what in the world are you talking about? All of what you said utterly no sense.. you totally ignoring that SLI is having identical issues or what? Nvidia is garbage too by your logic.. so what are you going to do.. buy an intel i series cpu and use the intel HD Graphics? or backtrack to a Power VR Kyro 2?

These drivers are great for me, im getting between 35 and 45 fps on my crappy HD 6570 at 1920 x 1080.

These problems are more with the game than it is the drivers crossfire will still be bottlenecked by the CPU.

Have ATI right now... first time I bought their cards, and last time I ever will.

i paid $90 for my ati 5770

runs the game on very high with no probs and when the game supports crossfire ill be able to run ultra ultra

ur claim is incoorect and has no factual basis

This. I get absolutely no difference in performance when running crossfire or not. Exactly the same. The issue is on Bethesda's end.

Running two 6990's and always 60fps except for weird drops down to 25-30 in some cities sometimes. Crossfire or not it's the same.

Working fine here, no bugs, no CTD, no stutter ever, getting 40-80 FPS inside/outside. About the same performance as 11.11 + the atiumdag.dll

Agree. Nividia way too overpirced and also having many problems with sli in this game.

It's a cap we need for CF not new drivers. Where does it say (officialy) that Crossfire should now work?

Whats the atiumdag.dll do ??

It makes fire look like black blobs...

Sorry couldn't edit above post.

Here's what 11.11b did to my game: http://youtu.be/YZoHA68y8a0

Loving these drivers for my dual 2gb 6950's.
They eliminated the negative scaling when i enable x-fire.

Although they didnt necessarily increase my fps, they allowed me to run AA with no performance hit over 11.11a drivers with no AA and no x-fire.

I get a pretty consistent 60fps on my rig with a few dips, like standing at the top of the Dragonsreach steps looking over Whiterun i drop to like 43 - 44fps.

So here are my MINIMUM fps when standing at the top of Dragonsreach steps looking over Whiterun.
11.11a - X-fire Disabled / no AA - Min Fps - 43.3 GPU 1 usage - 50% / GPU 2 usage - 0%
11.11b - x-fire Disabled / no AA - Min Fps - 44.3 GPU 1 usage - 50% / GPU 2 usage - 0%
11.11b - x-fire Disabled / 4X AA - Min Fps - 38.4 GPU 1 Usage - 66% / GPU 2 usage - 0%
11.11b - x-fire Enabled / 4X AA - Min Fps - 44.6 GPU 1 usage - 38% / Gpu 2 usage - 38%

EDIT:
Guess i should add my settings.
My rig 2600k @ 4.6ghz / 16gb DDR3 / two 2gb 6950's x-fire / Win7 64bit / Asus P8Z68-V Pro

Settings in game launcher are on ULTRA with the exception of the following.
1920x1080
AA - 4 Samples
Aniso - Off
FXAA - Enabled
Shadow Detail - High
Radial Blur - low (simply because i hate it!)
Everything else on the ultra settings.

Settings in CCC are all defaults except for Aniso which is set at 16x

I used the ingame AA because it worked better than forcing it through CCC on my rig.
If i force it through CCC i get weird stuff like posted above, so i use the ingame AA and it not only looks better, it performs better for me also.

I get the same FPS with a single 4870 and a single 6870. I can also drop the resolution from 1920x1080 to 1280x720 and still get the exact same values.

That means it's not the graphics card that is the problem. It's the CPU. Something in that spot needs lots of CPU cycles.

That's because the game is locked at 60fps. You can edit the ini file to remove it though and you'll see your fps's go way up in some places. I'm running 6950's with one of the cards disabled and it's usually around 60, but sometimes it fluctuates up to 180, but also dips into the 40's.

I agree, hopefully that can be fixed in a patch.

I still got fps drops when i enable AA to also stress the GPU as well as the CPU in that spot though, so the x-fire support helped with the settings that stress the GPU.

As far as what stresses the CPU, i'm imagining its because of calculating all the shadows, npcs etc...etc.. in that spot, so no video driver will fix that for us.

looking at my specs below..... there is no way i'm running low on cpu power.... i'm well aware that the game scales very well with cpus.... nor should i have problems with dual/triple card crossfire as I've got pci-ex 3.0 support with 16x lanes per card......

if they can get crossfire fixed up.. we'll be saling.

