Massman Posted December 4, 2011 Share Posted December 4, 2011 Just a heads up for everyone who's playing AMD VGA multi-GPU and doesn't have good results. 1) Play with the tesselation level in the Catalyst driver 2) Disable System Info scanning under help tab. 3) Re-run, re-run, re-run. The first option is something everyone probably already knows about. Just for reference, you might want to read this thread: http://hwbot.org/forum/showthread.php?t=17844. The second one is something that hasn't been discussed much before; only saw a thread about it on the Futuremark forums (click). Basically, with AMD crossfire multi-GPU the combined test will get a serious hit if you enable System Scan. On this SB-E setup, the score went down from ~11K to ~7K, which is a pretty big difference. By disabling system info, you won't be able to get your scores verified in the ORB Hall of Fame ... but adjusting Tesselation prevented you from doing that anyways, so who cares . The third remark is something I noticed after disabling System Info. It seems that GT1 is especially 'buggy' on this 4x 6970 setup fluctuating between 95FPS and 103FPS. You should be able to quickly see if it's a good or a bad run, though ... so shouldn't be too difficult. Underneath, two screenshots displaying the effects 2) and 3). You can see that I gained almost 3k points in Combined by disabling system info, but I lost ~6FPS in GT1 (even with increased frequencies). If you re-run enough, you will get a normal GT1 again: Another example of good vs bad GT1 run: 20418 with 95.83FPS, 20634 with 103.68FPS. Just a heads up ... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Christian Ney Posted December 5, 2011 Share Posted December 5, 2011 Many thanks for sharing Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hondacity Posted December 5, 2011 Share Posted December 5, 2011 (edited) arigato gosaimazu! Edited December 5, 2011 by Hondacity Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
OLDcomer Posted December 5, 2011 Share Posted December 5, 2011 (edited) I hate this benchmark. My pain is GT4. In most cases I get really poor results with 2xHD5970 in this particular test. With my old Core i7 960 re-runing enough times eventually brings me a normal score but now with my Xeon W3670 I have no success. Combined score is another pain but playing with System Info check box and re-runing enough times bring decent score. I will try playing with the tesselation level. Edited December 5, 2011 by OLDcomer Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Massman Posted December 5, 2011 Author Share Posted December 5, 2011 Test setup: - i7 3930k @ 4500 - MSI 6970 Lighting x4 - Rampage 4 extreme - 4x 2GB GTX8 - all air Okay, so wtf is going on ... seems like you get screwed over when running AMD, LOL! Yellow indicates the score you get when running SI enabled. For each configuration, SI detects the amount of GPUs correctly. Fyi, it doesn't matter how much GPUs I select in 3DMark11 with crossfire enabled, I always get ~40% load on all cards in combined. So, it's not like you get the bad scores because some GPUs aren't under load. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Crew Turrican Posted December 5, 2011 Crew Share Posted December 5, 2011 interesting, thx for sharing. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
OLDcomer Posted December 5, 2011 Share Posted December 5, 2011 Wow, I finally managed to obtain decent GT4 score on my W3670. Re-run and you'll succeed Feel my pain: Poor GT4 score: Decent GT4 score: SysInfo Disabled, default tesselation level Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FM_Jarnis Posted December 14, 2011 Share Posted December 14, 2011 (edited) Be advised that any run with SystemInfo disabled produces incorrect results from Combined Test with multi-GPU setups. The benchmark needs to know the number of GPUs for that test. The issues you are seeing with 3+ Radeon GPUs in this test are due to AMD driver issues. We've told them, they have so far disregarded the issue. Sorry, out of our hands. The result from SI-disabled, while the score seems great, it is meaningless. The benchmark doesn't do the same workload that it would do with SI enabled (or with SI enabled SLI run). Edited December 14, 2011 by FM_Jarnis Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Masterchief79 Posted December 14, 2011 Share Posted December 14, 2011 Is this only matter of fact with multi-GPU setups or do you have a chance to get higher results with single cards also? Did a 5870 Lightning last weekend so would be interesting to know^^ About P7100 single gpu with disabled tessellation in CCC. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FM_Jarnis Posted December 14, 2011 Share Posted December 14, 2011 Disabled Tessellation invalidates the score on any configuration. You are effectively telling the driver to skip work that the benchmark requests it to do. You can do so, but the score is meaningless. Naturally up to you under what "rules" you benchmark. I'm talking about FM hall of fame and the result being flagged in 3dmark.com result browser. Just disabling SI affects the score only on multi-GPU configurations (and only with Combined Test). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Massman Posted December 14, 2011 Author Share Posted December 14, 2011 If disabling SI makes the result meaningless because of policy and enabling SI makes the result meaningless because of driver issue ... ... how can I obtain a meaningful 4xCF 3DMark11 result? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FM_Jarnis Posted December 14, 2011 Share Posted December 14, 2011 If disabling SI makes the result meaningless because of policy and enabling SI makes the result meaningless because of driver issue ... ... how can I obtain a meaningful 4xCF 3DMark11 result? Ask AMD? Currently FM has no solution for this problem and the issue is within the video drivers. We have told AMD this (several times) and can only wait for them to correct the issue. All Single GPU configurations work 2 GPU Crossfire works SLI with 2, 3 and 4 GPUs works Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
