Switching video cards

[Aikeedoh]

I read on another thread that this game does not work with AMD crossfire. It's a shame since I have two 6970s. If I were to swap out the graphic cards and go with Nvidia, is is just a matter of swapping the cards and install the drivers? Do I need to re-install and patch the game again?

Thanks.

[ATAG_Septic]

Hi Akeedoh,

Yes it's just a matter of swopping the cards and installing the drivers.

If money is no problem then a GTX980 or 970 is great but how does it run on one 6970?

Septic.

[Stormrider]

it can work with a crossfire setup.I had two hd radeon 6950 2GB in crossfire.I recently changed them for a ASUS STRIX-GTX980-DC2OC-4GD.The crossfire set-up was much noisier and the graphics where "different".Still nice to see but it looks better now. I definitely am glad I made the change.It was a lot of money but realy worth it.I use v-sync for my monitor so there is no big difference in fps but the gtx980 does it more easily. My crossfire setup was most of the time at around 90% GPU load and this gtx980 60% GPU load.
Switching the cards is not so difficult, uninstall all the amd software of your old card, shut down your pc, remove the old card(s) and put in the new one and install the software/drivers.But first read the manual of your graphic-card what they advice you to do with installation.They can explain it better in english then I probably ever can.:)

[BSS_Tintin]

Sir

All they say about the GTX980 is correct.
If I had the "doe" I'd buy one of those too... ;)
As it is, I don't, but I have made SLI work with my two old GTX 580's bye selecting "force Alternate Frame Rendering (AFR)" in the Nvidia config tool.
I am sure you have something similar for the ATI cards, I just don't know what it is called...
I am not saying you should not buy the GTX 980, but there is no harm in trying this out first, just to see...
If it works, you've saved a little money that you can sink into the next gtx generation, or th 8GB version of the 980 ;)
(If you want to run multiple monitors you can never have enough dedicated video RAM)

BR

BSS_Tintin

[Aikeedoh]

ATAG: one 6970 is decent. I get anywhere from 30 to near 60fps in 1920X1200, with land, building details dialed down. However I still see the occasional jerkiness when turning at low altitude.

Stormrider: How were you able to get your crossfire working? I have the latest AMD driver and msiafterburner still shows only one of the GPU is working at max, while the second GPU appears to be idle. Other game like Rise of Flight are using both GPUs.

Thanks.

[ATAG_Septic]

ATAG: one 6970 is decent. I get anywhere from 30 to near 60fps in 1920X1200, with land, building details dialed down. However I still see the occasional jerkiness when turning at low altitude.

Stormrider: How were you able to get your crossfire working? I have the latest AMD driver and msiafterburner still shows only one of the GPU is working at max, while the second GPU appears to be idle. Other game like Rise of Flight are using both GPUs.

Thanks.

Hi Aikeedoh,

I don't know how to enable Crossfire but I can confirm that SLI works in Cliffs with Nvidia. It doesn't make that much difference though, two GPU's running at around 30% instead of one at around 65% and it does introduce the odd problem with the game GUI (and for me the green smoke bug, fixed by loading a single player mission or the FMB before going multiplayer). SLI helps cope with running multiple screens I understand.

Cliffs will use up to around 2.3gb of Vram (at 1080p) if available so, I wonder whether some stuttering is caused by less Vram. SLI doesn't double the available Vram.

I also found that locking the frame-rate to 30fps smooths things out a bit and lessens the GPU load, power usage and temps.

Just a thought, on my system, using power saving for the CPU causes a few stutters. I use Park Control to keep the CPU at full Mhz while playing.(it's free from the Process Lasso peeps) here; https://bitsum.com/parkcontrol/

Septic.

[Aikeedoh]

It makes sense that both cards split the load (30% each in your case), but I wonder if you crank it up to max, will each card goes up over 50% or more? Also, seems the general consensus is that Nvidia cards are better for CoD (Not Call of Duty... :) ).

One thing I have not tried is dial it back to 1920X1080 instead of 1920X1200. I think that will help.

Off topic, have you tried Battle for Stalingrad? How is it? It looks very nice from youtube video. I'll wait until price drops a bit and there may be more user mod (may be from ATAG...) by then.

[Stormrider]

Hi Aikeedoh,
I didn't do something special to get crossfire working with Clod.I enabled it in Catalyst Control Centre, turned all the energy save settings of I could find, also in the bios.When I had afterburner monitoring I always saw the 2 GPU were used.A lot of times almost equal.Only the vram was used of one card.
For Amd/Ati cards you can use Radeonpro to finetune things for your card or force to use crossfire.It is again a tool with also monitoring functions(witch I didn't use), I personnaly think using tools for monitoring your graphic-card also cost performance, I only use it if I want to try something.
I also had/have fps drops when I dived(crashed) to the ground,I still see it sometimes.But it can say I have 5fps or less, as long as it al keeps running normal without stutters I don't care.
I don't know if they still exist but in past there where motherboards who were only capable of providing crossfire or sli, not both.
I found a screeenshot were you can see both cards are working.
15325

[Incog]

If or when you swap your cards out, you'll have to uninstall the drivers. Don't use driver removal utilities, follow this guide instead:

http://www.overclock.net/t/988215/how-to-remove-your-amd-ati-gpu-drivers

very nice for cleanly getting rid of amd drivers.