ATI HD4870 & HD4850 Crossfire Performance Review

Potential Issues

As with many things in life, installing Crossfire and actually getting it to run properly isn’t always a walk in the park. There may be times that you will like nothing more than to take your newly bought cards and send them for a swim in your pool. On the other hand, many of you may go through the whole driver installation process and have your cards purring along like a dream come true in no time at all. It is the vast majority of you who will encounter next to no issues of performance drop-offs but there are always the few who will experience problems through Windows problems, hardware conflicts and the odd driver issue. While the following section of this review may make it sound like there are an incredible amount of problems with Crossfire, let me put that thought to rest right away. For the most part the new 8.7 drivers run without a problem but we just wanted to give you guys a heads up regarding what may arise.

I won’t mince words with you here and hold my nose in the air while claiming the Crossfire testing went absolutely smoothly. That would be easy to do since as you probably saw in our tests, even with the direct help of ATI, we had some issues with the HD4850 cards in 3DMark Vantage due to a BIOS issue which seems to affect some very early review samples. We have direct access to ATI for trouble shooting but we don’t go running to them like sissies right away if something goes wrong. Rather, we look for a solution and if we find said solution we report it to you so you can benefit as well if faced with the same obstacles. I’m not going to pretend like nothing untoward happened throughout our experience with Crossfire since issues did pop up and you readers should know about them and the solutions we found…no matter how odd they are. Simple as that.

So, without further ado lets take a look at the some of the problems you may encounter and the solutions which may (or may not) work.


The Telltale Signs of Problems

Let’s take a look at some of the warning signs that tell you there is something wrong with your drivers or potentially your hardware. After your get any of this it is time to take a serious look at the rest of our troubleshooting section below. These are all issues we encountered during testing.


Yes, here we have the most famous of the warning messages you may get in the form of a lost device which which usually accompanied by Windows telling you that the Display Driver has just recovered from an error. This signifies a TDR (Timeout Detection Recover) or what Windows XP recognizes as a VPU Recover which means Windows has detected an error and has had to restart the driver. This could either usually signifies that there is a hardware or software problem which means the first thing you should do is check the stability of your cards. To do this you should install card each separately and run through the test in which you encountered the error the first time. If it happens again for one card and not the other it is time to start thinking about an RMA. If it doesn’t happen then it is time to do some additional Crossfire troubleshooting.

Also remember that these messages are sometimes replaced with your screen going into Standby mode if the driver cannot recover.


The next way to tell that there may be something amiss is a little bit less in-your-face than a VPU Recover message but it could be the prelude to more widespread problems in the games you play. You will see that the Catalyst AI control panel in the Catalyst Control Center (CCC) will constantly say “loading”. When we had this come to the forefront, every game would work without a problem except Crysis and Medieval II: Total War (a game I love playing but don’t benchmark anymore). This was interspersed with another issue…


As you can see, sometimes there is no Crossfire option in the CCC which can sometimes be taken care of by a simple reboot. However, we have had perfectly fine Crossfire performance without the option being available until we hit one game or another and would get some pretty glaring issues like VPU Recovers, stuttering framerates and reboots. You will also see that there is sometimes (but not always) a lack of a Crossfire option when the Catalyst AI constantly says “loading” as seen above.