Catalyst Driver Fiasco

Few months ago the first card arrived at our test labs, even before the official release we could already enjoy the newest ATI HD3870X2. We first tried the card with the Catalyst 8.1 drivers, but due to malfunctioning we had to go for Catalyst 8.2. Drivers might not be tweaked too well, we thought, and so we focused on other products to be reviewed. After our visit to Cebit we got back to testing the X2, this time using the Catalyst 8.2 drivers, we found the X2 was performing far from great. Yes we could hit nearly 16K points in 3D Mark 2006 which is quite a lot better than the then current NVIDIA series can, but in-game the driver failed to boost the framerate over a single HD3870 in more then 50% of my games.

After retesting the 8800GTS 512MB with newer drivers we noticed that ATI released yet another pack of drivers, Catalyst 8.3, and so we tried out those. Unfortunately this made the Catalyst Control Center crash during Windows XP opening, stating a message that goes like "Current Catalyst Control Center version is not compatible with the current set of drivers". Okay, we reinstalled the whole Catalyst 8.3 file, CCC included, but no better luck this time. Trying to fix the problem, we went back to the older 8.2 and 8.1 drivers but none of them would make CCC reappear again.

Time for a format it seems, and so it happened, next day a 100% clean setup was ready to go for another round. We started using the Catalyst 8.3 file from the beginning now. After a reboot, Windows popped up again and finally no more errors appearing while using the CCC app.

That's where we went on testing, but again, performance wasn't always what you'd suspect and so we used a trial&error approach, going through nearly every Catalyst Control Center Option... but to no avail! Starting to get slightly frustrating over why the card just doesn't want to run on our setup we began thinking that maybe PowerPlay was clocking the second GPU back to such low speeds that it was of no great use to improve the performance over that of the single X2. We opened up AMD GPU clock tool and manually clocked to GPU's and memory chips, but again no solution was found. We tried different software, but it all doesn't change the fact that the X2 was performing way below its usual power.

Using a clean disk image, we went back to our original clean image and started every test again, with Catalyst 8.3 installed. In few cases the X2 showed its power, but here and there some issues are still holding the card back. Having spent already quite a lot of our test time with this card we decided to go ahead and continue our test and report what we found thus far.

During long on-line search evenings we found a lot more people complaining about the performance of their CrossFire/X2 video card, it seems we were not alone with our troubles, so readers should be aware that it is not always glamour with the new ATI high-end series.



Several others sites have showed how a good working HD3870X2 scores against the NVIDIA 8800GTS 512MB, you should be well aware that the results on following pages are far from best but unfortunately this is how it turned out on our config. Read on ->