Widescreen Gaming Forum

I recently put together a crossfire(6850)/eyefinity setup. The CF scaling on Witcher2 is excellent, although it does not have eyefinity. I got Dirt3 running with CF/Eyefinity and was doubly impressed.

Two titles I have tried since then, Warhammer: Space Marines(Demo), and Skyrim($60) have zero or negative CF scaling, and both have HUD issues.

I am patiently waiting for Skyrim eyefinity fixes from this community and have low expectations for CF drivers in the next three weeks from AMD. I have not been through the waiting game before, and am curious how long it takes for AAA titles? AA titles?

What % of AAA games get eyefinity/CF support? How long does it take on average?

Two overclocked 6850s in crossfire cost $250-275, and give performance in the range of a GTX590. Starting to think its too good to be true if none of the games run on it, or if I have to wait two months.


Also, are consoles and large resolution monitors going to kill eyefinity? (IOW are things getting worse?) I can still back out now, send the cards an monitors back and get a single card, single monitor solution.

While I'm sure you've got it resolved by now, looking back now we see that Skyrim was released Nov 8th, and CF drivers (11.11b) were out Nov 25-27th, so a little under 3 weeks.

Most games get Eyefinity / CF support. CF usually requires a patch that can take 1-21 days, while Eyefinity is usually out of the box, but may require user mods to fix HUDs and Menus. Eyefinity seems to have nothing to do with the budget of the game, since many indie games support Eyefinity perfectly, while Skyrim has issues with menus not scaling.

The benefit to CF / SLI is that you can get the performance of a much more expensive single card for much less. The obvious downside is that there are issues, bugs, and a lag time on CF/ SLI patches for games.

I'm not sure how large resolution monitors are going to kill Eyefinity, as resolution has actually shrunk recently (from 1920x1200 to the new 1920x1080 aka 1080p standard). The whole point of Eyefinity is to create an enveloping visual field (large viewable display size) while maintaining high resolutions (1080p across a 40" screen is the same resolution as on a 21" screen, just really stretched out).

A single card is always going to be easier than CF / SLI, but will cost more if you want the same performance. A single monitor will always be simpler than multi monitor gaming until all the developers build in support for multi monitor gaming. That said, I feel that multi monitor gaming is in a better place now than it was 2 years ago, and I hope that now that AMD and Nvidia each have multi monitor solutions, and the user base that could deploy multiple monitors increases, we'll see improved developer support. Look at it this way, DX 11 came out 2 years ago, and they're still having issues with DX 11 implementation in big budget games (DA2, Skyrim). But the number of games that support DX 11 is growing, so it's headed in a better direction over all.