Improving Unreal Development Kit Crossfire Performance

UPDATE: Turn off vsync if you enabled it in the .ini files. Use D3DOverrider with triple buffering instead.

Simply rename UDK.exe found in the Bin32 folder to AliceMadnessReturns.exe. Make sure to have the latest CAP, and it still works even with my sparkling spots fix, which uses 11.2 dlls.

The Alice profile is almost as fast as other profiles like Crysis 2, but without flickering of the water or other artifacts.

The following screenshots are of a 4870×2.

Fix For CityEngine Startup Crash

Here’s a similar situation to the Cities In Motion issue, this particular CAD software also has a problem running on ATI/AMD drivers newer than Catalyst 10.4, or at least 10.4 looks reliable enough to function properly. After launching, amdkmdap has a driver reset when the 3d rendering panel appears, crashing the application.

The fix is nice and simple, just place the appropriate OpenGL driver into the program’s folder where CityEngine.exe is.

If you have any other OpenGL game or application that is crashing after 10.4, try this fix or the Cities in Motion one.

For 32-bit: atioglxx.dll
For 64-bit: atio6axx.dll

Your card should support 10.4 drivers in the first place, I have no idea what you would do if you’re using one of the latest Radeons or if you’re using an nVidia card.

Improving Hydrophobia: Prophecy Crossfire Performance

Once again, like the Section 8: Prejudice trick, grab RadeonPro (since it’s a steam game) and simply use the Half-Life 2 crossfire profile. Apparently other profiles flicker or do not scale as well.

Credit goes to spyre who noticed this… months ago. I’m not sure why it’s still not in the CAPs or drivers.

Improving Section 8: Prejudice Crossfire Performance

UPDATE: Another profile that scales and doesn’t flicker is Company of Heroes, RelicCOH.exe. It might even be a bit faster than Dark Void’s.

After a fair amount of testing, the Dark Void profile gives the performance boost of the FEAR profile without the flickering.

So what you need to do is grab RadeonPro so you can make a profile for the game. You can’t simply do the exe rename trick, as it has a launcher that blocks you from starting from the game exe directly.

Once inside RadeonPro, push the ‘add a new profile’ button and select S9-Win32-F.exe from the Binaries/Win32 folder of the game. Go to the tweaks tab and click ‘manage custom profiles’, then add Dark Void as ‘ShippingPC-SkyGame.exe‘. Now to fix the launcher issue, go to the launcher tab and select ‘Games for Windows Live’ from the dropdown, then pick the actual launcher exe, which is S9.exe in the root folder of the game.

This should do it until a profile gets built into the drivers. Enjoy!

Cities in Motion (and possibly other OpenGL games) Startup Crash Fix For ATI/AMD Cards

UPDATE: I was curious as to what this FAQ item was for Atom Zombie Smasher, so I tried the demo. Nothing appears, just the exe starts up. Seems the same atigktxx.dll trick does the job for this game as well, it loads up just fine now.

Looks like Cities in Motion is an OpenGL game with the exact same issue that The Polynomial had for a few months. On drivers after Catalyst 10.4, it appears crossfire is breaking the game from working, and there is no way to disable it on a 4870×2 like myself. Some single gpu cards may be affected, so you might as well try this, too.

The simple fix should be placing 10.4′s atigktxx.dll into the game folder. Here’s an alternative fix that may or may not work for you if you have tried this atigktxx trick.

Do note that the file is from the 64-bit Vista/7 drivers, I’m not sure what the effect will be on 32-bit, XP, or on the latest 6 series cards. If you have crashes or freezes that happen after the game menu has loaded, then you might have a different problem unrelated to this. The beta, demo, and final release all should act the same. If the demo worked before (on drivers after 10.4) while the final does not, then you probably have a different issue.

Fix For The Polynomial Startup Crash

FINAL UPDATE: This post is a mess… this should not be a problem anymore for anyone. You should be on drivers newer than 11.2 or older than 10.5. This used to affect the BIT.TRIP games, but those run fine now as well. What has not yet been fixed in updated drivers is Cities in Motion.

FINAL FIX: Turns out you just need atigktxx.dll in the game folder! No mess, not even the main atioglxx.dll. Download the 10.4 dll here, place it where polynomial.exe is, done! I also noticed after installing Catalyst 11.2, the dll might not be needed anymore.

FIX ATTEMPT: I tried a brute force method, I put every driver file of 10.4 into the game folder. You can do this while still having whatever newer Catalyst you have installed, just run the 10.4 installer, cancel it, open a cmd prompt at C:\ATI\Support\10-4_vista64_win7_64_dd_ccc_wdm_enu\Packages\Drivers\ Display\W76A_INF\B_98282 or similar, then simply ‘expand -r *.* c:\pathtoyourgamefolder‘ and voila! I have not yet tried deleting any of the files 1 by 1 to see which ones are required to stop the BSOD so the game folder would look cleaner, but so far it works!

