New build with R280, low frame rates

[Teh Lemur]

Hi guys. I've just put together a new build, fairly standard stuff - Asus Z97-A, i5 4790K - with an MSI ATI R9 280, all running stock with no overclock for now.

I'm seeing some very odd behaviour, because everything is rock-solid stable, no glitches or crashes whatsoever, but I'm getting nowhere near the performance I should from the GPU.

I first noticed the problem when Saints Row IV auto-selected "Low" quality settings for me. If I change to "Ultra" quality, as I expect would be fine with this card, I get under 20 FPS in the game. Investigating further, I found that I was only getting a score of 2200ish in 3DMark Firestrike, instead of the 7500 or so that charts lead me to believe I should expect.

Can anyone suggest what might be going wrong here? It's a brand new build with fully up-to-date motherboard and GPU drivers, so I can't see why it would be a driver problem. Any ideas how I could go about troubleshooting this?

 

[XSI]

overheating or downlocked gpu. just a guess

 

[RCoon]

Mind running GPU-Z for us and posting a screenshot of the info and sensor screen?

I also assume you've plugged your monitor into the GPU, and not the motherboard output?

 

[Blue-Knight]

How much memory you have?

 

[Teh Lemur]

Thanks for the replies guys. It has 16GB of DDR3. I'll post GPU-Z screenshots as soon as I'm in front of this PC this evening.

 

[Teh Lemur]

I seem to have found a temporary fix, though I'm still not sure of the cause of the issue. By messing around in the AMD Overdrive tab of CCC and setting a mild overclock, it seems to have woken the card up - prior to that I think it was stuck in its low clock speed state for some reason, even when I was in-game. It remains to be seen if it will just work from now on, or whether I'll need to mess around in CCC after every reboot.

 

[EarthDog]

Disable ULPS if that is the case. It won't clock down again.

 

[Teh Lemur]

Disable ULPS if that is the case. It won't clock down again.

Won't that mean the card is running at full-blast even when I'm just on the desktop?

 

[EarthDog]

Correct. Full clockspeeds.

 

[eidairaman1]

Radeon Pro can help.

Some configs have a power config problem others dont

 

[Batou1986]

something is suspect there you shouldn't need to disable, ULPS I don't
name a few other games you have tried that I may have to compare

or install and do a benchmark run on the ultra preset in unigine valley since its a small download
http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/2208/unigine-valley-benchmark-1-0/

 

[Teh Lemur]

I spoke too soon, turns out my problem isn't solved at all. After a reboot, I'm back in terrible performance mode. Overclocking the card makes no difference, neither does disabling ULPS. When I run a game, I can see in GPU-Z that the card is throttling up to full clock speed, or at least it thinks it is, but the performance is still terrible.

I tried Unigine Valley. I got a score of 1140 in Ultra mode in 1080p. I understand I should be getting something more like 2500.

Any ideas what I could try next? I'm beginning to think I need to return the card.

 

[RejZoR]

The card is most likely defective. R9-280 which is effectively a HD7950 should run modern games on highest in 1080p pretty easily. At least mine does.

I only had clocking problems when overclocking with MSI AFterburner where it often didn't switch tio higher clocks. With modded BIOS it does even that perfectly. But on stock, it should unconditionaly work.

 

[Teh Lemur]

The card is most likely defective. R9-280 which is effectively a HD7950 should run modern games on highest in 1080p pretty easily. At least mine does.

I know it should, it should also score around 7500 on 3DMark Firestrike, instead of the 2200 I'm getting.

But the weird thing is, sometimes I am getting full performance out of it, and other times I'm not. It's also completely stable, no glitches, crashes or overheating. That made me suspect that it's some kind of config issue rather than a defective card, but I just don't know at this point.

 

[EarthDog]

You should run MSI Afterburner and show a graph on the core clocks to see what is actually going on.

 

[Teh Lemur]

You should run MSI Afterburner and show a graph on the core clocks to see what is actually going on.

Will Afterburner show any different results to GPU-Z? Because in that I can already see the core clocks going up to their correct values as I start the game/benchmark, and dropping back down to power saving mode when I quit out. They do that regardless of the card is giving good performance or not.

 

[m&m's]

Mind checking the box "Log to file" (bottom of sensors tab), start a game for 4-5 minutes and uploading the log file?

 

[EarthDog]

I just want to see if your core clocks remain at the 3D clock level. And when/if they drop, what the other items on the graph are saying (temp etc). GPUz isn't granular enough with its graphing. If you detach and enlarge the MSI AB graph it will. Make sure you put the clocks and the temp in the same screen.

Also, log it as MnM said.

 

[Teh Lemur]

Mind checking the box "Log to file" (bottom of sensors tab), start a game for 4-5 minutes and uploading the log file?

No problem, I've logged going from desktop to Saints Row IV and playing on "ultra" settings for 5 minutes. The log is attached.

 

[Teh Lemur]

I just want to see if your core clocks remain at the 3D clock level. And when/if they drop, what the other items on the graph are saying (temp etc). GPUz isn't granular enough with its graphing. If you detach and enlarge the MSI AB graph it will. Make sure you put the clocks and the temp in the same screen.

Okay, I'll get Afterburner installed and do this too.

 

[EarthDog]

That log is enough actually (less pretty view of the graph)...

I do not recall, can you have MSI AB check FPS and have it in that log too? We need to see the breaking point as it didn't throttle here. Did you experience a FPS slowdown?

 

[Batou1986]

I understand I should be getting something more like 2500

That seems a tad unrealistic but if anyone can figure out how to almost double the performance of the 7950 I'm all ears.

 

[m&m's]

From the log, everything seems fine.

1. Press the blue "?" to start a render test and verify if the "Bus Interface" changes. It currently is @x16 1.1, it should rise to @x16 3.0, if not -> Reseat the card and try again, still not at @x16 3.0-> change the card slot. (Depending on which card slot you used it could be @x16 2.0).
2. Uninstall all the AMD drivers, delete the AMD folder (C:\AMD), reboot and reinstall the latest drivers. http://support.amd.com/en-us/download/
3. Still not working properly? Put the card in another PC.
4. Still not? -> RMA.

I found your Fire Strike score and the Physics Score is what it should be, which means that it is only GPU related.
http://www.3dmark.com/fs/3399308

 

[RejZoR]

Oh, one more thing. Re-check graphic card power cables. Most of modern cards will still run with no or bad power connection, but they'll be stuck in low clock mode.

 

[newtekie1]

I know this sounds odd, but try downclocking the memory a little bit. You might have a bad memory chip and the ECC algorithm is killing your performance. Downclocking the RAM might make it stable and performance might actually go up. If it does, RMA the card.