[B.0]Horrible Crossfire Performance

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Hi.
Speccs:
i7 860@4Ghz HT On
ASUS HD5970
8 GB 1600 Mhz Cl8 RAM (Corsair Vengeance)
ASUS P6P55D Deluxe Mobo
Game running of an old gen-2 Intel SSD.

I seem to get lower FPS in the beta, FPS dropped to 70-80 while playing InstaGib with like 20 players on the server. Since I've got a 120Hz monitor this feels extremely sluggish and laggy, and I also get tons of more mouse delay (lag). The reason behind this is probably the horrible crossfire perfomance, my cards chill at around 40% usage, even though my FPS doesn't reach the 125 FPS cap. Have you talked to AMD about making Crossfire profiles for the game? Doesn't matter if it's beta, they do it anyway if the game is popular enough.

Anyone tried tweaking it with Radeon Pro, renaming the SM .exe etc.? Tried a bit in alpha, but couldn't really get any noticeable boost from it.

Thanks.

[jonthekiller]

It's a problem from ATI Drivers, try to disable the Crossfire.

[rctcool0]

Ah. I used to have the 5970. You should be able to tweak the settings a bit to get a performance boost, but I cannot guarantee 120 fps.

First, the CPU/GPU sync for this card should be set on 2 frames. I had the best results for this.
Next, Aniso needs to be set at x16 but not x16 everywhere.
Set water reflections to max, but put bloom on medium. You can try high, but I think it looks bad. Too shiny.
Make sure the blur is on its default setting (0.25 i believe)
I think you can also enable FXAA.

Now you need to adjust the display sync, which this should be the biggie. When i tried maxed out display sync and instant CPU/GPU, the lag was so bad that my keyboard took almost a second to respond to input. The lower this setting is, the more fps you should get, HOWEVER, it may look a bit choppy. Also, if you get a message that says Crossfire is not enabled, you can enable it with a rename of the .exe file( rename the maniaplanet.exe to AFR_Friendly.exe), however, keep in mind that I had microstuttering problems in TM2 with crossfire enabled.

EDIT: More info on the sync settings:
http://forum.maniaplanet.com/viewtopic. ... =0#p107295

Good luck, and I hope this helps at least a little bit. Also, if I may ask, what PSU wattage do you have?

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Edited the app profile in Catalyst CP to set the crossfire to AFR friendly and it seemed more smooth, I usually have 125 FPS now (capped). I use 1 Frame synchro though, but I'll try 2.

[Knutselmaaster]

I have the same problems, 2x 6870.
Indeed the CPU/GPU sync for this card should be set on 2 frame, it really makes a big difference for me.
Also, using the ingame AF setting seems to be better than overriding in the control panel.
What i saw with my old config (2x4850) in all Nadeo games, and in a less noticable way on my actual config, is that the shader settings maxed out has a huge influence on performance, the 2nd best setting doubled my framerate on the 4850s and gives me an average of about +30%, but much more stable, on my 6870s.
If you download the Catalyst application profiles, there is a ManiaPlanet profile, but i get awful results with it, both in speed as in quality.
Luckily the shadow calculation in ManiaPlanet does not bug with crossfire, as it does in TMF.
I play on one card at the moment, i get the same speed, but more stable.
Hopefully i will be able to use the potential of my both cards, as it makes me regret my investment at the moment.
By the way, shadow calculations do seem to get a decent speed boost when using crossfire.

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I've got 125 fps in Elite, but on public storm with more players and bigger maps my FPS drops like a dead fish. Tried all the crossfire options in catalyst, and none of them really do any better. Disabling Crossfire didn't help at all, the one card still didn't max at 100% and I got way lower fps. Maybe change the .exe filename and force another profile would work, but not sure which one I should force. Anyone got any other ideas? I'm running almost everything at lowest when it comes to graphics.

[Knutselmaaster]

Online the fps depends on the server and your connection.
To test your real performance you should always play offline, or maybe on a lan.
If you play on a big, full server, your fps drops, no matter what settings/cards.
I had 15 fps yesterday on an 80 slots, almost full server but still it ran rather smooth, smooth enough to play comfortably anyway...

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Ye, that's a good point. The problem however is still the bad GPU usage. Normally I'd say it would be a CPU bottleneck, but since it's running at 4 GHz that really shouldn't be an issue. Hyperthreading doesn't seem to work with Shootmania though, but I guess it doesn't really matter since it only utilizes a tiny percentage of the CPU anyway.

EDIT: Did a complete driver reinstall and installed only the new 12.7 Beta AMD drivers and now (ony my own offline server) I have 99% utilization on both cards, and tons of fps :O
EDIT2: Tried online again, and with 30 players on a server the same problem kicks in. Down to ~30% on each card and lower than 100 FPS at all times. I guess I can't do anything with this though