Sick of my textures bogging my FPS down and crossfire doesn't seem to work. Is there some sort of settings or drivers I should be using?

Using 12.1a now.

Screw it, I just emailed them. I will post the response when I receive it.

"Any idea when you guys are going to release working drivers for Skyrim? I can play on a single 6870 with no mods installed but the moment I install a single mod my FPS gets cut in half. If I try and run it in crossfire I get 5 fps unless I look at the sky.

I am using the 12.1a beta drivers. I have the latest cap. What is the deal here? Skyrim has been out a couple months and Nvidia owners have been running it fine since launch. I am honestly getting ready to sell my cards and convert to Nvidia and bring all my friends along with me. Not to mention smear and tarnish the AMD name as much as I possibly can to prevent people from buying your products.

Also, any information I receive here will be posted to the many gaming forums I frequent. The amounts of disappointed AMD owners are staggering. We like our hardware, we despise our drivers/support. "

I did the same almost 2 years ago...same reasons, I posted at AMD (great hardware, frustrating drivers)...I was specific with the problems (gave forum admin data containing hours of testing, comparing different driver versions). For my troubles, they perma-banned me from their forums LOL. I switched to nVidia, and advertised as such on my youtube page. But you know what? They could really care less.

Now my wife is running Sims3 off a 2gb 5970 Sapphire.

This sounds like your hitting your memory limitation.... 1gb cards? Although you should be able to run with a few good texture mods.... there is a possibility that i noticed that i didn't see a boost with the 1gb cards but i did with the 2gb.... it's like the 1gb vram isn't enough when running crossfire.... it's odd...


Wrong, Nvidia's SLI was plagued with.. and still are for some people plagued with skyrim related dual/triple/quad sli issues... it's NOT specifically limited to ATI.... you can blame skyrim's poor and total lack of multi gpu support....


Now this is just being a [censored] for lack of a better word. Your having trouble.. running a game that explicitly is known to be problematic on multi gpu system reguardless of type of card and what brand it is. Hasn't had a lick of patching/support from the developers of the game to "help" it along at all.... and your going to bad mouth the one company you happened to be using and having issues with WITHOUT having played with the video cards you think will run the game flawlessly.

There are as many reports showing nvidia having issues as ati....

There are as many reports of people having no issues with ati as there are with nvidia......

The Grass.... is not always greener on the other side. Get your facts straight before sticking your foot in your mouth.

In no way am i trying to sound offensive or insulting.. but please.... a little grey matter please?

Granted.. what one person will have no troubles with.. someone else will and vice versa....

Many of the issues are user related...... that's just the going statistics..... the 90-5-5 percent rule applies.

5% is the software problems
5% is the hardware problems
90% is caused by the users


Fact of the matter is.... Skyrim is single GPU friendly... generally your going to have absalutely no issues, better FPS and overall a great experience with as many mods as you like (provided with the power required) to play skyrim if you ensure only one GPU is trying to run it.

I should have been more specific on the last part. These problems have come with every single new release I have bought since owning these cards. They seem like they just are not prepared whatsoever for games. It just feels like they are either bumbling idiots or that they don't care... or both.

Almost none of the manufacturers are prepared... It's the fault of the developers of the programs mostly. Top it off it doesn't help that one or the other is shoveling money into whatever developers pocket to explicitly support one or the other when there is multi gpu support.

Nvidia has a history of walking around legal loopholes to ensure stuff like this.

BAD enough that many developers won't even bother "TESTING" a single ati or alternative card with their product and actually i've had a few high level devs (not from gamesas but other highend developers which i cannot name) that stated to my face, in person that being provided by Nvidia with numerous nvidia cards, the few ati cards they did receive, they never bothered even testing and usually sat on the shelves even after they gave the game a "gone gold" status followed by being boxed up and shipped. When i argued this absurdity, he said it wasn't his department so there was nothing he could do.

I haven't heard many cases in which ATI has had this happen in their favor.... but this doesn't make it certain that they cannot do anything right.

Now i hate referrencing synthetic benchmarks or whatever.. but futuremarks latest 3dmark11 clearly shows how EXCELLENTLY ati's crossfire works blowing he doors off even nvidia's SLI without requireing PROFILES to do it let alone driver updates really. The 3D rendering system was developed from the ground up with multi gpu support in mind, and it clearly shows. It's the software developers job to do it right.

Add to the fact that skyrim and many games still use a extremely dated DX9 mode which is NOT multi gpu friendly (requiring profiles... and tweaking and per driver modification or settings to get working halfway decently)

I'm basically possitive that IF any developer was developing with pure dx10/10.1/11/11.1 in mind... the multi gpu issues with mostly disappear.

As unfair as that is it only proves Nvidia has an upper hand with gaming. crossfire can be 459862435 times superior to sli but if it doesn't work with the games we play, then what good is it? At this point I am upset with both AMD and Bethesda. I think Bethesda especially because they can rely on millions of Elder Scrolls fans to buy their games no matter how unpolished they are. They simply will not be taking a hit to their pockets regardless their game is a nightmare. AMD has been spending a TON of their resources and time launching new models and advertising them instead of creating rock solid drivers for the many cards they already have out. Hell, Rage still only works for a handful of people.

This all just makes me miss older console games. I never had to wait for drivers, return botched games, email company's, look for tweaks to help a game run, be bombarded with DLC (I effing DESPISE DLC packs.), and when a game launched, it worked.

Why can't there just be some sort of list of standards they have to stick to? Don't release a buggy product, communicate with all GPU manufacturers and run multiple tests. It seems like the gaming industry has lost it's way.

the drivers for AMD cards are fairly rock solid..... it's argueable if nvidia's is any better or worse.... but they are fairly decent.

Rage was a fail on both cards from the start .... the port was terrible.... buggy as hell..

nvidia has situated..... maybe legally, but ethically is questionable..... into a position..... monopolistic back scratching shouldn't be fed.....

Good developers use all tech available.... at least one or 2 models of each generation that they plan to support.... and do work with those manufacturers.. but in the last say 5 years... they haven't been doing that at all.... heres your nvidia card... make it.... otherwise.. heres your ps3 or xbox360.... make it.... we'lll worry about the other stuff later.