AMD Catalyst bug reports [Eyefinity / Crossfire]

[Juanlo]

A bit off-topic, but I want to share my first impressions of the Oculus Rift with you. In a nutshell: it's freaking awesome! What surprised me most is how huge are game environments. Watching the Doom 3 corridors, halls and characters at real-life scale is an overwhelming experience. It's incredible to stand in front of an NPC and realizing that he's as tall as you! Then you look down, at the floor, and you see their shoes! And if you look up, at the ceiling, you can see the pipes and lightbulbs... you really have to see it to believe it, it has nothing to do with watching in front of a monitor.

The field of view if huge. It's bigger than a scuba mask (if you have tried one), for me it's big enough to create a believable experience.

Moving your head feels very natural, just like in real life, and it helps to the immersion. And talking about immersion, the 3D effect is way better that any cinema/tv glasses I've ever tried, it's so natural that you forget you are in front of a screen. Each eye receives its own image without any tricks like shuttering or interlacing. It's so convincing that you must see it to believe it.

The first time I tried it I was standing and I felt a bit of vertigo when walking with my Xbox 360 controller, walking slowly helps. After taking a rest I played for almost two hours with no issues.

Bad things? Sure. You can see the pixels and the black spaces between them. When you have been playing for 5 minutes you forget about it, but the resolution is really low and it's difficult to appreciate details at medium and far distances. Also the display is a bit blurry when you look around.

Another small problem is the positional tracking. The Rift tracker can track roll, pitch and yaw, but it can not detect horizontal movements like getting closer or further away from the computer screen peering into something. I mean, if you move your head but don't move the Rift, it will not record it. This will probably be fixed in the consumer version and it's especially important for games where you are inside a cockpit.

In my opinion, this thing is not ready for mass market yet, but I'm sure that with a better screen and true positional tracking, it will change gaming forever.

Should you buy one? It's difficult to answer. It won't replace your current monitor(s) for gaming, but if you have the money and you are the kind of geek that loves new technologies and wants to be surprised, go for it. Anyway if you have the chance, try it. You will never forget your first time. Nothing has ever surprised me so much in my long gaming life.

Take a look at this video, because the reactions of several members of my family have been very similar:

http://www.dbtv.no/?vid=2328907978001

[HK-47]

The consumer model is supposed to have better resolution. Neat stuff I may pick one up once they release a consumer model. I have been looking at maybe buying a Sony HMZ T-2 to connect to my gaming laptop.

[Dartmaul]

During last month I suffer from a set of very annoying issues. (off course eyefinity+crossfire)

1) If I leave my PC idling for a while (actually wait until screens would be disabled for power saving (for 15min in my case)) and then would try to restore it with any move, I would get a 0x0000003b BSOD (BSOD mini-dump)

2) While returning from sleep mode (S3) PC sometimes disables 4th monitor (Dell). If I re-enable it my eyefinity would be reset. Very annoying since Dell is the primary monitor.

Also any GPU overclock would make the rig freeze and reset after 10 seconds after I press reset button, if some windowed 3D app and some movie would be opened at the same time. (but let's just focus on the 1st 2 issues)

HW config:
MOBO: RIVE 3602/4004 BIOS,
CPU: 3820 @ 4300MHz
MEM: RipjawsZ 2133 9-11-10-28 (actually mem's XMP settings)
VGA: 2 x 7970 (refference)
PSU: OCZ ZX Series 1250w
Monitors: 3 x Asus VW225N (2 of them connected to miniDP via active DP->DVI adapter, 3th one via to HDMI via HDMI-DVI adapter + OC Key) and Dell U2913WM Native dual link DVI.

(BTW I would likely to connect dell screen via DP or HDMI but here's a problem: these interfaces can detect if I disable the screen and would automatically remove it from the system resetting all desktop and resolution settings so I have to use DVI to be able to disable it while playing without issues)
The whole conception of my build is quite simple: for average tasks i use a single Dell screen keeping all other off. Use other 3 monitors configured as eyefinity massive for playing some games or when I need to open 100500 windows at the same time.


Software tested:
OS: Win7 SP1 x64 Ent (old one, and clear installed)
Drivers: 13.2/13.3beta/13.4/13.5beta
VGA BIOS: Stock and Asus test bios


Even is I just disable crossfire in CCC all issues are gone.

[Juanlo]

I have had Eyefinity issues on Windows 8 after installing 13.5 betas. Monitors disconnecting, and Eyefinity group disabling even after a simple reboot. I think something went wrong during one of my previous driver upgrades. I've reinstalled Windows 8 and everything works perfectly now, except for the displayport cable issues. I will buy the Club3D MST hub as soon as I can, hopefully it will fix my DP cable and tearing problems. But we shouldn't have to buy external hardware to fix that kind of problems.

