I like to play video games in the computer. The famous Meme applies well to me.
However, I must confess I have lately fallen to the confort of couch gaming, and just turning on the Xbox to play casual games.
In the last month or so I have been coming back to the PC little by little. I just enjoy keyboard and mouse so much better.
If is frustrating though, when you come back to the PC and some games do not work. I have moved my Steam library in the last 6 months so I though it was that, but something cough my eye, the Batman Arkham games were not working. Strange since I have completed them all.
Ok, lets see what is different…Windows 10 now, and anniversary update is installed. I think I had problems before, but I am not sure.
New drivers. This is very likely the reason. But there must be something more. The games are not exactly just released. Some had quite a few years.
Incompatibility with W10 1607? Not likely, but could be. A mix? maybe.
Then the remastered editions of Bioshock were released. They also had problems. So now I know something else is the problem.
Trying Batman Arkham Asylum again the light bulb on top of my head turned on. It has physics from Nvidia. Cool effects for ragdoll, and paper flying, plus the papers and leave flying around have a more natural feel (when it works right, other times the sit in the air).
So now I open the radeon settings and I start looking around, and I identified possible causes. What was the actual cause?
Crossfire. Disable Crossfire, then try again and the game work. Interesting.
I have a pair of HD 7870. Now they are starting to age, and I didn’t get them at the same time. So here it is possible that either a card is bad, the bridge is not working well (lose connection, or dust), that the card has a bad connection (this is not uncommon with large and heavy cards), or that the drivers do not work well for those specific games when Crossfire is enabled.
I can’t discard all other possibilities, but I think the last one is the most probable. A single HD7870 has plenty of power to play at highest setting using 2560×1080 monitors so I don’t care enough at the moment to take apart the computer, but if it was a bad connection I would see the problem in .
PC gaming is awesome because I can play old games like X-Wing using DOSBox, games from Windows XP, and new games. All without buying a new console.
At the same time, it has the challenge that you will have to troubleshoot problems sometimes.
When I played more often, I could pinpoint problems right away, this one took me a while.
I am hoping this will help a fellow gamer in need. Keep on playing!!
DehcTech 