Yes this is the somber discovery of the monster that is "Micro-Stuttering"
Until a few days ago, i knew nothing about this apparently brushed under the rug issue that effects so many people. Like many i always just dismissed it. Putting it down to things like, "it's hot day, it must be effecting the gpu's a little." or "the game is just buggy" etc etc.
However, ever since i recently installing some pretty heavy duty games, and having to tweak the settings of said games to get up to a comfortable 40-60 fps, but still finding that i'm seeing some pretty noticeable micro lag, i became intrigued. Then having trawled various forums, i read about this micro-stuttering. Which, when you know what phrase to type into google, is sure enough, pretty well documented. Of course no one tells you that, oh by the way, even tho you have invested in a supposedly superior setup, such as crossfire. You may or may not experience an effect in some games that almost completely negates the fps boost afforded by a crossfire setup, and also makes you think, "hang on, am i playing this game with two souped-up bad boys, or has someone just ripped them both out, and left me with some manor of crappy on-board graphics instead..."
Having just discovered what this thing was that had been bugging the hell of of me, in previous games, aswell as in the new ones. I then learned that, ATI and nivida have known about this issue since way back in 2007/8... and have seen fit to do absolutely nothing to attempt to fix it. That is even if it is fixable.
Ok, sorry if that seemed a little ranty, but finding out that what you thought was the next step in gpu evolution, and that you were lucky enough to have such a setup, actually has a fundamental flaw embedded within it. Namely, the lack of sync between frame rendering, seemingly inherent to all crossfire/sli setups, is a tad annoying
However, having read forum after forum and article after article, i'm kind of in information overload at the moment. I have managed to slightly reduce the visibility of the effect, by running some games in either, windowed mode, or turning off Catalyst AI, for games on fullscreen at higher resolutions, which effectively force's single card use. The weirdest thing tho, is that even when i completely disable crossfire, and run left 4 dead 2 for example, on the single card, i still see the micro-stuttering, or at least something extremely similar. Now my understating of MS is that it only effects an array of linked cards ?
Has anyone else noticed this MS effect showing up on a single core, single card ?
And also please share any solutions you have tried and found yourself for micro-stuttering on crossfire.
Thank you.


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) If it's not, and there are additional external factors at work, then what are they ?