[mob bob]

hi, i have the hd7970 in crossfire, I ran two benchmarks with 3d mark, the default setting of amd overdrive actually scored less then it being turned off. is that suppose to happen ?

pc specs- asus maximus v formula 1803 bios
intel i53570k
16gb ram
overkill psu
gigabyte hd7970 oc 3gd ver 2.1 bios 12.4 beta with the latest cap

[HK-47]

I ordered a Club3d MST 1.2 Hub. The only place I could find it was on Amazon and ships from Germany with a 1-3 week shipping time to the US. I will post my results once i receive it and test it. I am hoping this will fix the vsynch issue. Also here is the link if anyone is interested in ordering one.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CD2632M/..._26725410_item

[Juanlo]

I'm very curious to know if it fixes all DP cable problems (including the Eyefinity vsync), please let us know.

[HK-47]

The hub arrived and I have done some testing with it.

The screen tearing is gone but vsynch is still choppy with crossfire active. No other issues to report, these 2 issues is all I bought the hub for and it fixed one of them. Installation was easy and all 3 monitors were detected and available for a eyefinity display group. Also the clover leaf power cord that plugs into the power brick that came with it is a Euro style plug and will not work in the US. I used a clover leaf plug from a old dell laptop power brick and it worked fine.

If you have any questions feel free to ask.

[Agente Silva]

Hi there,

My first post here so cheers everyone. Hope I´m reporting this in the correct board...

This saturday, 15 days after purchasing my brand new rig, I had a sudden PC shutdown when playing Battlefield3 on Eyfinity 3x1 setup. Since first day I´ve been using Eyefinity and all was good... until now! I´ve red many many posts regarding Eyefinity on 7970 DC2Top issues and I think none refer to sudden shutdowns and being unable to start PC again from a normal "power button press" procedure :P. Anyway, this issue must be closely related to what has been mentioned.

I´ve tried everything to narrow the cause - booting PC with no cables attached, switching power cords, power inlet, etc... Yesterday (29-9-2013) after randomly being able to boot PC, I tried running BF3 (campaign) on only one display (DVI) - Auto detect: Ultra and High all the way, no MSAA, no HBAO, no Vsync - Game runs for 3 minutes registering 148 FPS. After this turned settings all to Ultra, MSAA 4x, Vsyn ON (to 60 hz) - obviously registering 60 FPS... 30 secs... shutdown. No BSOD, no beeps... Tried to restart PC again, no go. It simply just stays there. If I keep pressing the power button, my mouse light go off (I assume it clears all energy left in the mobo circuits). Then, if I try to start it up, PSU just flashes quickly but all system stays off. I even considered being a "power button" flaw but after reading dozens of similar issues I´m all turned to the GPU.

Specs:

Motherboard: MSI Z87-G43 GAMING
PSU: Corsair GS700
CPU: Intel Core i7 4770K
RAM: G-Skill Trident X 2x8 GB DDR3
GPU: ASUS 7970 DCII Top
HD: Samsung SSD 840 250 GB
Display: 1x Samsung S24B370; 2x Samsung S24B350
Ports on GPU: 2 x DVI; 4 x Display Port
Ports on Display: VGA; HDMI
Ports used: a) DVI ---> HDMI (on slot far from mobo); b) D-Sub --> VGA (on slot next to mobo); c) Active DP port --> DVI --> HDMI above a) using second DP slot.
Driver: I THINK I´m using CCC 13.8 (13.9 are on AMD´s page since 18/9/2013 and set up my OS in 15/9/2013)

My previous rig was running Eyefinity on a ASUS HD5850 and sometimes I had BSOD´s... to reboot PC I had to remove one DVI and DP port. After this I turned system off, connect the cables back, and reboot. System would automatically recognize all 3 display and place them unde Eyefinity good config.

My questions:

- is this graphic card malfunction or driver fail?
- is this common to ALL 7 series? (because I´m seriously considering returning the 7970 and get 2x7950)

I don´t wanna go nVidia because of Mantle

[Nodens]

You issue sounds like PSU or RAM issue. Do try another PSU if possible and Memtest86+ your RAM.

I don´t wanna go nVidia because of Mantle

I wouldn't be too excited about Mantle for several reasons:

1) With properly optimized code, you have very little to gain from direct hardware access. If a company doesn't optimize their code properly, don't expect them to actually write low level code..that would be oxymoron in itself. If A doesn't spend resources for B, don't expect them to spend double resources for B+0.1.

2) The main reason AMD is going that route is to solve the platform's inherent frame latency issues.

3) The API is open. Which means if nvidia decides to jump on this bandwagon for the public relations/marketing side of the matter (they certainly won't for performance because of point 1 and because they don't actually have frame latency issues on their latest archs), they can do so at any moment they choose to.

4) Upcomming DirectX 11.2 on Win8.1 has a few features that basically nullify the miniscule performance gain you could get from low level code.

5) OpenGL is currently the way to go, since game designers are going multiplatform (SteamOS, Steam Machine and Steam's support for Linux in general is a major factor in this).

The only real plus of Mantle is ability to do things that can't be done currently due to existing graphic API limitations but I seriously doubt any AAA developers would be jumping on this bandwagon.

But don't take my word on it, read John Carmack's tweets on the subject here: https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack