'slow' hd5870 performance

[bobzilla2009]

hi all!

I received my hd5870 yesterday, and i've been achieving around 15-50% (dependant on game) less than the scores in the reviews around the net, for example, at 1920x1200 in crysis i got this score on the standard gpu benchmark:

Run #1- DX10 1920x1200 AA=2x, 32 bit test, Quality: VeryHigh ~~ Overall Average FPS: 25.42

whereas in the review here: http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/...iew/page11.asp

they have nearly 20% more frames than me, initially i thought it may be just good old cpu bottlenecking, but as you can see from this review of the 940, the difference between the 940 and the i7's just aren't that much in such a gpu bound game. Even in gta (another game that doesn't differentiate a lot between an i7 and a 940 in terms of frames) i'm getting around 30-40 fps average whereas a gtx 285 with a phenom 965 gets over 60fps in the review here:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...ng,2403-8.html

it also isn't caused by power starving either, since i have actually changed power supplies, since my old one was pushing the limit and only barely ran the card while being very loud, but performance didn't improve when i got my new psu.

Could a reason be due to only having a pretty standard motherboard? since it is only a fairly basic 760G chipset, but surely the bus speeds will still be the same mostly? and i'm pretty sure 1066MHz ddr2 isn't that far behind ddr3 and none are really that limiting. Or are the drivers just a bit sucky atm? (if anyone could link me to some btw i'd be glad to have a look to at least try).

Please tell me if you have any ideas!

[dir_d]

Well 1st fill out your system specs, then from there we can go deeper if needed

[bobzilla2009]

should be displayed now (didn't notice the option in the cp when i filled it out).

[erocker]

Well, you should most definitely be getting better performance.

Perhaps it's a driver issue. Follow this guide to uninstall and reinstall the drivers. http://forums.techpowerup.com/showthread.php?t=52502 <--Always works for me.

Make sure DirectX is updated: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...displaylang=en

Also make sure you are using the latest drivers for the 5870: http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles...icsdriver.aspx

[Woody112]

Fill in your system specs on your profile so that we can be of better assistance when determining what the problem may be. If you were running a 285 on the same board before you installed the 5870 then you need to fully remove all drivers for both ati and nvidia and reinstall CCC and display drivers.

[bobzilla2009]

i wasn't running a gtx 285, i was running a hd4670, i gave the gtx 285 as an example of my performance deficit i'll try some driver re-instillations anyway, ill post back soon.

[Easo]

After unninstall dont forget to use the ccleaner or even better driwersweeper.

[bobzilla2009]

ya, it probably didn't help that i did that, this is the first time i've ever really swapped a card out, since i was a laptop user before, so i didn't have to fuss with true uninstalls for drivers, hopefully that is just the problem and its my stupid fault

[erocker]

Originally Posted by erocker

Well, you should most definitely be getting better performance.

Perhaps it's a driver issue. Follow this guide to uninstall and reinstall the drivers. http://forums.techpowerup.com/showthread.php?t=52502 <--Always works for me.

Make sure DirectX is updated: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...displaylang=en

Also make sure you are using the latest drivers for the 5870: http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles...icsdriver.aspx

Originally Posted by bobzilla2009

ya, it probably didn't help that i did that, this is the first time i've ever really swapped a card out, since i was a laptop user before, so i didn't have to fuss with true uninstalls for drivers, hopefully that is just the problem and its my stupid fault

Yessir! Follow those links above.

[francis511]

If you run 3d mark , it will let you compare your system to similar systems. That should give you a better idea

[bobzilla2009]

Originally Posted by francis511

If you run 3d mark , it will let you compare your system to similar systems. That should give you a better idea

i did during my 'analysing how much slower its running' phase, and it was all the way to the left

still, nearly done with the clean install of the drivers.

