Crossfire, The Ugly

First up is Quake Wars which as a result of being OpenGL based does not benefit from Compatible AFR, in fact the game appeared to have no profile in the 3870 press driver and performance was not noticeably improved over single card mode.

Oblivion was our next test and demonstrated our first display issue. After loading our save game the screen badly flickered as if the refresh rate was set to low. This resolved itself once the mouse was moved but looked terrible initially.

Lost Planet was the next game we tried and like Oblivion performance was good. Unfortunately the shine was taken off the game by some corruption which occurred when anti-aliasing was used. The “now loading” message was one of the corrupt items as was water in sections such as caves.

Luckily the above issues were the only ones which caused image quality degradation but Compatible AFR and CrossFire sadly had other key issues. In World in Conflict (DX10), Colin McRae Dirt and Half-Life 2: Episode 2 there was very little stability and in each title we could recreate display driver errors which resulted in each game crashing to the desktop with "ATIKMDAG display driver has stopped responding" errors. In addition to this the driver issue also caused a Half-Life 2 engine error.

Clearly the experience we were having was not one ATI/AMD had intended and so we contacted the driver team. The end result is that ATI have confirmed the issues reported above by us, and thanks to Driver Heaven there are now knowledge base articles that ATI have committed to fixing, apparently by the next driver release.

For reference, here are each of the knowledge base articles:

EPR 224330  Oblivion:  CrossFire. 2x 3870.   Flickering when the game first loads :  737-30750:
 
EPR 224331  LOST PLANET.  CrossFire 2x RV670  corrupt text with CF enabled. Water in caves is also a bit corrupt. 737-30751:
 
EPR 224344  World In Conflict: CrossFire. 2x 3870.  Driver crashes (atikmdag error) 737-30752:

Colin McRae: Dirt: The game crashes to the desktop with an error messages stating that DIRT.exe has an unexpected error. 737-30852