How To: Make Skyrim (& Other Games) Utilize AMD Crossfire Before the Patch is Released

Users of the latest AMD 6xxx series graphics cards may have noticed that when they are playing Skyrim, their framerate isn't anywhere near what it is supposed to be with dual GPUs in Crossfire. AMD is working on releasing drivers with these issues fixed, but it has been too long since Skyrim has come out to just sit and wait.

In this Null Byte, I'm going to walk you through the process of getting the AMD drivers working to their full potential, especially for you mobile graphics and crossfire users. To tell if your graphics cards are suffering speed loss, first disable crossfire and start Skyrim. If your game runs a lot faster, then you need this guide.

What We Need Downloaded

• AMD laster driver (mobile series)
• AMD desktop driver (6990)
• CAP—This contains application profiles for many games that optimize performance and Crossfire.
  
• RadeonPro—This tool provides override settings to the graphics card and allows profiles for optimization. I have gone from 80 FPS to 180 FPS with just a few small tweaks.
• Driver Sweeper—This will make sure any residual drivers are removed from our system to avoid driver conflicts.
• CCleaner—This tool will remove the registry values of our old drivers to ensure a clean installation without conflicts.

Step 1 Remove Your Old Drivers

1. Go to Start > Control Panel > Uninstall a Program.
2. Remove the Catalyst Control Center and all of its components.
3. Run Driver Sweeper and clean out AMD display. Make sure that this is the only one selected.
4. Run CCleaner to clean up some of the leftover registry files.
5. Reboot.
6. Run the installer for the latest AMD driver that you downloaded.
7. Reboot.
   
8. Install latest CAP and RadeonPro that we downloaded earlier.
9. Reboot.

Step 2 Configure RadeonPro

1. Start up RadeonPro and click the Global profile.
2. Make yours look like mine.

Step 3 Play Skyrim

Start up Skyrim and adjust the settings to your liking, depending on whether or not you need performance or graphics enhanced even further. This should have adjusted your game to make Crossfire work, so instead of your frames dropping, they should be incredibly high (unless they were really terrible before).

Look at how pretty Skyrim looks now!

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