[bobzilla2009]

re-installed the drivers now, and the new result is:

Run #1- DX10 1920x1200 AA=2x, 32 bit test, Quality: VeryHigh ~~ Overall Average FPS: 27.5

not a ground breaking achievement, but its 10% up on what i was getting at least, i think i'll be happy to settle with that tbh, since i'll just put on an overclock, i'd imagine that its just my fairly cheap motherboard may be slightly bottlenecking it somehow (cpu was about 80% on one core max during becnhmark), plus its no guarantee they did the benchmark on the same run anyway, so i should be ok, i'll edit this post with updated 3dmark06 scores in a minute or two.

3dmark has gone up to 18141, and considering i've seen reviews with the card getting 19-20k with an i7 (bound to skew the cpu result horribly), i think that's gone back into the acceptable range, since 17k was a bit low. So thanks for the help everyone! now for some overclocking!

[erocker]

Just want to add, the motherboard shouldn't be holding you back. While the onboard GPU isn't the greatest AMD has to offer, the components of the board are actually quite nice and it does use PCI-E 2.0 x16. Just make sure you are using the latest bios which is 1001, and make sure the onboard graphics are turned off. Also try having as many background programs/procesess turned off while benching. Crysis likes using the HDD too. Make sure indexing is turned off.

[bobzilla2009]

Originally Posted by erocker

Just want to add, the motherboard shouldn't be holding you back. While the onboard GPU isn't the greatest AMD has to offer, the components of the board are actually quite nice and it does use PCI-E 2.0 x16. Just make sure you are using the latest bios which is 1001, and make sure the onboard graphics are turned off. Also try having as many background programs/procesess turned off while benching. Crysis likes using the HDD too. Make sure indexing is turned off.

thanks about the indexing tip, i do tend to have a lot of (tbh fairly essential for everyday use) background stuff running while benching like avg ect. so that probably accounts for the missing 10% now also, im running the latest mobo bios, i put it on when i dropped in my phenom. It's good to hear my mobo isn't holding me back at all, since i've always thought it was very good for its price

[bobzilla2009]

sadly, i don't think the driver re-install has helped, i performed a l4d benchmark and got these results:

- Avg: 81.389 - Min: 41 - Max: 185

this was recorded at the helicopter rescue in no mercy from when i answered the radio to when the helicopter doors close, spending most of the time on the top of the 'tower' area with an m16 facing toward the hordes. As this review:

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum...review-17.html

shows, my min is nearly half of theirs and my average is only 2/3's, if anyone could do a quick run of similar circumstances with their 5870 it would be appreciated, (cpu was nowhere near max on any cores either). which means i'm being beaten by pretty much every other high end single gpu too, i'm beginning to think i may have a faulty card...

[IINexusII]

you probably have some crapware installed, and theyre using a 4ghz i7 so should take that in mind probably a good fps difference

[bobzilla2009]

I'm hoping so tbh, but it seems unlikely the more i try to search for anything hogging resources (i run a very clean computer aart from av/anti spyware, and they were tuned off in the above test). When i'm idling i use 0-1% cpu power too when they run at 800Mhz. also about the i7, my cpu was only running 35% whereas my gpu was at 100%

this may be a long shot, but will re-installing the games help at all? since quite a few were installed before my phenom came along, although it seems weird if that could be a cause.

[r9]

Make clean OS install and than try again. I believe that it has better possibility that the problem is you system instead world wide conspiracy .

[IINexusII]

yeah i would do a clean install

[bobzilla2009]

ya, it does sound like that would probably help a lot *sigh* good job i keep my main data on a separate partition eh? still, would've done this anyway in 3 weeks, so i may as well do it now and tbh, i don't care if it means i'm pretty much doubling my framerates in most of my games, with gta probably going up 3 times in some cases, i actually dip to 20 fps for a few seconds in some places of the map! that is not right in any sense considering what's powering it.

[IINexusII]

yup

[bobzilla2009]

anyways, brb formatting windows :P
edit: all went horribly wrong, and the w7 disc seemed to be broke, so i'm back to stone age xp for the moment, still, we'll see if the frames improve (obviously crysis can't be tested due to no dx10 anymore though)