4)PCI Express x1 2

Wow, you know, unfortunately you’re correct. I bought the system pre-built with the dual cards in Crossfire mode. Never looked at the slot specifications before I bought it. Lesson learned. Grrrrr

Oh well, I’ll resolve that when it’s time to upgrade the mobo & CPU. Until then, I guess I’ll live with it.

Thanks for all the help.

I smell cyberpower or ibuypower with their famous selling point on the cheap motherboards Xfire ready.

If you could find a buyer for both cards for $100 each or so you could buy one good card and no more xfire problems,
7870 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125418

Thanks for the info zerk, those specs are a bit misleading because it also says it supports crossfire and quad crossfire. Not sure what good that does with 1 slot that only supports 4x speeds.

Btw zerk are you sure that doesn’t mean that both slots support both 4x and 16x? Both slots are colored blue on the motherboard which normally means they both support 16x

Edit: I read another article and confirmed that in crossfire one of the pcie slots lowers to 4×. That is very misleading.

Swordbreaker.2581:

Thanks for the info zerk, those specs are a bit misleading because it also says it supports crossfire and quad crossfire. Not sure what good that does with 1 slot that only supports 4x speeds.

Very misleading by the board makers.

You will really like this.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128501
now look how it reads on the Gigabyte site.

Expansion Slots

1.1 x PCI Express x16 slot, running at x16 (PCIEX16)
* For optimum performance, if only one PCI Express graphics card is to be installed, be sure to install it in the PCIEX16 slot.
2.1 x PCI Express x16 slot, running at x4 (PCIEX4)
* When the PCIEX1_2 or PCIEX1_3 slot is populated with an expansion card, the PCIEX4 slot will operate at up to x1 mode.
3.3 x PCI Express x1 slots
(All PCI Express slots conform to PCI Express 2.0 standard.)
4.2 x PCI slots

Multi-Graphics Technology

1.Support for ATI CrossFireX™ technology
* The PCIEX16 slot operates at up to x4 mode when ATI CrossFireX™ is enabled

hi,

I would like to know if it is the reason why my sli configuration(2xgtx560ti) doesn’t work better than my gtx580. my motherboard is an asus maximus 4 extreme Z but they say that in sli or crossfire dual it is x8 x8 or in tri sli configuration it is in x8,x16,x16.
Can someone please confirm that? my processor is an i5 3570 oc’ed to 4,3 ghz. Have i missed something by not placing the 2 gtx560 ti in the good slots? because there are 4 pci express x16 slots.

Ps: sorry for the poor english, mothertongue is french

bernardo.5436:

hi,

I would like to know if it is the reason why my sli configuration(2xgtx560ti) doesn’t work better than my gtx580. my motherboard is an asus maximus 4 extreme Z but they say that in sli or crossfire dual it is x8 x8 or in tri sli configuration it is in x8,x16,x16.
Can someone please confirm that? my processor is an i5 3570 oc’ed to 4,3 ghz. Have i missed something by not placing the 2 gtx560 ti in the good slots? because there are 4 pci express x16 slots.

Ps: sorry for the poor english, mothertongue is french

I’ll go ahead and answer this your are only running at x8 in SLI your running x16 with the single 580 so look at this and keep in mind the 560ti’s are overclocked. Also all games will very how well SLI will scale.
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2011/02/21/msi_n560gtx_ti_twin_frozr_ii_oc_sli_review/8
And again not really sure about the 8×8 or 16×16 the item descreption is bad.
Expansion Slots

4 x PCIe 2.0 x16 (x16 or dual x8 or x8, x16, x16)
1 x PCIe 2.0 x4
1 x PCIe 2.0 x1
I could be wrong about the 8×8 or 16 x16 but it still varies depending how the gme scales with the SLI.

ok thanks for the tip

I know now for sure i can make the two 560 ti’s work for sure in x16,x16 mode but it has to work with another chipset(NF200) which isn’t required for the x8,x8 configuration. (in fact it depends where you put the cards into the pcie slots). According to some benchmarks there is no to little improve in performance between x8x8 without having to deal with the NF200 and x16,x16 dealing with the NF200. Asus recommends using the x8,x8 configuration because using the chipset (NF200) increases in a certain way the time data are being sorted out

