Horrible lag During Animation like WS or Tele with my 6990

Hello All,

I lag big time during animations like using a weapon skill or teleporting. If there arent any animations occuring i am running solid at 60FPS. This Only seems to happen when i turn my Draw quality past 8 if its at 8 then everything is fine but thats not good enough for me. I was having the same issue when i had three 5870's running in tri-fire so i sold those and bought a 6990.

If anyone has any solution for this please fill me in. I was kinda thinking lack of drivers in Crossfire mode but not to sure so i would like your input. Also I can play crysis 2 and dragon age 2 on max settings perfectly fine with no issues so i didnt know if this was game related.

ASUS P6X58D Premium
Intel I7 920 OC to 4Ghz
Saphire 6990
CORSAIR DOMINATOR GT 6GB 2000Mhz
2 X Western Digital Caviar Black WD6402AAEX 640GB (Raid 0)
Antec TPQ-1200 1200W
COOLER MASTER HAF X RC-942-KKN1 (case)
Windows 7 64bit
3d mark 11 score 10725

I have this same issue with my 5970 and did some messing about to try and categories the problem.

If I set Draw Quality to 10/10 and turn off AA the issue is only just visible.
If I set Draw Quality to 10/10 and turn on AA the frame rate will drop from a solid 55 FPS to terrible for the duration of the animations and then jump straight back to 55 FPS. The greater the selected AA level the worse it becomes with 8*AA dropping from 55 FPS to 3 FPS during animations.
If I set Draw Quality to 9/10 the problem can just about be seen at 8xAA.
If I set Draw Quality to 8/10 it can not be seen at all( although I expect the root cause is still there just not visible)

I thought it might be resource limitation on my 5970 but dropping the resolution down to 1024x768 from 1900x1280 which saves a huge amount of GPU resources made no difference at all and the frame rate issue still persisted suggesting it is not the card running out of steam but something more fundamental.

After discussions with ATI they said it is a fault with the rendering engine supplied by SE and there was nothing they could do about it. Given my lack of understanding about graphics engines and windows drivers I can only take their word for it. Quite how I can convince SE it's there problem I have no idea, I would expect the first words out of their mouths will be "update your graphics driver" and we will have both ATI and SE insisting its the other persons fault. :(

Interesting though that we are both ATI so I wonder if users with powerful nVidia cards see this very specific issue?

Well first off thank you for responding and in a way im glad somebody else was having this issue also lol. I noticed that if a play with just 1 gpu active then i dont run into this problem at all but with both i still do.

Anyways after a volley of several emails had been sent back and forth from both myself and ATI/AMD Tech Support they finnaly came to the conclusion as of right now that it is a Crossfire Profile issue and that it has been sent to the Catalyst Crew Team and they will be working on an updated profile for the game. They sent me that email on 4-19-11 so hopefully something gets resolved cause im really feeling like i didnt get what i paid for right about now.

The problem you guys are having sounds like what was happening to me as well. I run a 5870, and was getting some really bad stuttering in combat, only when WS were triggering.

What fixed it for me was; I was running vsync, but did not have triple buffering enabled (didn't know what it was). After I enabled triple buffering, that fixed the problem for me. Worth a try if you're not running triple buffering.

There is a trade off though; triple buffering fills up VRAM pretty fast I guess, so I have lower frame rates in town now, sometimes dropping to 30 fps but never under. Still 60 in the field and in combat though.

Well I had a play and enabling triple buffering hasn't helped, the issue is still present on my system. However running with 1 GPU makes things better (10-15 FPS) compared to both GPUS (0-3 FPS) so perhaps there is more than one issue here. The first could be a crossfire configuration issue and then there is the issue in single GPU mode.