Set TribesAscend.exe to use the AFR-Friendly or Mass Effect 3 profile, either from CCC or RadeonPro. Now most importantly, use D3DOverrider to force triple buffering if you want to use vsync. Enable vsync itself from the game or with D3DOverrider, but the main thing is to have triple buffering forced. Seems certain Unreal Engine 3 games struggle and stutter with the internal game vsync.
If the rare flickering bothers you (ski training, shadows on gun when you start and aim around), try the Hard Reset profile, but the framerate might be a tad slower.
Of course, you would use Crysis2.exe since it’s the same engine. You might see small amounts of sky/light flickers from time to time. Another profile that might scale without flickering is Optimize 1×1.
After some testing, you might as well use the Portal 2 profile, Portal2.exe. Now you will get scaling and the in-game minimap will not flicker. The only issue is that when you open the menu while in game, the background will flicker between different frames.
These other profiles also should work the same way: ACR.exe, HardReset.exe, Shaun White Skateboarding.exe, wic.exe
Other source engine profiles do NOT help, either the map flickers or you don’t get any scaling, so don’t bother with left4dead.exe, dota2.exe, or csgo.exe.
Just use the Company of Heroes profile, RelicCOH.exe. Some demanding tracks may not scale much or at all, but the simpler ones do get a boost. Plus the GPU usage should be cleaner instead of getting no scaling and twice the power draw/heat generation.
So this has happened before a couple years ago. Luckily it appears to be minor. Just open a close a game and your secondary crossfire gpu should be back to 2d idle clockspeeds. I tried it on a couple DirectX9 games and it worked fine.
UPDATE: Medal of Honor still flickers, even if you force the BC2 profile. At least it doesn’t flicker much, just little blips sometimes.
There is an interesting line in the release notes of the Catalyst 12.2 drivers: “Random flickering is no longer observed when playing Battlefield Bad Company 2 in DirectX 11 mode.”
I will have to do more testing, but those blank screen flickers might be history, even on my 4870×2 in dx10 mode.
I discovered this some months ago, when vsync and crossfire are enabled in old UE2 games, the combination will cause strange framerates and massive stuttering. So you should disable CF by disabling Catalyst AI, rename the game to ForceSingleGPU.exe, or make a profile in RadeonPro or the profiles feature in CCC (starting from Catalyst 12.1).
This seems to affect the standard UE2 games, not the heavily modified ones like Bioshock or Duke Nukem Forever. It does not matter if you’re enabling vsync with D3DOverrider, an in-game option, or the engine .ini file, it all results in the same stutter. I’m noticing it in Unreal Tournament 2004 for example.
UPDATE: 11.11 has fixed both Killing Floor and Red Orchestra. This fix is not needed anymore.
Looks like Catalyst 11.10 has extremely high gpu usage in Killing Floor, so it struggles to maintain a solid framerate when there’s any action on screen.
No problem, put 11.9′s atiumdag.dll into your ‘\steamapps\common\killingfloor\System‘ folder.
The original Red Orchestra is in the same situation.
UPDATE: Apparently 11.10 is now fine with the apps and games that the Rage drivers broke, so you’d want to update to the final release. Some people’s Rage turned blue, so those people should just use the atioglxx.dll from the Rage driver that works best for them (put it in Rage’s game folder): 11.10p v1, 11.10p v2, 11.10p v3.
I’m seeing reports of people saying that the Rage drivers broke all other OpenGL applications or games. No problem, there are two ways to quickly fix this for yourself.
You can go back to having 11.9 WHQL installed for the system, then simply place atioglxx.dll from the 11.10p Rage driver into Rage’s folder. (Wherever rage.exe is located, I don’t have the game.)
Or if you just want to fix 1 or 2 things while keeping the 11.10 preview installed for the system, just put atioglxx.dll from 11.9 into the game or application folder of what you want to fix. Java based games like Minecraft or Spiral Knights actually run java.exe, so you will put the dll into Java’s ‘bin’ folder instead.
I put in a couple other OpenGL driver files, atigktxx.dll and atiglpxx.dll, just in case if using the single atioglxx.dll alone did not work.
By the way, these are 32-bit dlls for 32-bit games/apps/Java. As for issues in Rage itself, I can’t do any tests since I don’t have the game. (Which would be useful since I’m a 4870×2 and I hear 4 series has the most problems at the moment.)
UPDATE: 11.12 seems to work fine, this should be good for 6 series cards that can’t use old dlls.
Not sure how widespread this is, but on my 4870×2, ETQW will freeze after a few seconds of playing and then BSOD with “Attempt to reset the display driver and recover from timeout failed.” The STOP code is 0×00000116 with atikmpag.sys as the faulting module.
This happens on… let’s say recent drivers. I can successfully play without issue using the handy 10.4 atioglxx.dll, which is the latest most stable driver for older OpenGL versions or games. I also used atigktxx.dll just in case. Simply place them into the main ETQW folder.
I’m also seeing that Doom 3 has a driver reset after a minute of play or when vsync is enabled, so the 10.4 files fix that as well.
