Being a system builder is one thing.... useing better logic is another matter... personal opinions sway you away from logic... specially emotional irritation... Sure it's fine and dandy getting a little pissed off about the situation and jumping [censored] because your just sick of it... but to what end?

You use a single video card.... a 6870.... one that is apparently quite familare with being plagued with potential issues..... you can't get anything to work.... and you call yourself a system builder with 20 years of experience and don't bother swapping it for another 6870 from a different manufacturer? You should know that sapphire makes the closest to reference design ATI card you can buy and also appears to have the greatest stability/reliability rating as well.. (being that they are essentially built by ATI, not powered by)...

So you jump to a cheap 520.. that is in no way comparible to that of a 6870.... so why not have grabbed a 6450 or something around the same performance and see if you continue...

No you say your using logic.. but you clearly arn't.... Your making a decision based on your own sour point of view, not bother to use what a real "system builder" experience should say you should do... and in the end.. posted your little silly opinionated rant on these forums for the public to do what i'm doing right now in this post.. pointing out the failure in making any attempt at all at resolving the problem outside of a software solution. Like i said, as a "system builder" you should have clearly realized that apparently... software cannot fix hardware failures very easily or at all....


Fact of the matter remains..

Both ATI and Nvidia have been plagued with similar issues... presented based on system build and cards used.

SLI/Crossfire don't work.... BOTH vendors cannot get it working 100% at all yet....

Both manufacturers have terrible drivers according to the populants of the users out there that swear by it...

Both have had failures depending on the manufacturer of that specific card..

Nvidia is the only one that has had Multi-Million unit Failures due to a manufacturing process they insisted on using... resulting in hundreds of thousands of users experiencing premature video adapter/card failures.... ATI thus far has not had this problem...

Nvidia also has a very bad rep for using their PR gurus to spin anything that they have done wrong or horribly into gold.. and have even outright lied about other companies.... ATI thus far... hasn't done anything quite like nvidia..

I'm not one sided for ATI... but NVidia doesn't exactly have a great history....

And i think being brand specific is stupid too.. whatever is working... and working great.. performing great... etc.... i use.

Intel is the kingpin at the moment in the cpu market, ATI and Nvidia are head to head, but considering the failure rate of NVidia hardware in my own builds, i don't typically recommend them.. and that may be right down to my suppliers just receiving bad batches perhaps.

I was taking you seriously for a moment then.

then you tell me i should have shelled out on different cards to find an Ati that worked ???????

sorry but logic said buy a cheapo nvidia to check,and i was right.


please stop trolling for arguements,you simply are too transparent.

No i wasn't telling you to find an ATI card that worked.... and shell out? Cmon... don't twist things up beyond what they are.

System builders are usually required to be able to trial and error a machine that is giving issues.... IF you have a 6870 and your skyrim game is not playing nice with it all..... what is the first thing typically done? Replace the card with either the same card preferably from a different manufacturer... say sapphire.... OR in your case, you grabbed the least valueable card in the newest series...... so in that case, fine, grab a low end ATI card.. plug it in.. and actually determine if the 6870 you had was faulty or not...

The whole 3 strike policy tends to work best, If 3 ATI cards from different manufacturers and different series models.. (6450 vs 6770 vs 6870 as an example)... produce all the same results PROVIDED you did a search for the ones you were going to try, to see if anyone else was having issues with those specific cards, prior to getting them...... then we can crop it up to being some weird system glitch/issues/maybe not entirely related to the drivers or manufacturer at all... could be even user error still... but i'll give you the benefit of the doubt. Obviously if your going to have to spend money to test, you make certain you purchase them with the ability to get a full refund.

At which point moving to an NVidia solution makes total sense...

Whos to say there isn't something else going wrong... like motherboard.. which may not effect the NVidia card directly immediately.... but it's possible.. I've seen stranger things.

LASTLY, i couldn't recommend anyone buying your potentially failed 6870..... That just seems like a terrible thing to do to someone if you aren't completely sure your card is actually just fine or not. Clearly it isn't.. something isn't right. Top it off, considering that others appear to have an issue with that card..... and that people with 6870's are running the game just fine....... As i stated. your logic doesn't make any sense.

Adjusting the speed at which per core updates.. and using a nifty program to determine programs affinity... essentially what program is access what cores at what times..... it clearly shows up to 4 cores being access sustained That's something you should be able to look up...


