Crossfire users - BEWARE of AMD'S new "Hotfix" - You cannot enable crossfire in Elite: Dangerous

Aelemar · Jan 11, 2016

Crossfire users - BEWARE of AMD'S new "Hotfix" - You cannot enable crossfire in Elite: Dangerous

This one is for all of you guys running crossfire out there (Note, for those that don't know, the 295X2, or any card that's "X2" also uses Crossfire, since these cards are basically two-cards in one).

I installed AMD's new hotfix that supposedly fixes the Supercruise bug a couple of days ago, and yes: it indeed seems to help with the bug and Supercruise is much smoother.

However, I noticed that Crossfire no longer works in Elite: Dangerous. I run with MSI Afterburner and On-Screen Display Monitoring, and noticed that the second card never, ever ramps up.

I found that the reason for this is that AMD removed the option to "Enable AMD CrossfireX for applications that have no associated application profile" under the Crossfire menu. Since Elite: Dangerous does not have an official Crossfire profile (requiring it to be forced), it will not have crossfire under this driver. So while the Supercruise performance may have increased, those of us with crossfire might have performance issues in every other area of the game.

Additionally, these drivers seem to have been rushed out the door. Cleaning out previous drivers properly and completely purging the previous drivers (as it should be done), these drivers caused some serious issues within Windows 10 (freezes, lockups, etc). Even after removing the drivers and rolling back to an older driver, the issues persisted. The only way I managed to fix the computer was to completely reinstall Windows.

Note: I'm a computer technician and I build systems as a hobby. I know my way around a computer extremely well. So it's not like I didn't know how to properly install the drivers.

I run two R9 290X in crossfire. While one 290X can run the game perfectly fine, I have my game setup with larger textures, much higher resolution and other graphical enhancements... As such, it cannot be run on a single card.

Additionally, yes, the "hotfix" raised the Supercruise FPS from low 20s or 30s to 60 on a single card (I use V-Sync so I'm capped), running the game in crossfire has a similar effect for me (Supercruise runs fairly smooth, never lower than 50FPS). So there is not much to gain from this driver.

Just a heads up, in case anyone with Crossfire notices "strangely" low FPS. I assume not everyone uses on screen display to monitor their hardware.

Cheers!

z4StormShadow · Jan 12, 2016

Great info! Thanks posting. I've been trying to get crossfire working for two hrs.

Drelthar · Jan 12, 2016

This sucks so much

dementia · Jan 12, 2016

So glad I opted for Nvidia cards when I was building my ED super machine. I was going to get a couple of Fury X cards right up to the last moment.

Mordu · Jan 12, 2016

Thank you for the input. Any idea if AMD have been made aware of the issue?

Vingtetun · Jan 12, 2016

Small correction. That option still exists in the amd control panel.

However, with crossfire enabled, the game doesn't generate the shaders and crashes.

Frontier confirmed that it isn't supported at the moment.

avow555 · Jan 12, 2016

I guess I can delay getting a second card for the moment, thx for the heads up.

Aelemar · Jan 12, 2016

Vingtetun said:
Small correction. That option still exists in the amd control panel.

However, with crossfire enabled, the game doesn't generate the shaders and crashes.

Frontier confirmed that it isn't supported at the moment.

Not to question your input here, but are you sure you are using the hotfix? I installed-reinstalled the hotfix twice on Windows 10, reverted to Windows 10.1 (to see if it was a Windows 10 issue), and the option to force crossfire is completely gone.

I am inclined to believe that maybe you updated the drivers, but not the Catalyst Control Center (or it wasn't updated/installed correctly by the software) in which case the option from the old Catalyst Control Driver would stay, but it wouldn't work since the functionality was removed from the driver apparently (hence the crashes/issues).

irtuk · Jan 12, 2016

Slightly off topic but how do you enable enhanced textures and the other graphical eyecandy you talk about?

Aelemar · Jan 12, 2016

dementia said:
So glad I opted for Nvidia cards when I was building my ED super machine. I was going to get a couple of Fury X cards right up to the last moment.

Personally, it has nothing to do with the cards, but the drivers themselves. I have owned both Nvidia and AMD in the last few years, and each have their pros and cons. I really have no preference for either team, I only choose what's best for my money at any given time

While the Fury X cards are all nice and such, I really don't feel like upgrading. First of all, HBM memory is a new technology, and if anyone remembers what happened when AMD released the first cards with GDDR4 memory, they were plagued with serious issues for months. Secondly, memory performance aside (HBM is obviously superior to GDDR5), the performance difference between the R9 290X and the Fury X does not warrant the cost (at least on paper).

From my many years building systems, this is what I have concluded from the green and the red team:

AMD is really, really good at building hardware (GPUs only, although they suck at cooling for their reference cards) When it comes to raw horsepower, their GPUs are top of the line. It should be noted that AMD seems to like innovating, which is something I actually like about them. They were the first to venture into the GDDR4 video memory, and were the first to venture into GDDR5. They were using GDDR5 video memory for months while Nvidia still was stuck with GDDR3. The other thing I like about them is their price points are usually at a good level. (When 290X came out for around $600, it trumped a a couple of Nvidias top of the line cards, including the Titan which was priced around $1000)

However, AMD are really bad at making their drivers. I would say that maybe 1 our of 5 driver releases is actually great, while the rest are simply "meh". They can be really slow at addressing issues as well. The Catalyst Control Center can only dream to have as much flexibility and features as Nvidias counterpart.