OLDcomer Posted December 14, 2011 Share Posted December 14, 2011 (edited) @FM_Jarnis: And what about GT4 and my problem? Check the GPU usage in the first and second image which I provided above. It is very annoying. Edited December 14, 2011 by OLDcomer Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Massman Posted December 14, 2011 Author Share Posted December 14, 2011 Why is 2xCF scoring higher in physics when 1GPU is selected than in auto/2GPU ? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FM_Jarnis Posted December 14, 2011 Share Posted December 14, 2011 Physics? Or Combined? That number-of-GPUs-switch / SI enabled should not affect any other test except Combined Test. In combined test if the switch is set to something other than the actual GPU count (or auto, as per what SI detects), yes the score changes because the test workload is different. GPU count determines how many copies of the GPU physics simulation is spawned. Normally there should be a copy of the simulation running on each individual GPU (to eliminate cross-GPU data traffic on physics simulation state). The whole "GPU physics using DirectCompute" is fairly complicated issue on multi-GPU setups. In any case, AMD just released new drivers and we're going to investigate in-house if anything has changed with either of them (11.12 or the 12.1 preview drivers) and will bug AMD again if there are still issues. I've also suggested internally that FM should make a full ("lots of big technical words") disclosure on this specific issue - we'll see if it can be made happen. Could explain exactly what is going on. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FM_Jarnis Posted December 14, 2011 Share Posted December 14, 2011 @FM_Jarnis:And what about GT4 and my problem? Check the GPU usage in the first and second image which I provided above. It is very annoying. Sorry, no idea. It would appear that for some reason the GPU isn't fully stressed on GT4 on some runs. As every run asks the driver to do exact same things, I can only summarize that there is something funky going on with the drivers. We have not seen this kind of effect in-house and considering the thousands of runs the benchmark went through during pre-launch verification testing, this kind of massive score disparity randomly on some runs would have stood out like a big flashing beacon. So I'm fairly certain that this is not a 3DMark 11 bug, but an issue with the rest of the system doing what 3DMark 11 asks it to do during the benchmark run. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dinos22 Posted December 14, 2011 Share Posted December 14, 2011 what boards have you tested other than R4E? Does UD7 score the same physix? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Massman Posted December 16, 2011 Author Share Posted December 16, 2011 @ Jarnis: Yes, combined, sorry. @ Dino: tested both R4E and UD7 - same problem in combined. Physics a different problem on X79 ... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Massman Posted February 1, 2012 Author Share Posted February 1, 2012 The current decision is to not approve the existing 7900 drivers during this contest, so it now looks like AMD Radeon HD 7900 series cards will not be able to enter this contest. ~ http://futuremark.yougamers.com/forum/showthread.php?162091-ASRock-Overclock-King-Global-OC-competition&p=1656330&viewfull=1#post1656330 Heh, seems like the Radeon cards are not supposed to be approved Perhaps in April. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hazzan Posted February 1, 2012 Share Posted February 1, 2012 Heh, seems like the Radeon cards are not supposed to be approved Perhaps in April. soo lightning 580 still power full heh........ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FM_Jarnis Posted February 6, 2012 Share Posted February 6, 2012 (edited) Heh, seems like the Radeon cards are not supposed to be approved Perhaps in April. No, this is purely due to no combined AMD driver available. We do not approve beta drivers. 12.1 will be approved this week. It doesn't support 7xxx series, so... Edit: Also note that GTX 560Ti experienced exact same issue. Edited February 7, 2012 by FM_Jarnis Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hondacity Posted February 6, 2012 Share Posted February 6, 2012 (edited) thanks for the update amd is slow on efficiency and internet lol Edited February 6, 2012 by Hondacity Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FM_Jarnis Posted February 8, 2012 Share Posted February 8, 2012 Just FYI, Catalyst 12.1 is now approved. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hiwa Posted February 8, 2012 Share Posted February 8, 2012 well the 12.3 supports HD7XXX is beta too so no approved for them.... maybe AMD will make final when we bench kepler Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cyclone Posted July 18, 2012 Share Posted July 18, 2012 Wow! Great for those newbies and noobies (like me:) ready to play with 3- & 4-cross Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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