PC Drivers & Software

[gene6545]

installed driver for Pro Duo and can not find where to enable crossfire. GPU-z says crossfire is not enabled.

The version of the driver I installed is win10-radeon-pro-software-enterprise-20.q3.1-sep11.

The computer is a x288 MSI MB with a 7820x cpu, 32GB ram with dual monitors.

Thanks folks.

Gene

[defectivebydesign]

The problem is AMD decided to COMPLETELY REMOVE CROSSFIRE SUPPORT IN 2020.

Not only this, they sold Dual GPU laptops for the sole express purpose of only being capable of playing games under crossfire, and not only did they DISABLE CROSSFIRE, they completely REMOVED SUPPORT for the DEDICATED GPU.

Search AMD's site for R8 M445DX drivers. YOU WON'T FIND IT, and it is a dx12 GCN 1.2 chip.

Meanwhile, there used to be a company called Lucid who had a product called HYDRA that could pair BOTH AMD and Nvidia GPUs in Multi-GPU with perfect scaling, and that product is DOA.

The only people who are allowed to use Multi-GPU are big businesses with server farms who write their own custom code, or game developers who write custom code. Crossfire has been depreciated in favor of dx12/Vulkan mGPU, which only works when a developer enables it.

If normal users want to use crossfire, it appears that we need some 3rd party HACK that hooks the game into supporting mGPU, which doesn't currently exist, so AMD has basically dropped all support against customer wishes.

[pokester]

Yep Crossfire support has been pretty much non existent for a couple years now. Nvidia has now officially killed SLI too. The truth is that less than 1% of gamers ever used it. It does suck though if that was you. 

Truthfully though very few and far between did games benefit from it. Most developers never found it worth the time to support and as high refresh gaming became prevalent with competitive gamers the latency involved in crossfire and sli proved to be not worth the extra speed. 

You are right you won't find the drivers under that model and I too don't like that AMD doesn't include those rebadge names for searching for drivers. That model is a straight rebadge of the original GPU and that is what the driver is under. So the driver is there you just have to look for Radeon R7 M440.

[defectivebydesign]

Problem is the R7 M440 isn't an exact match for a R8 M445DX. The R7 supposedly is 2GB, the R8 is 4GB. I haven't had luck installing R7 M440 drivers, albeit it may be possible with the right override methods.

The truth about crossfire/SLI is that games did benefit, but only with proper optimization, which was always half-baked.

3dfx never needed "profiles" for SLI. It just worked. Lucid invented Hydra for "modern" pci-e SLI that worked without profiles, and you could mix vendors, but it was never released to the public.

Dx12/Vulkan supports mGPU, but only on a developer supported per-app basis.

The entire "profile" thing is nonsense. If the DXVK devs cared enough, they could support mGPU and put AMD to shame, but I think EVERYONE involved in graphics is being coerced into not supporting it. This is why Lucid never released Hydra. They were probably threatened to not release it.

AMD had a card called the Rage Fury MAXX, and they could've copied concepts from that, or the open source 3dfx SLI code for crossfire. So there's enough circumstantial evidence that crossfire was never meant to work properly.

You can also take that same logic and look at how AMD has handled control panel forced AA, which hasn't worked since dx9, and none of their new "features" work either. Only AA that works is VSR, and no AMD card has the power for it.

Chill? Doesn't work.

Boost? Doesn't work.

Enhanced Sync? Doesn't work.

MLAA? No longer works, especially under borderless.

HBCC? Supposedly got a patch, but x to doubt on stability, and only supported under Vega afaik. Can't have people using more ram than what was given.

Here's another thing that shows scams with Vsync, is Lucid's Virtu. Now they supposedly did some virtualization and load balancing, but the key feature was that FPS from a dedicated card was sent over to an APU buffer that perfectly synced FPS like freesync without tearing on a non-freesync monitor. We can't copy that now can we?

A 3rd party could mimic this by sending FPS over to a video buffer that is synced with the monitor hz.

Why hasn't anyone tried it? Probably because all relevant developers are being coerced into not doing it, and Lucid may be patent trolling.

Don't get me started on freesync. Freesync started from eDP, and all eDP screeens support it, but AMD doesn't support freesync over "plain" eDP. That's 100% a scam, especially when AMD literally demo'ed freesync with eDP.

Did you know that most laptop vendors lock AMD APU video memory to 512mb, even if you have 16+GB of RAM?

Fluid Motion doesn't work without a 3rd party codec, nor is enabled for laptops?

Zero RPM is *deliberately* disabled when you change fan speeds in Wattman/Tuning?

How is no-one publicly calling AMD out for any of this? (tech reviewers)

(Did you know AMD hired Scott Wasson from Tech Report to leave and stop writing negative articles?)

I bet half of these "bugs" are meant to be broken, and frankly it's getting to be intolerable.

