Crossfire causing frame drop and stuttering in large multiplayer matches. One card works perfect!
I'm goint to try my best to describe exactly what I'm experiencing in hopes to give you accurate information. First, here are my specs:
AMD FX 8350
Corsair H80i
Asus M5 A99FX Pro R2.0
8GB Patriot Viper Extreme DDR3 1600
2x Asus R9 280X DC2T-3GD5 in crossfire
Samsung 840 250GB SSD
Cooler Master V1000 PSU
Cooler Master HAF X case
Asus VG248QE 144hz monitor in1080p
Battlefied settings: Ultra preset, 1080p @144hz (yes catalyst is set to this as well for my desktop), 100% scale, Vsync OFF,
Okay, here we go. I jumped back into playing BF4 last month after adding the second video card and enabling crossfire and downloading the new expansion packs. (I hadn't played in a few months). I immediately noticed that the frame rate would randomly drop during the game, and the longer I played, the worse it got. After hours of trying different things from installing the latest drivers to reinstalling the entire game, I decided to see what happened if I went back to one card. With only one of the cards installed, the game runs perfect at 1080p on ultra and hovers around 70-90 fps with smooth and fluid gameplay even on full 64 player servers. If I enable crossfire and join a large game, it goes in the toilet. For example, about an hour ago I was playing with crossfire in Metro on a 64 player server. The game started with around 20 players total. At this time, I was actually getting between 160-200 fps on ultra! As the game progressed and more players joined the round, my fps fell. Mind you, I was monitoring the temps of both the CPU and the GPU's and both were fine. (CPU 56C and GPU's around 65C) By the end of the round, we had 40-50 players and my frame rate was around 80fps and dipping to the 20's intermittently. Sometimes, I would even get half second pauses in gameplay that immobilized me making the game absolutely unplayable. One thing I have noticed; with one card my GPU usage is 99% and my CPU usage is maybe 50-60% spread across almost all eight cores. With crossfire, both GPU's only use 50-60% but my CPU is around 90% across all eight cores. I've tried overclocking the CPU to 4.4Ghz but it doesn't help. Maybe the FX8350 is a bottleneck? My mobo has dual PCIE 16x slots for crossfire and I've tried this with both Direct X and Mantle but get the same results. I've even tried disabling ULPS! I also have TW Cable Ultimate which is 100Mb down and my roomate doesn't have this proble at all (just to rule out ping). By the way, this is the only game I have an issue with when using crossfire. If anyone has any ideas, please let me know. I'm losing my mind. Especially after buying another R9 280X only to lose performance on such a "big budget" game. Not to mention with premium this game has cost myself and many others a nice chunk of change yet still doesn't work right. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
