Widescreen Gaming Forum

Thanks for the info. Any suggestions about what I could look at?

I have 3 Dell 30" monitors attached to a single 5970, running on Windows 7 64 with 12 GB of ram.

Basically if I start Grid at native res, the movie starts but then stutters and then updates once every few seconds :

Any tips where I could look?

Cheers,

The only difference with my system is that it has 6 GB ram.

The main reason why some games did not work for me initially was that they would default with too much AA, maybe because I tried the game on a single screen first. I thought this may be your problem, since L4D runs fine for you and this game engine is very easy to drive. Another reason could be that I got the Steam version of GRID so maybe you have to check for a patch?

Disabling Crossfire is possible with a 5970 too, by checking the "Disable Catalyst AI" box in the CCC. It helped me to get Crysis playable and apparently the same applies to NFS Shift. But all other games I tried so far run better with Crossfire enabled.

I can do some testing to compare if you want when I'm back home in a few days, but I can tell you that a single 5970 is more than capable of driving modern games at 7680x1600 and often with high graphics settings.

Just an aside, how are you guys able to set non-native resolutions for Eyefinity? For example, I have three 24", which I run in portrait mode at 3600x1920 (1200x1920x3). I'd like to run it at 3150x1680 (1050x1680x3) or 2700x1440 (900x1440x3) for games that are too much to handle for a single 5870.

As far as I am aware, non-native res EyeFinity is currently a bit of a hackjob solution. Dave Baumann has said ATi are looking into non-native res EyeFinity, although I've got no idea when that would make an appearance in drivers... :(

This thread:

http://www.widescreengamingforum.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=64&t=17635

Thanks for all the info again.

AA could be it. I literally can't start the game to get to the options, though I had a little bit of luck with a text file I found to edit some configs. Was a bit of a hack job though.

Can I just force AA to disabled in the Catalyst Control Panel? That would over-ride in-game settings, correct?

The other thing I noticed while doing some reading was there is a post-9.12 hotfix available. I've not installed it as it's supposed to fix Eyefinity crossfire in multi-card solutions (ie, the 5970 isn't supposed to need it) but should I install it?

I normally have the attitude of don't install a hotfix unless you definately need it ;)

Don't know if the CCC panel overrides in-game settings, but can you not simply disable Eyefinity and run the game on a single 2560x1600 first? That should always run and it will allow you to disable AA. After that you enable Eyefinity and change the resolution to 7680x1600.

I would install the hotfix as I think it allowed me to run allmost every game in crossfire with a 5970 as opposed to the short White list before that. Maybe the problem is that you are just using a single core? One way to find that out is by right-clicking the ATI logo in the taskbar, highlighting 1. ATI Radeon HD 5900 series and under CrossfireX settings choosing Show Status Icon (what do you mean CCC not user friendly?). That should show you a big logo in your right corner when you run a game in Crossfire.

Wanted to jump in, as I have the exact same setup, Single 5970 (was dual but one card had to be RMA'd) with 3x dell 30's

My experience has been the same... I'm concerned about being able to drive those ultra high resolutions too, but my plan right now is to run with 2x 5970's. Now though, even with the 9.12 hotfix quad GPU's don't work with eyefinity (HORRIBLE framerates), hopefully that's resolved in the next driver release.

I definitely wouldn't give up the 3x 30's though... Even if we can't drive them effectively, graphics horsepower will only increase in the future and we'll be able to drive them (as long as we have top-end cards). I've been really impressed with the ability of 1 5970 to handle 7680x1600 so far, we'll see what quadfire support adds.

My feeling is if I can run at 7680 at an acceptable framerate, then I will, if not, then I still have a single 2560 display that I can run with maxed out settings (2x 5970's)... Not complaining either way :cheers

I run the hotfix driver and I haven't really noticed a difference at least in the games I play.

I use afterburner and a g19 to monitor GPU clocks, temps, and load while in games and benchmarks. You can use this to see if both cores are really working, and how hard. It works great, most useful feature of the g19 so far lol... Well that, coretemp, and the ability to see whats playing in my winamp stream.. Just a warning though, I've found the user definied auto fan control in afterburner to cause some stuttering (make sure it's disabled), same with fraps, asus gamer OSD, and the rivatuner stats server.

Two of my favorite eyefinity demo apps in desktop mode... Google Earth and Winamp fullscreen milkdrop visualizations... Awesome..

There are basically 2 things i see you can do.

1. Get the 5870 Eyefinity 6 Edition as it's probably have 2 GB of VRAM.
2. Use an EDID mask to run each monitor at 1920x1200 (5760x1200) or 1680x1050 (5040x1050)

_________________
System Core: | Intel Core i5-2500K + ASUS P8Z68-V + 16GB Corsair XMS3 DDR3 1333 MHz | Win7 x64 | MSI R7970 Lightning 3GB [1105/1400] |
Display: | 3 x Dell Ultrasharp 3007WFP-HC @ 7680x1600 | Dell u3011 |

Current Status Update :)

I installed the 9.12 Hotfix driver and then ran DoW2. I turned off AA, but left all the other settings to high. It ran FAR better (still not 100% smooth, roughly 60 FPS max and 3 FPS min on the in-game performance tool).

So I'll tweak the settings a bit and see what I can get out of it.

I can't force AA at the moment as the installation of the Hotfix driver has stopped Catalyst appearing : The driver functions ok but obviously I can't change anything :D Seems the solution is to do a full uninstall of the driver + driver clean but I'll wait a few days (as the new driver is due out soon it seems).

Stage 2 will be to do force the medium resolution for the group as well.