I can’t believe some of the crap being posted here… so let me help clear things up.
1. having a card in a x16 slot and and x4 slot does not cause noticable performance drops. this has been tested at least a hundred times by various sites. heres one foryou to look at: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-crossfire-nvidia-sli-multi-gpu,2678-5.html
2. This game sux with crossfire enabled. The micro stuttering is horrible and often FPS is lower than with a single card. Pretty much why anybody running this game in “windowed, full screen” will see an increase when using crossfire.
3. Everyones idea of a “cpu heavy game” is horribly mis interpreted. I play this game on an i7 2700k at 5.0Ghz under water with 8 gigs of ddr3 2133 and crossfire 7970’s. If i downclock my cpu to stock i get no change in framerate. CPU heavy game would be Metro 2033 or battlefield 3. This game has never shown to have drastic clock changes based on cpu’s of the current generation. Perhaps and i3 or the older core 2 duo’s may, but then again the game doesn’t really load up the cpu as much as people think. His cpu at stock is more than enough to push good frames from this game.
4. Under no circumstances do board slot colors indicate their performance. PCI express slots can be different speeds depending on the board, or more importantly how many gpu’s you are running. Some cut down lanes based on this. This is because the chipset only has a usual number of 32 total lanes to dedicate to the pci express bus. Thus if you plug in two cards you get 16 each, ifyou plug in 3 you may get 16,8,8. It does no downscale the first pci express slot until you’ve got more than 3 or so cards. Not all boards exibit this behavior but for the most part refer to point one, it makes little to no difference.

This game is simply not good with crossfire, other than disabling it and running the game with an overclocked single card, i’ve never been able to get a positive return with crossfire and i’ve tried every driver i can for my 7970’s

exodusprime.3154:

I can’t believe some of the crap being posted here… so let me help clear things up.
1. having a card in a x16 slot and and x4 slot does not cause noticable performance drops. this has been tested at least a hundred times by various sites. heres one foryou to look at: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-crossfire-nvidia-sli-multi-gpu,2678-5.html
2. This game sux with crossfire enabled. The micro stuttering is horrible and often FPS is lower than with a single card. Pretty much why anybody running this game in “windowed, full screen” will see an increase when using crossfire.
3. Everyones idea of a “cpu heavy game” is horribly mis interpreted. I play this game on an i7 2700k at 5.0Ghz under water with 8 gigs of ddr3 2133 and crossfire 7970’s. If i downclock my cpu to stock i get no change in framerate. CPU heavy game would be Metro 2033 or battlefield 3. This game has never shown to have drastic clock changes based on cpu’s of the current generation. Perhaps and i3 or the older core 2 duo’s may, but then again the game doesn’t really load up the cpu as much as people think. His cpu at stock is more than enough to push good frames from this game.
4. Under no circumstances do board slot colors indicate their performance. PCI express slots can be different speeds depending on the board, or more importantly how many gpu’s you are running. Some cut down lanes based on this. This is because the chipset only has a usual number of 32 total lanes to dedicate to the pci express bus. Thus if you plug in two cards you get 16 each, ifyou plug in 3 you may get 16,8,8. It does no downscale the first pci express slot until you’ve got more than 3 or so cards. Not all boards exibit this behavior but for the most part refer to point one, it makes little to no difference.

This game is simply not good with crossfire, other than disabling it and running the game with an overclocked single card, i’ve never been able to get a positive return with crossfire and i’ve tried every driver i can for my 7970’s

Actually most motherboard manufacturers will color their pci slots different colors depending on what speed they are, this is not a standard and they can be any color. You will get worse performance on crossfired high end cards, if you have 1 on a 16x and one on a 4×. You will get worse performance if you have ONE graphics card and its only using 4x and not 16×. Also crossfire works just fine in this game with the newest drivers and caps. I get double the FPS in crossfire than if I disabled crossfire. So on all accounts you’re wrong.