Nvidia makes fairly good hardware, and I have to say cooling on their reference cards is miles ahead of AMD. Their reference coolers are pretty darn good. I also love the way their cards look, stylish and polished. Nvidia is really good at making their drivers, and I have to admit I absolutely love the Nvidia Control Panel. So many options, so much control over every little detail. Nvidia seems to be on pretty good at addressing issues as well. Because of their usually great drivers, they can get a lot of their cards to perform as well as AMD cards that would normally be superior, based on specs.

Nvidia however, has a tendency to greatly overprice their cards. When comparing apples to apples, you can usually get similar performance for quite a few bucks less from AMD. Something that I also dislike about Nvidia is their tendency to "rebrand" old video cards and sell them as "new" video cards. AMD has done this, but not to the extent that Nvidia has. (Remember the 9800GTs, which were basically 8800GTs with higher clock speeds?)

Like I said, I usually just get the best I can for the money. I used to have the GTX 680 (2 of them), then moved on to AMDs 290Xs on release, and who knows? Maybe my next upgrade will be Nvidia.

Aelemar · Jan 12, 2016

irtuk said:
Slightly off topic but how do you enable enhanced textures and the other graphical eyecandy you talk about?

I actually made a post about it, you can read about it here:

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=218831

I apologize, my comparison videos are not working for whatever obscure reason (maybe I need to re-upload?), but let's just say that my game looks even better than ObsidianAnt's

My settings in a nutshell:

Everything Ultra
Planet texture size 8192 (instead of the default 2560)
Environment Textures 4096 (twice the default)
All effects and quality settings at 3 (there is 1-3, but even when you put Ultra in game, some settings are left at 2 in the configuration file. To get true ultra, you have to manually set the settings to 3 in the file)
I'm using AMD Virtual Super Resolution: So while I am playing on my 65" 1920x1080 TV (you can see some pixels hehe on such a huge screen), with VSS I'm rendering the game at 3200x1800 then compressing the image down to 1920x1080. This results in absolutely no pixels, and I can even turn Anti aliasing off.

There are some other things I changed which I don't remember. Just check out the thread XD I will re-upload my videos sometime so you can see what it looks like.

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avow555 said:
I guess I can delay getting a second card for the moment, thx for the heads up.

You don't necessarily have to delay. Just use the drivers from December 17. They are working pretty well for me, and even in Supercruise FPS is pretty good due to crossfire.

AMD will come around to fixing these drivers and even add a profile for Elite at some point.

Justor · Jan 12, 2016

Vingtetun said:
Small correction. That option still exists in the amd control panel.

However, with crossfire enabled, the game doesn't generate the shaders and crashes.

Frontier confirmed that it isn't supported at the moment.

So it looks like it is not AMD this time, looks like Frontier doesn't support the feature it at the time. I can say that my R9 290 runs great, even where there was the super cruise bug, I only saw it a couple of times. I have used both cards Nvidia and AMD over the years, I can say unlike what most fanboys think, AMD is not the only one that has put out a bad driver. I have had Nvidia screw up a game and had to roll back drivers to play.

There is a lot of complexity with engineering the drivers and software, so some times S@#T happens, I am sure AMD and Frontier will get the problem solved over time, make sure to submit a ticket to FD and AMD on the issue.

Vingtetun · Jan 12, 2016

Aelemar said:
Not to question your input here, but are you sure you are using the hotfix? I installed-reinstalled the hotfix twice on Windows 10, reverted to Windows 10.1 (to see if it was a Windows 10 issue), and the option to force crossfire is completely gone.

I am inclined to believe that maybe you updated the drivers, but not the Catalyst Control Center (or it wasn't updated/installed correctly by the software) in which case the option from the old Catalyst Control Driver would stay, but it wouldn't work since the functionality was removed from the driver apparently (hence the crashes/issues).

Yup. Hotfix is there.

Aelemar · Jan 12, 2016

Vingtetun said:
Yup. Hotfix is there.

That my friend, is weird

Very weird!

Out of curiosity, what Windows are you running?

rogue221 · Jan 21, 2016

I too can confirm this. I never had the supercruise bug because when I used the Force crossfire option, the game gave me no issues at all. I only had it if I disabled crossfire. I wish I hadn't bother updating to 16.1. I may even go back to the previous driver. I don't know how but crossfire worked and gave me a decent boost on my 7990. No issues landing on planets or supercruise. I ran the sim with VSR enabled at 1440p maxed with no AA.

