I don't think Crossfire is working

Lagamorph · 06-07-2015, 11:28 AM

Ok, so I finally seem to have gotten my graphics drivers installed and running correctly, but now I'm facing an issue with getting Crossfire enabled.
My laptop has 2x 5870 graphics cards in it and I'm trying to enable both for Crossfire, but I don't believe anything I'm trying is working. The in-game performance I'm getting seems to indicate that crossfire definitely isn't working, along with checking some of the settings that I know of/can find.

If I open the AMD Catalyst Control Center GUI, Crossfire shows as disabled. If I enable it I get told to reboot in order for the settings to take effect. When I do reboot and go back into AMD Catalyst Control Center, it's still disabled.

If I run,

Code:

aticonfig --lsch

Then I get the following output,

Code:

Multiple GPU chain for adapter 0, status: Crossfire is enabled
  0. 02:00.0 AMD Mobility Radeon HD 5800 Series
  1. 03:00.0 AMD Mobility Radeon HD 5800 Series

This was from following a tutorial I found about setting up a GPU chain. Whilst that seems to say that Crossfire is enabled (Though I think that might just mean the chain is capable of Crossfire rather than Crossfire itself being enabled), if I run

Code:

aticonfig --lscs

Then I get,

Code:

    Candidate Combination: 
    Master: 2:0:0 
    Slave: 3:0:0 
    CrossFire is disabled on current device
    CrossFire Diagnostics:
    CrossFire can work with P2P mapping through GART
    Dongle Capabilities: support PASSTHROUGH |INTERLINK_SW_AFR | INTERLINK_AUTO_AFR | INTERLINK_BLACKING | INTERLINK_SUPERAA

Which says that Crossfire is disabled.

It should be doable I believe, as listing my candidates shows,

Code:

Master adapter:  0. 02:00.0 AMD Mobility Radeon HD 5800 Series
    Candidates:  1. 03:00.0 AMD Mobility Radeon HD 5800 Series

I don't have any secondary displays connected to the laptop, just the built-in display.

From looking at the aticonfig help, I think I need to do something involving the following commands,

Code:

aticonfig --mgpu-sls={on|off}
aticonfig --crossfire={on|off}

But I don't quite know what parameters I should be using with them.

Incase it's needed, I'm running the latest version of Debian.

/dev/random · 06-10-2015, 10:08 AM

Try this

Code:

aticonfig --adapter=0,1 --cfa
aticonfig --adapter=0,1 --crossfire=on

Lagamorph · 06-10-2015, 07:25 PM

Ok, running the first command I get this output,

Code:

Multiple GPU chain added
Warning: X needs to be restarted before MGPU changes take effect.

I'm guessing that's normal for the command.

For the second command though I get this,

Code:

Warning: No MGPU chain defined for master adapter 1
Crossfire chain(s) enabled
Warning: X needs to be restarted before CrossFire changes take effect.

The "No MGPU chain defained for master adapter 1" part slightly concerns me though. Is that normal? Is it just saying that there's no chain after adapter 1 since I only have adapters 0 and 1?

/dev/random · 06-10-2015, 08:31 PM

I think that is correct, what happens when you restart X and run the second command? (not the whole machine)

Lagamorph · 06-11-2015, 03:52 AM

I've been rebooting the machine. How do I restart just X? I've tried googling how to do it but I can't seem to find how to do it on KDE.

EDIT - Ok, figured it out,

Code:

sudo service kdm restart

I've run the first command, then restarted X, then run the second command, then restarted X, but I can't see any difference. Both the --lscs and --lsch commands return exactly the same results as above.