UPDATE2: mixed reports saying 10.12 is good, it’s almost a guarantee that it’s good for 5970 users that were stuttering, but it’s the same crash for me still on 10.12.

UPDATE: this might be affecting Bit.Trip Beat as well. Something to do with crossfire, but there are some reports of 5970s working fine.

So I finally attempted to try the demo of The Polynomial, but the driver is crashing on startup of the game (it’s in OpenGL). I’m trying this on a 4870×2, Catalyst 10.11 WHQL, latest CAP, Vista 64.

It might be something to do with crossfire, or at least in my case and this user. The developer is also active in that thread, and I’ll try to get some form of exposure to ATI/AMD, so we’ll see how this goes.

Workarounds

-The whole older driver package: refer to the working fix at the top of this page.

-Current iD Tech games (with this side effect! depends on the visualizer options): doom3.exe, etqw.exe, prey.exe, quake4.exe, wolf2mp.exe

-Riddick Butcher’s Bay profile looks like a bunch of detail is lost, and the bloom is lower resolution, yet the bright flashing lights are gone: sbzengine.exe

-An older atioglxx.dll: I tried 10.2 and 10.4, the game launched without glitches, but has a BSOD soon after. This must be because crossfire changed at 10.5, as mixing dx10/11 dlls older than 10.5 would also BSOD in Shattered Horizon and Bad Company 2. If you’re ok with not having the latest drivers (if you don’t need the fixes in there), you may be able to get away with installing 10.4 and just the latest CAP.

-RadeonPro recently added some OpenGL support, but the crossfire options are not functional just yet. I can’t think of any DX9 things to test if the ‘disable crossfire’ option is different from just disabling CatalystAI, but if it is, then this would end up a working solution once this app is updated.

Dark Athena, older Quakes, Unigine, FurMark, and a couple other profiles I attempted to launch act like the original game’s driver crash.

I will update this post if there’s a workaround better than the iD one, if there’s some combination of settings to try, or if either the drivers or game manage to fix it.

Catalyst 10.10 Is Looking Good

The 4870×2 issue is gone, everything seems to work normally. There’s even a boost in FC2 dx10, maybe other dx10 titles have improved as well.

ATI Catalyst 10.8b Hotfix

I HEARD YOU LIKE UPDATES: 10.10 works perfect, I tested every one of the stuck games, and a couple of the regular.

UPDATE2: Get the 10.9 hotfix, so you can have any other fixes that are in 10.9 itself. This list here still applies, since both 10.9 and the HF were made before I even started this list. Hopefully they figure it out for 10.10.

UPDATE: They’re looking into it. (Cool! Terry saw me.)

Time for some testing. This is for those that had the 2nd crossfire gpu stay in 2d speeds.

Download 10.8b hotfix from AMD. (Older, if you don’t like 10.9 for whatever reason.)

I’ll update this as I go. You can open and close one of the ‘ok’ games to get the core back into 2d no problem.

ATI Catalyst 10.7 Major Crossfire Issue

UPDATE: 10.10 Solves it for good.

NEW HOTFIX DRIVER: 10.8b says it fixed the issue, which might have appeared on 10.6. It’s almost perfect, the games are ok, but when exiting some of them, the core is still in 3d speeds. Here’s a list of some games that I tested. I was close to trying TwL‘s drivers, too…

Today I installed Catalyst 10.7 drivers after skipping 10.6 from hearing some horror stories. I’m with a 4870×2 using Vista64. The installation went smoothly, including the HDMI install. (A year ago the HDMI installer failed on one release, worked on the next month’s release.)

After some testing, there’s a severe problem with the 2d/3d detection, so far with the second core.

With DX9 and OGL games, the second core does not switch between 2d and 3d speeds. On a fresh boot, it stays idle after launching a game. This mismatch makes games really stuttery, especially if they are more demanding. The DX9 games I tested were: Borderlands, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, Far Cry 2, Lead and Gold, Mirror’s Edge, Moonbase Alpha, Need for Speed SHIFT, Serious Sam HD.

Mirror’s Edge managed to flip the second core into 3d, but then it got stuck after exiting! I checked Borderlands and it was as smooth as it was before (some areas can dip to ~45fps). Lead and Gold finally has a crossfire profile in the drivers, so now that the second core was in 3d mode, the game was nice and smooth without the huge flicker and ~40fps from before.

DirectX 10/11 games I tested (Battlefield Bad Company 2, Red Faction Guerrilla, Shattered Horizon) work just fine. Launching and exiting flips both cores correctly into 2d/3d. Even after Mirror’s Edge locks the second core into 3D, you could reset it back to idle speed by opening and closing a DX10 game.

If there is no hotfix, it might still be possible to take a specific .dll from 10.5 or 10.6 and put it in the Windows system folder so you can still use the new game profiles of 10.7.