[pokester]

They are all the same driver regardless. It is just what luck you are having with what version of the driver. 

Why you  can't get the driver to load may just put you in the same camp as a lot of us with the 2020 drivers. 

I promise you are preaching to the choir with all the things broken in the drivers. The sad thing is the drivers were pretty good until Wattman came along. Since then it seems like they are trying to break features and increase instability. Many people with GCN cards can't even get the 2020 drivers to load at all. 

Their have been tech sites that have called them out. I know Gamers Nexus, LTT and JayTwoCents all have. 

AMDs GPU market share has dropped a lot the last couple years because of the issues too. I really do hope they fix things with RDNA2. I won't be buying one right away. I will have to see proof in these forums that the platform is stable at a hardware level, all the featureless work and very few driver bugs. Nothing about current drivers makes me feel good other than they have made more progress in the last couple drivers than the prior year combined. 

I am going to mention another user colesdav‌  maybe he will have some advice for you. He knows a lot about getting crossfire working and about finagling the drivers or alternate ways to get drivers to load etc... 

He also shares a good amount of displeasure with the choices and issues with the AMD driver in the last couple years. Anyway I hope he can help as the help truly gets no better from anyone else out there. 

[colesdav]

RE: Only AA that works is VSR, and no AMD card has the power for it.
I used to run VSR on to get "4K resolution" on a 1080p monitor and then use a pair of R9 Fury X / Nano/ Fury Combo to run BF1 Ultra  in DX11 CrossFire or DX12 MultiGPU.
Needed to use DX12 MultiGPU on thosce cards to get ~ 60FPS.

[colesdav]

DX11 was much slower / lower perfomance on BF1 Ultra 4k VSR than DX12.

[colesdav]

RE: How is no-one publicly calling AMD out for any of this? (tech reviewers)
I agree.

It is a total disgrace.
There are many Tech YouTubers who claim RX5700XT is better value than RTX2070S based on  highly skewed to DX12benchmarks/Vulkan, with no mention of all of these Driver Problems in Adrenalin 2020 and before.
Some reviewers are just completely biased towards AMD, and are even claiming Adrenalin 2020 is the next best thing since sliced bread... they tend to get free GPUs to keep.

[colesdav]

There were a number of new AAA Crossfire titles for ~ 2 years after RX480 launch that worked and still work very well in DX11 Crossfire.
Raja tried promoting 2 RX480 were better than a single GTX1080 .. they were not of course.

[colesdav]

RE: The problem is AMD decided to COMPLETELY REMOVE CROSSFIRE SUPPORT IN 2020.
If you mean the Adrenalin 2020 GUI/UI is pretty useless for DX11 Crossfire/MultiGPU you are correct.

AMD were trying to drop DX11 Crossfire support after RX Vega launch back in 14 August 2017.
Comically, Lisa Su had presented a Demo showing a pair of Vega 64 FE cards in DX11 Crossfire on Prey before RX Vega 64 Launched, so a number of complete headcases went out and bought a pair of RX Vega 56/64 cards at launch. 
It took lots of complaining from the User base and months to get DX11 Crosssfire Support in RX Vega cards if I remember correctly. 

RE: ot only this, they sold Dual GPU laptops for the sole express purpose of only being capable of playing games under crossfire, and not only did they DISABLE CROSSFIRE, they completely REMOVED SUPPORT for the DEDICATED GPU.

Are you are talking about APU with iGPU not working with the Discrete Laptop GPU?
AMD Radeon R8 M445DX Dual Graphics - Benchmarks and Specs - NotebookCheck.net Tech 
Oh dear. That is bad.

I did know about similar laptops where AMD pre-GCN iGPUI on APU  was mixed with GCN discrete GPU, in that case the newer drivers will not install because newer AMD driver will not install if the detect Pre-GCN architecture. That happened ~ end AMD Catalyst drivers/start of Crimson. 

Lucid Hydra - yes I remember.

RE: The only people who are allowed to use Multi-GPU are big businesses with server farms who write their own custom code, or game developers who write custom code. Crossfire has been depreciated in favor of dx12/Vulkan mGPU, which only works when a developer enables it.

In some cases you have tio turn on Crossfire Button in AMD Gaming drivers to enable DX12 MGPu. In others you are told to make sure the Driver Crossfire Button is switched off. I seem to remember trying Pro drivers where they had renamed the CrossFire Button to something else ... that information escapes my memory at the moment. I am sure I posted it on the Forum once.

RE: If normal users want to use crossfire, it appears that we need some 3rd party HACK that hooks the game into supporting mGPU, which doesn't currently exist, so AMD has basically dropped all support against customer wishes.

It should still work on a pair of compatible Discrete GPUs.
The situation with AMD APU and Disctere Laptop GPU is very likely a joke.
I was looking for a new laptop recently with Ryzen 4000 series processor but they were all APUs will Radeon iGPU.

