Slower performance in crossfire mode

[melonpaste]

Specs in the thing-thing at the top right.

When I play games, performance is actually reduced. It was slightly improved when I overclocked to ~3.7ghz but a single GPU is by-far superior in performance still.

Games I play:

ARMA II
Many source games. In TF2, crossfire mode actually causes a stutter which makes the game almost unplayable. CSS is fine.
The Stalker series cause a stutter too (Doesn't surprise me though).

CF only seems to improve performance in Shogun 2 and Empire Total War.

Perhaps my processor isn't clocked enough and it is bottlenecking my GPU's?

Or perhaps the games I mentioned don't really use multi-GPU setups? I have tried stuff like testing one card at once and different drivers and profiles. Nothing too noticeable in performance, though.

Thanks in advance

[JJThomp]

It is micro-stutters caused by crossfire. You can't really fix this, you should be able to play most of those games on high without crossfire anyways. The CF drivers for the 58xx series are not great, but even high 6950 and 6970 (as well as their nvidia counterparts) have this issue.

[yamawho]

I tried crossfire last year with 2 HD4870's ... what a waste of time.
Lower FPS than with a single card.

Ended up getting a GTX570 in the end.

[melonpaste]

Originally Posted by yamawho

I tried crossfire last year with 2 HD4870's ... what a waste of time.
Lower FPS than with a single card.

Ended up getting a GTX570 in the end.

And money

I could of invested in a better, single card. But now I'm stuck with this extra one that doesn't serve me any good.

[JD]

I experienced similar issues with Crossfire too (dual HD5870s). I think it's mainly to do with drivers and the lack of support for games. Not too many games are sponsored by AMD/ATI so I think that's why Crossfire never quite works right as most games are geared towards NVIDIA. I know it shouldn't matter, but it seems to.

Ended up buying a GTX580 a few months later and haven't looked back. It was an expensive "mistake" but it seems single-card is still the way to go these days.