[UPDATE] AMD Catalyst and FurMark: the Return of BSoD!

FRAPS 3.2.4
A nice BSoD (blue screen of death) under Win7 64-bit + Catalyst 10.10e + FurMark/etqw


UPDATE: I removed Cat10.10e, installed Cat10.10c and the etqw profile worked like a charm. I also tested SeriousSam, another OpenGL profile, and it worked fine with Cat10.10c. Then to be sure, I re-installed Cat10.10e and… crash on both etqw and SeriousSam. Conclusion: Cat10.10e is not recommanded for FurMark CrossFire support!

I’m polishing the new FurMark and after having successfully tested a 2-way SLI of GTX 480, I tested a 2-way CrossFire of HD 5770. Since CrossFire is not enabled for FurMark.exe, I used the well known trick: renaming FurMark.exe in etqw.exe.

Bad idea man!

This trick worked fine for previous versions of FurMark and Catalyst but now, seems AMD has changed something in etqw profile (I used the latest Catalyst 10.10e hotfix) and now my OpenGL miserably crashes when etqw profile id used. Now the only solution: install two Radeon on my devstation and debug this pesky bug!

Related posts:

  1. FurMark: How to Enable CrossFire Support
  2. How to Enable SLI and CrossFire Support for OpenGL Applications
  3. New Catalyst 10.10c Hotfix Available
  4. Catalyst 9.8 and 9.9 Improve Protection Against FurMark
  5. (GPU Tool) FurMark 1.9.0: The Return of the Furry Donut

5 thoughts on “[UPDATE] AMD Catalyst and FurMark: the Return of BSoD!”

  1. James

    Doesn’t furmark currently have a multi-gpu executable for crossfire/sli settings? What’s the difference between the two modes.

  2. JeGX Post Author

    Yes the current FurMark (1.8.2) has two exe (FurMark.exe for single GPU and etqw.exe for multi-GPU). But I wanted to remove etqw.exe in the new FurMark. This is possible with NVIDIA but apparently this is not the case with AMD and etqw is still required.

    Now on my devstation, the 2-way XFire of HD5770 works fine with the new FurMark renamed in etqw. Certainly a problem of driver in my testbed.

  4. WacKEDmaN

    why call it etqw?..i understand that it will use the profile for etqw…but whats stopping it being called zyxy.exe for example..and use something like ATI CrossFire Xtension to create the crossfire profile for that exe

    also looking at that BSoD, it looks like a the “Timeout Detection and Recovery of GPUs through WDDM” problems i was having in vista with my 3870.. i fixed it by disabling TDR..reg keys can be found here..
    http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/display/wddm_timeout.mspx

  5. JeGX Post Author

    Thanks WacKEDmaN for the TDR trick.

    The etqw trick is cool because it’s simple: just rename a file, that’s all. And since many users use this trick, I think it was important to talk about this problem.

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