My rig is nothing special:
Intel I5 4690k @ 4.2 GHZ with H100i Cooler
AMD gigabyte 7990 6GB @ stock clocks
Gigabyte Gaming GT Z97X
16 GB of corsair dominator DDR 3 2400MHZ
Asus Xonar Essence STX sound card
Corsair 1200 watt PSU
Rosewell Blackhawk ultra enclosure
Windows 10 Home 64 bit

Juris · Jan 21, 2016

Just want to add a couple of things. I was using Crossfire on my 295x2 pre-Horizons and getting 90-120fps odd. Since Horizons fps performance almost halved to 45-70fps but both GPU's seemed to still be running 100% (using MSI Afterburner overlay) so I thought it was just a crappy Horizons 2.0 launch which FD have stated wasn't scaling as well as Nvidia SLI. A week ago Crossfire stopped working on both 11.1 and 12 drivers (checked with GPU-Z and reflected in temps) and I do not know why but the fps stayed the same. Seems as if both GPU's were somehow just duplicating the workload but not translating it into framerate on screen. I'm now on 16.1 running without Crossfire getting 45-70fps depending on location (30-40fps on some planets).

Regards upgrading to 16.1 if you do a straight upgrade from a previous driver and it works for you great but do not use DDU (even the latest one) to remove the former driver and upgrade. It does not work and leaves remnant files behind causing serious issues. Use the AMD Clean Uninstall Utility instead http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/AMD-Clean-Uninstall-Utility.aspx. I spent days trying to sort this out (its worse when you have 6 screens with 3 on an MST hub) before ACUU sorted things out. If you have more than 1 monitor remember after running ACCU and installing 16.1 you may need to re-enable those additional monitors in Radeon additional settings. They will not show up in the Crimson main interface.

rogue221 · Jan 24, 2016

Juris, this was my biggest mistake. I used DDU on 15.1 and installed 16.1. So I cleared it out and went back to 15.11 but the damage was done because even in those the option was gone. I think I may have to go back to a non crimson driver to get it working again then just install 16.1 over it.

What a shame, I should have never even bothered with 16.1 in the first place, I never had the SC bug and I had solid 60FPS in ED with vsync on. If it ain't broke don't fix it.

Noddie · Jan 24, 2016

I bought my AMD gpu a few days before the second version elite manual came out with Nvidia branding. If I'd seen that first, I would have bought nvidia.

Joe nose · Jan 25, 2016

Juris said:
?...A week ago Crossfire stopped working on both 11.1 and 12 drivers (checked with GPU-Z and reflected in temps) and I do not know why but the fps stayed the same. Seems as if both GPU's were somehow just duplicating the workload but not translating it into framerate on screen. I'm now on 16.1 running without Crossfire getting 45-70fps depending on location (30-40fps on some planets)

Afterburner does not correctly report clock speeds when I disable crossfire on my R9 295X2, both gpu utilisation percentages stay the same. The reason your FPS stayed the same, I would have thought, is because crossfire scaling is so bad without the dedicated AMD profile. I see no FPS benefit with crossfire enabled in elite, and never have had.

Fortunately, even at 4k, single gpu mode works well with a few settings turned down a notch.

Aelemar · Jan 25, 2016

rogue221 said:
Juris, this was my biggest mistake. I used DDU on 15.1 and installed 16.1. So I cleared it out and went back to 15.11 but the damage was done because even in those the option was gone. I think I may have to go back to a non crimson driver to get it working again then just install 16.1 over it.

What a shame, I should have never even bothered with 16.1 in the first place, I never had the SC bug and I had solid 60FPS in ED with vsync on. If it ain't broke don't fix it.

I had the same issue as you. I didn't use DDU, I used the AMD Cleanup Tool, and then used Driver Fusion (previously driver cleaner). 16.1 removed the force crossfire option, and even reinstalling the older driver did not fix the issue.

For me, after a few hours of meddling with it, reinstalling Windows was the only solution.

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Joe nose said:
Afterburner does not correctly report clock speeds when I disable crossfire on my R9 295X2, both gpu utilisation percentages stay the same. The reason your FPS stayed the same, I would have thought, is because crossfire scaling is so bad without the dedicated AMD profile. I see no FPS benefit with crossfire enabled in elite, and never have had.

Fortunately, even at 4k, single gpu mode works well with a few settings turned down a notch.

That's very strange. With crossfire enabled my FPS almost doubles in all instances of the game, and that is with some extreme manual settings applied (editing the Graphics Config manually). Are you using the "Optimize 1x1" option on crossfire? The other options don't work at all.

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Noddie said:
I bought my AMD gpu a few days before the second version elite manual came out with Nvidia branding. If I'd seen that first, I would have bought nvidia.

Even if Elite is the only game you play (which I doubt), don't worry so much about getting AMD over Nvidia. The only issue at hand here is AMD releasing a faulty driver, but on a single R9 290X, and some extreme graphics settings, Elite still runs brilliantly, equally well as it would run on Nvidia's newest cards. The performance on these AMD cards is good enough that I still don't see a need to upgrade to the newer cards (performance difference is negligible).

So like I said, don't worry about it. You made a good choice and AMD cards are known to perform better than Nvidia in Direct Compute (Computer Shaders).

Which AMD card did you get?