CrossFireX Arrives: First Look at 3 and 4 GPUs in 2 Card Setups
by Derek Wilson on March 7, 2008 12:05 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Setting it Up …
We Had Issues
Our experience with the new 8.3 drivers and CrossFireX were not seamless. AMD has been working very to try and reproduce the install issues we had with no success so far. Multiple other AnandTech editors had no installation problems, but we feel that it's at least worth mentioning. We can also advise some steps to follow to avoid the issue. This may be an isolated incident, but here are some things you can do to never find out.
It does need to be noted that we only experienced major issues on the Skulltrail platform that we've been using for our graphics benchmarking lately. We've had multiple hardware and drivers installed and uninstalled over the past month or so. These factors certainly could have contributed to the problem and would also make finding the issue tough for AMD. It's always easier to start from a fresh install, but our readers (especially the ones interested in actually running CrossFireX and Skulltrail) will very likely be the ones who install and uninstall hardware and drivers most frequently. We think our usage model for this system could be fairly representative in this case.
The specific problem we ran into was a timeout during attempts to install the driver either through the Catalyst Install Manager or manually. Additionally, once we got the driver installed on one 3870X2, plugging in the second would cause a hard lock when windows tried to automatically find the driver for the second card. We suspect that this occurred because we had previously installed two 3870X2 cards and then removed one before installing the 8.3 catalyst driver. We aren't exactly sure of the cause and neither is AMD, but we can say that the fix for us was removing some non-present including display adapters (along with driver files) in safe mode. After rebooting a few times to let windows do its thing, we installed the driver and all was well.
How to Not Have Issues
To make sure this doesn't happen, when installing CrossFireX, here is what we suggest:
- Install Vista SP1 (this is easier/better than installing the required hotfixes)
- Uninstall old drivers first
- Reboot and let windows install a standard VGA adapter (or cancel if prompted for drivers)
- Power down and install the second (or additional two or three) cards
- Boot and let windows finish finding new hardware
- Reboot and let windows finish finding new hardware (if it needs to)
- Install Catalyst 8.3 or higher
That should keep you safe, in our experience. It's a serious headache to fix the problems once they start, as simply uninstalling doesn't fix the issue.
How to Fix It (Spring Cleaning)
Just in case, here's what you'd need to do if you find the driver times out on install. Please be cautious with this procedure and do not remove any software devices, as they can be difficult to reinstall without reinstalling the OS.
- Start up with only one card in the system
- Uninstall ATI drivers through the control panel -> add/remove programs
- Reboot into safe mode (press F8 at boot)
- Open a command window with admin privileges
- Run these commands
from a command prompt:
- set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1
- start devmgmt.msc
- Enable show hidden devices
- Uninstall all display adapters listed (present or non-present/hidden - they appear slightly faded); make sure to check the box to remove driver files if possible
- Uninstall any non-present/hidden "PCI standard PCI-to-PCI bridge" devices from system devices. It may also help to uninstall other non-present hardware, but be careful about software and non plug-and-play devices (don't remove them).
- Reboot normally
- Let windows finish finding new hardware
- Power down and plug in all new hardware
- Boot and let windows finish finding new hardware
- Reboot and let windows finish finding new hardware (if it needs to)
- Install Catalyst 8.3 or higher
As we said, it's best to follow the first set of directions as it's quite a bit less involved. If all goes wrong, however, this lengthier repair/install process should help you get yourself out of a hole.
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DerekWilson - Saturday, March 8, 2008 - link
that is key ... as is what ViRGE said above.in addition, people who want to run 4 GPUs in a system are not going to be the average gamer. this technology does not offer the return on investment anyone with a midrange system would want. people who want to make use of this will also want to eliminate any other bottlenecks to get the most out of it in their systems.
not only does skulltrail help us eliminate bottlenecks and look at the potential of the graphics subsystem, in this case i would even make the argument that the system is a good match for the technology.
Sind - Saturday, March 8, 2008 - link
I agree, I don't think the Skulltrail is doing anyone favours of how they could judge utilising these MGPU solutions in a "average" system that the reader on Anand would be using. X38 seems very popular as is 780i, I really don't think even more then 1% of your traffic would ever utilise the system you used to do this review. I've read the other CrossfireX reviews from around the net, and most had no problems at all, and infact most noted that it worked straight out with no messing around with the lengthy directions that were indicated in the article to get it to work.ViRGE - Saturday, March 8, 2008 - link
Something very, very important to keep in mind is that Skulltrail is the only board out right now that supports Crossfire and SLI. If AT wants to benchmark both technologies without switching the boards and compromising the results, this is the only board they can use.Cookie Monster - Saturday, March 8, 2008 - link
No 8800Ultra or GTX Tri-SLI for comparison?DerekWilson - Saturday, March 8, 2008 - link
we were looking at 2 card configurations here ... i'll check out three and four card configs laterJarredWalton - Saturday, March 8, 2008 - link
Unfortunately, Tri-SLI requires a 780i motherboard. That's fine for Tri-SLI, but CrossFire (and CrossFireX) won't work on 780i AFAIK. I also think Skulltrail may have its own set of issues that prevent things from working optimally - but that's conjecture rather than actual testing. Derek and Anand have Skulltrial; I don't.Slash3 - Saturday, March 8, 2008 - link
...graphs are both using the same image. The Oblivion Performance and 4xAA/16AF Performance line graphs (oblivionscale.png) are just duplicates and link to the same file. :)JarredWalton - Saturday, March 8, 2008 - link
Fixed, thanks.slashbinslashbash - Saturday, March 8, 2008 - link
Graphics really are fairly unique in the computing world in that they are easily parallelized. While we're pretty quickly reaching a point of diminishing returns in number of cores in a general-purpose CPU (8 is more than enough for any current desktop type of usage), the same point has not been reached for graphics. That is why we continue to see increasing numbers of pipelines in individual GPU's, and why we continue to see effective scaling to multiple cards and multiple GPU's per card. As long as there is memory bandwidth to support the GPU power, the GPU looks like it is capable of taking advantage of much more parallelization. I expect 1000+ pipes on a 2-billion-transistor+ GPU by 2011.So, I expect multi-GPU to remain with us, but any high-end multi-GPU setup will always be surpassed by a single-GPU solution within a generation or two.
DerekWilson - Saturday, March 8, 2008 - link
that's not the issue ... graphics is infinitely parallelizeable ...the problems are die size and power.
beyond a certain die size there is huge drop off in the amount of money and IHV can make on their silicon. despite the fact that every chip could have been made larger, we are working with engineers, not scientists -- they have a budget.
multiGPU allows IHVs to improve performance nearly linearly in some cases without the non-linear increase in cost they would see from (nearly) doubling the size of their GPU.
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then there is power. as dies shrink and we can fit more into a smaller space, will GPU makers still be able to make chips as big as R600 was? power density goes way up as die size goes down. power requirements are already crazy and it could get very difficult to properly dissipate the heat from a chips with small enough surface area and huge enough power output ... ...
but speading the heat out over two less powerful cards would help handle that.
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in short, multigpu isn't about performance ... it's about engineering, flexibility and profitability. we could always get better performance improvement from a single GPU if it could be built to match the specs of a multiGPU config.