I will not touch a laptop with "Radeon" with a bargepole...

[defectivebydesign]

From what I've heard about RDNA, RDNA 1.0 had silicon bugs that are supposedly "fixed" in RDNA 2. The workarounds for RDNA 1.0 might have contributed to instability in GCN, and reviewers have called out the black screens, but they haven't touched on ANY of the other driver problems.

ReLive broken? Silence.

Mobile and APU driver/bios shenanigans? Silence. Literally never worked right, and features have been removed.

Crossfire? Silence, other than "well it never worked", which is only true for crossfire itself.

Freesync over eDP? Never.

Control panel AA not working? Nope, and AMD has regressed since early Dx11 and DX10.

Fluid motion lacking official codec support? Nope.

Did you know GPU Metrics doesn't disable itself on a game basis, nor support RED as a standard color?

When did AMD start screwing up drivers and playing games? Technically with the 390, mantle, and windows 10.

The 390 was an "improved" 290 with minor power tweaks, but never hardware tweaks.

The 390 release driver was **EXCLUSIVE** and had driver based performance tweaks (mostly tessellation) over a 290 that took months to get ported to the 290 (but it eventually was, proving it was a scam). The windows 10 driver also had exclusive driver tweaks over the windows 7 driver, and wasn't backported until DRIVER MODDERS ported the windows 10 driver to 7. Then AMD stopped supporting the 390 features, and completely ditched the exclusive power efficiency tweaks in modern drivers. Finally, the release of Adrenaline removed power efficiency for GDDR downclocking in multimonitor modes. This meant that the 390 ran GDDR at FULL TILT under multimonitor, was never fixed, and actual developers lied to the public by saying the hardware never supported it, when it previously WORKED under the old CCC drivers, and you could still manually downclock the GDDR with no compatibility issues. Considering that this overheats the RAM, as fan speed is based on GPU temps, I think AMD was trying to burn out the 390 to sell new hardware. Nobody called them out for this, and to this day multimonitor has major issues that AMD won't address. Mixing DP with HDMI used to break freesync, among other things. Speaking of things breaking freesync, VSR also would break freesync and refresh ranges, as early drivers would lock to 60fps.

Right now, the only "viable" AMD hardware seems to be Vega, and only on a bare minimum, which isn't exactly tolerable for modern gaming, when no features work, and if you aren't plagued with instability and crashes.

Adrenaline itself also used to be super laggy with game profiles, and removed features compared to CCC, and only started looking visually good with 2020, but that's also when game/OS stability dropped. So I can play games, the control panel doesn't lag, but not use any features, and you have to be super picky with driver versions to avoid stability issues.

Also, I have to blame Microsoft for some of these problems, as every w10 "service pack" seems to break drivers. Sound cards in particular, but ReLive started being broken from the 2004 update for me. That said, Creative released updates to fix their soundcard drivers, while AMD won't even acknowledge ReLive is broken, let alone support HWS, and even removed crossfire to boot.

It's like AMD doesn't care to write working or efficient windows drivers, unless it's vulkan or dx12, which means DXVK is a requirement for any performance, but then nothing else works either. Sigh.

[colesdav]

I have been telling people that RX Vega 64 Liquid is still the best GPU amd made recently. 
I have tested a few RX5700XT now. I think they are basically unstable and overclocked far beyond where they should be running. The GDDR6 is on the edge as well.

I have shown a number of cases where an HBM2 overclocked RX Vega 64 Liquid with HBCC on completely beats RX5700XT at 4K or in other cases with HBCC off on other games - is slightly slower FPS but - lets use the AMD Marketing Term I hate "Buttery Smooth" Frame Rate in comparison to the RX5700XT that looks like it has FPS Manic Depression, along with Tourettes levels of stutter, 

[colesdav]

There are a number of Pro DUO branded cards.
Exactly which one do you have?
Can you provide a link to the GPU on AMD Web Site please.

You might be ablke to get Crossfire to work using a Hybrid Adrenalin 2019 19.12.1 GUI/UI + Driver update using Windows device manger to later driver version.

[gene6545]

All is well now - using an older driver. The AMD folks need to know that

the updates from AMD are just an update and any new card may have to go

back thru the updates to find one that they can start with. I tried to

start with the Sep. 2020 update and there were no provisions in it for

crossfire support. really odd way to do things.

It is a Pro Duo Polaris 32GB edition.

. It seems to be doing great so far. It does 3D fantastic, renders well and

is ok for video editing.

So I end up letting the CPU handle more of the video editing than I'd like.

GG

[colesdav]

Glad it is now working for you.

[colesdav]

https://community.amd.com/message/2997346 

[gene6545]

Fixed the issue. apparently the iterations of the AMD drivers are card

specific. So I up loaded the last driver to mention the AMD Crossfire and

used it - so far doing great.

It deals with complex 3d models and scenes very well.

Thanks