I have been an Ati man ever since day 1,and thats a lot of years,was always the cheaper and better way to go due to drivers,BUT this game simply would not take a hd 6870.
come t think of it i have had these problems with most of the later games,same old crash to black "no signal" or error report.
the constant random point crashing and brain frazzling graphical errors.

then i went and bought a cheapo ￡40 nvidia 520 to finally check if it is the actual card thats at fault.

and VOILA!,
24 hours stress testing and theres not been a single crash

I think me and Ati/Amd will finally part ways now,time to put the 3 month old His hd6870 icqx on ebay and start with nvidia cards.
i dont know if Amd are going broke and cant pay for decent driver writers,but its just too stressful waiting months for them to fix these issues.

been great Ati,saved me a lot of money over the years,but i need my fix.

So on legitreviews about the 11.11b drivers it's stated:

http://legitreviews.com/news/11927/

Meaning apparently this driver brings Skyrim improvements only for the AMD 6xxx series.

However, on http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/catalyst-1111b-performance.aspx nothing about this is mentioned?

So you have had little to no problems with your card for how many years.. then you recently have a bad experience.... don't bother changing the card maybe due to it being faulty...... and think ATI has gone to hell?

really?

Meanwhile people with NVidia cards have been experiencing the same issues with crashes/overheating/failures in all the same magnitudes that other people with ati have had....

There isn't anything wrong with the official WHQL 11.11's..... fact they are damn stable...

The only people having problems generally are due to just a bad video card.. which happens to all manufacturers and companies.. and some manufacturers have factory overclocked them which ran other games fine.. but skyrim is no generalized graphical pig.... it's a serious gpu demanding game among cpu and other parts of the system.. stresses it all..

Yes there is.

No it doesn't. Skyrim only really uses two CPU cores. Read this:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/skyrim-performance-benchmark,3074-9.html

Raw core speed is important. That means it runs better with only two high-clocked cores that four lower-clocked ones.

I already mentioned above that switching from 1920x1080 to 1280x720 doesn't help in the least. So how is CF/SLI going to help in this situation?

Strange considering my CPU utilization at high resolutions crosses 3 cores, and manages to peg them very well.. Then again toms hardware didn't really dive to deeply into the multi core solutions aside from showing off the AMD solutions which all shows no scaling.. where as there is a clear and most definite difference between a i3's dual core and an i5's quad results....

Just because Toms showed or said "doesn't appear to be" doesn't make it true.. there is activity on the other cores.. even if they are say running at 25-45% load on each of them.... it's still balancing across the other cores..

And what I've determined.. is that i'm running out of GPU power at this point in time, slapping a 6970 2gb in the machine results in a massive boost in FPS..... but it can most definitely go higher yet...

For you switching from 1920x1080 doesn't change anything.. .sorry about that..

for me switching from 3240x1920 to 1920x1080 gives a huge boost..... mostly doubling my frame rate, dropping down to 1280x720 has an effect.. but it's not nearly as clear....

Strange as it seems,yes i am ditching Ati due to the reasons you also state.
building systems for over 20 years,so i know when its a driver issue or a games developer/driver writer not doing the diligence.


its simply logic.

the latest games wont run on my Ati

i swap the Ati for a cheapo nvidia and everything works


you see i went through all this "promised driver fixes" with oblivion,Ac,rage,and practically every other new engined game.

and no fix ever comes.

whatever the reason,i am sick of it.
so........
the logical thing is to jump ship.

at my age i can testify to one certainty..
stress is a silent killer and games should not cause stress,and trying to get the HD6870 to work was soooooo stressful.

Heard of a lot of problems with that HIS card. I myself am using an XFX Radeon 6870 1GB, and have had zero crashes or freezes. Huh, might not be the fault of AMD after all.

Note: Not saying they are innocent, just stating my experience. Also I am using an AMD phenom IIx4 980. Again, AMD haven't failed me there.

How do you tell that with Windows moving the threads between cores multiple times per second? This results in all cores showing activity, but what happens is that only two of them are stressed by the game at any given time.

The cores differ. (Lower cache mostly.) Look at the AMD CPU results. No difference between X2, X3 and X4. This is proof that the game does not use the extra cores of the X3 and X4.

That's just Windows moving the threads between cores.

Of course it does change performance! I go from 40FPS to 60 when lowering resolution. The point was on that specific spot on Dragonsreach, looking down on the village. Did you even try that one?