Of course it's proof that the x3 and x4's cores aren't being used at all....Your stil ignoring the intel i3 vs i5 running the exact same setup but different CPUs... and how there is 15% boost in average frame rates and a very minor amount of improvement on the lowest.

EVEN if skyrim isn't fully utilizing all the available cpu cores.. it is load balancing them at least.... And there is clearly an advantage when the extra cores are there.... even if other background services and programs are simply just stretching their legs and not impeding skyrim as much...



Actually if you look at that thread, I've posted in it already with the recent 11.11b crossfire enabled/disabled functions which clearly only makes things worse at the moment...

But you just contradicted yourself by stating previously the following


So what is it then.....

So would people even suggest bothering to install these?

With 11.11a I get 60fps most of the time running just a single 6870 at 1920x1080 at highest detal settings with 2xAA.

I wouldn't bother myself. Untill they have released official Drivers with a cap for CF i'm not changing anything.

Ended up trying these anyway. Performance seems okay not much different from 11.11a. Have settings all highest at 1920x1080 with 2xAA & 16xAF and locks at 60fps most of the time with usage on my cards being 90%+ on one and around 50-60% usage on the other. With occasional drops to 30fps in certain parts of town with a lot going on with NPC's etc...

Full release notes 11.11.b:
http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/catalyst-1111b-performance.aspx

description about Skyrim:
Elder Scrolls Skyrim

Delivers AMD CrossfireX performance scaling
Improves performance 2-7% on single GPU configurations
Resolve corruption seen when enabling Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing on the AMD Radeon HD 6970 Series

BTW look like this performance drivers ONLY for 6xxx & 5xxxx series gpu

Definitely notice a slight performance gain with this driver over 11.11a. Now I'm pretty much running 60 frames in every location I visit.

Are you [censored], or just on crack? A 6990 is $700. A 590 is $750.

This thread is full of morons.

So the only difference between 11.11a vs 11.11b is crossfire support for HD 6xxx? Why didn't they just release a CAP, instead of recompiling the whole driver? If you have a single card, don't even bother installing this.

Because a cap isn't going to fix the issues with crossfire.

and it supports the HD 5000 and 6000 series..

However as I've posted above... even with 2x 5770's in crossfire...... i get half the performance than if i just only use the one card by itself...

Yeah same except in certain areas of towns with lots going on. Suppose could be better but will do for now. The fact that there isnt much performance increase could also be down to CPU bottleneck.

Posting to say that I tried these drivers out and they work wonderfully on my 5770. I get AT LEAST 10 more fps than before. Cities no longer lag for me.
Before it was about 35 - 40 fps on Ultra.

What I said. Looking down from Dragonsreach is slow, regardless of resolution. What exactly don't you understand?

And i3 vs i5 is not just about amount of cores. It's also about architecture, chipset, cache, turbo boost... If the game runs the same on an AMD X2, X3 and X4, then it's clearly a dual-core game. Period. Your multi-core + hyper-threading CPU isn't going to help in avoid CPU bottlenecks, no matter how much you wish for this not to be true. All it can do is help avoid the performance impact of other application threads.

Is anyone else getting massive screen color corruption on their extended displays (if have any) with 11.11b?

I use 3 monitors, my left and right monitor r seriously corrupt, cant read anything, middle is fine.

That link to the 11.11b site doesn't work for me. It comes up as an error page... anyone else??

Googling for "AMD 11.11b" results in official AMD site which offers great downloading speed:
http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/catalyst-1111b-performance.aspx
Actually it just dl'ed @ my maximum speed 1,4MB/s.

Glad to see i'm not the only one having probs with catalyst control center settings not working. I thought i was going mad after trying everything.
It started when I installed the cap driver on the original 11.11 drivers. After uninstalling cap and re installing 11.11 it worked until 11.11a came out which is also broken in 11.11b...

^^ take that back. I now have the 11.11b drivers and crossfire on my 6950's is much better than running with one card. It could still improve (and will) but these drivers are an improvement for Crossfire.

Sounds like a bad card dude... It happens, but w/e. Drivers made no difference here rolled back to 11.10

How do you roll back to older drivers? I'm having a huge issue of all my fullscreen games flickering with the new drivers.

Same way you install new ones just use an older version. Uninstall 11 whatever then install 11 whatever

Uninstall the 11.11b
Reboot
Install the 11.11a or other version
Reboot
Play the game

I have a 5970 too. Also made it worse for me