OLtos Posted December 2, 2012 Share Posted December 2, 2012 Like so many people I have had a miserable time with the AMD 7850 2g OC video card from Gigabyte while playing the game Skyrim. After a week of beating on it here is what I found. I found that there were three seperate problems. 1. The game would outright CTD after less then 5 minutes of play2. Screen flicker. That annoying off in the distance flickering crap.3. Screen shear and tearing. Here are the solutions I used that worked for me. I do not know if they will work for you, but at least here is a place to start. 1. CTD in 5. This is problem with the minimum voltage of the card. The stock minimum GPU voltage on the GIGABYTE 2G 7850 OC is 1.138. This minimum voltage APPEARS to be the same thing people post about when they talk about the 2d voltage. Finding a way to change that was a misery of searching the web for crap I just barely understand. MSI Afterburner did not work. I could not figure out how to enable core voltage adjustments in it. I finally found that Gigabyte has their own little OC front end that has the GPU min adjustment. It only adjusts up to 1.225, but that seems to be enough. Now in the VISION Engine Control Center in the Overclock page their is a slider for "power". There is NO explanation of just WTF they specifically mean by "power" but sliding that all the way up to +20% seemed to help. At least it did not hurt. So get the min GPU voltage up to 1.225 and the AMD VECC overclock power all the way up. This got me into Skyrim without CTD every 5 %^&* minutes. 2. Screen Flicker. This miserable mess has been bugging Skyrim players all along and the solutions vary. None of the solutions I found worked. This iswhat I found and did about it (For the AMD 7850 2gig OC card from Gigabyte. The problem appears to be a bug in the settings for the AMD 7850 OC 2g card from Gigabyte. My guess is that it may be a problem elsewhere with cards of other brand as well. What has happened has to do with what you see in the Vision Engine Control Center under Performance>AMD OverDrive. In ther you will a slider for the GPU Clock and the Memory Clock. The clue is at the top end of the sliders. Notice that GPU Clock is a smaller number than Memory Clock. That is as it should be. In every spec page I have ever seen GPU Clcok is smaller the Memory Clock. The problem is at the other end. The minimum end. You will notice that the GPU Clock is 300 and Memory is 150. This is bad. The reason that this is bad is that AMD Overclocking is not static. AMD has designed their chips, even the main CPUs, so that any overclocking only happens when there is an actual demand for it. When the demand deminishes the clocks drop back lower. If that lower setting is dinked and set wrong, you wind up having problems when the card is actually not under any strain at all. In my case no matter how I tweaked Skyrim's ini files I got no where. To change it you have to create preset in the Vision center for skyrim. Documentation sucks so you have to figure it out. When you make the preset you have to have the pages open that you want the new settings to appear in OPEN. Then you have to fine the profile page and edit that fool thing. Now that file is HIDDEN. It's at C:\users\*your user name*\AppData\Local\ATI\ACE\Profiles. The AppData folder is hidden you need to change the view settings for your to even find this POS. (yes I'm still mad and sleep deprived.) In the profiles folder you will see xml files that contain the code for your profiles. Find the one for skyrim, right click, choose edit FOR ME, by default that xml file was opened by notepad. In there, if you had the overclock page open when you made the preset you will find the following lines. <Featurename="MemoryClockTarget_PCI_VEN_1002&DEV_6819&SUBSYS_25531458 &REV_00_4&22E940E&0&0010A"> <Property name="Want_0" value="15000" /> <Property name="Want_1" value="120000" /> </Feature> AND <Featurename="CoreClockTarget_PCI_VEN_1002&DEV_6819&SUBSYS_25531458&a mp;REV_00_4&22E940E&0&0010A"> <Property name="Want_0" value="30000" /> <Property name="Want_1" value="97500" /> </Feature> You may very well see a ton of other crap in there but these lines are what you want. You edit the Property name lines for MemoryClockTarget that says<Property name="Want_0" value="15000" /> And you want the line from CoreClockTarget <Property name="Want_0" value="30000" /> The 15000 and the 30000 are where those miserable settings 300 and 150 come from. I have no idea why each one has extra zeros, but just in case they are important make sure you leave em in when you change the numbers. In my case I went with Core clock 80000 and Memory Clock 110000. The only reason I chose those numbers is that recalled that stock settings look like that on many cards and since this thing from Gigabyte comes pre overclocked from the factory I guessed that Core 800 mem 1100 would get me something useable. It did. I finally got rid of most of that lousy flickering. But not quite all of it. To get the rest you need to make sure that when you overclock from the factory settings you maintain the same percentage of change for both Core and memory clocks. I have gone all the way up to approx. 7% above what the card starts, 1045 core and 1285 mem. This got the rest of the flickering unless I am actually panning around from a view point with my mouse. Yes it really is that much of a pain in the BUTT to deal with. And lastly 3. Screen Shear or Tearing. This is a seperate and nastier issue from screen flicker. In skyrim it is a conflict between skyrims Anti Aliasing(AA), Anisotropic Filtering (AF), and possible FXAA as well. For the MD 7850 that I am using here turn all of these OFF in the Skyrim options. If you want them turn them ON in Vision Engine Control Center. This journey has been a real XMas misery. Thank BABY JESUS that I bought this dam-ned card on Black Friday, and have fixed my problems before XMAS actual. Once set up this thing is pretty cool. I am on a DELL XPS studio 7100 with a 6 core PhenomII that is now two years old. The card, well you know that by now. I am running Skyrim with all the bells and whistles up to Ultra High, minus the AA,AF, and FXAA. AA and AF are handle by the VECC. In addition I am running the following tweaks: Skyrim.iniUgridsToLoad=7 (this allows for the loading of water falls a greater distance from my character, LARGE hit to Frame Rate and the main reason for this oddessy into OverClocking) SkyrimPrefs.iniShadowDistance=12000 (Trees wave in the wind so far away from my character now that I have to zoom in with console FOV command to see the movement) fLightLODStartFade=75000 (because I like to see the lights of Dragon Reach in the dark from a long way away) fGrassStartFadeDistance=8000fGrassMaxStartFadeDistance=12000.0000 (Nice not to have to watch grass fade in half way up the nearest hill) bRenderSkinnedTrees=1uiMaxSkinnedTreesToRender=60bForceFullDetail=0bEnableTreeAnimations=1bEnableTrees=1 (TREES! Those damnable trees. My trees would NOT blow in the wind. These settings enable them. If a tree is going to animate I think it has to be a rendered tree. So at any given time I can have 60 trees in one state of animation or another around my character. Oh yeah. One more thing on trees. Tree animation depends on what it loaded into any given set of cells. Well even after getting the move at all they would always stop after time. That is because of this line in Skyrim.ini. uExterior Cell Buffer=36But guess what. It's a buffer. Buffers fill up, and when they do stuff stops happening. So I tried this line after the ugridstoload line. bPreemptivelyUnloadCells=1 That made it better but the buffer still filled up eventually. So I went with uExterior Cell Buffer=0bPreemptivelyUnloadCells=0 apparently to keep the trees moving that second line has to be there even if its set to off (0). My Frame right is a healthy 41 to 59 except in one or two small spots on the North Riften Road where I drop down to 26. I am pretty happy with that. Cheers, OLtos Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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