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Bad performance/Usage spikes with R9 290 Tri-X CF.

Joined
Jul 31, 2014
Messages
81 (0.02/day)
System Name Quasar
Processor Intel i7 2600K
Motherboard ASRock P67 Extreme 4 B3
Cooling Intel Stock Cooler
Memory 8GB DDR3
Video Card(s) AMD HD 6950
Storage 1TB 7200RPM, Samsung 840 Evo 120GB
Display(s) LG IPS 236
Case Silverstone Raven RV02-E
Audio Device(s) Sound Blaster Z
Power Supply Corsair HX 850W
Software W7
Benchmark Scores 3D Mark 2013: 13000+ Heaven 4.0: 2460+
I bought 2 R9 290 Tri-X recently and i have low FPS in games like Crysis 3 and BF4. In crysis i have somewhere between 35-90 fps and in BF4 i have around 50-60 on Ultra, 1080P. I have noticed some serious GPU usages spikes in those games.

I have turned off ULPS, tried in windows mode, the temps are good and the benchmarks "seems" okey.

Do you guys have any clue what the problem might be?
 
games on the ssd or spinner?
 
50-60 Ultra at 1080P seems very low for BF4
 
I ran the same settings as anandtech did in there bench. They got 77 with one card. I got 60 with 2. Something is wrong.
 
I ran the same settings as anandtech did in there bench. They got 77 with one card. I got 60 with 2. Something is wrong.
what are temps for both cards and is anything OC'd
 
welcome to the world of crossfire
pray that AMD fixes there drivers or simply disable Xfire are your options
 
welcome to the world of crossfire
pray that AMD fixes there drivers or simply disable Xfire are your options
Haha thank's. I would be happy if it was just CF problems. This feels like something else is wrong. Anandtech said i should get 77FPS(with 1 card) on Crysis 3 with a specific setting. I got 30 with one.
 
Haha thank's. I would be happy if it was just CF problems. This feels like something else is wrong. Anandtech said i should get 77FPS(with 1 card) on Crysis 3 with a specific setting. I got 30 with one.
might not be throttling up all the way install msi afterburner and lock it to max nominal clocks and see what happens
 
might not be throttling up all the way install msi afterburner and lock it to max nominal clocks and see what happens
It says they are running at 1000Mhz when am playing. Don't know what the problem is.
 
Haha thank's. I would be happy if it was just CF problems. This feels like something else is wrong. Anandtech said i should get 77FPS(with 1 card) on Crysis 3 with a specific setting. I got 30 with one.
That is not likely the cause, there are no issues with crossfire in those games as I play both on 3 290X cards with way better FPS (1 card on 1080p stays at 60FPS pretty constant) which likely leads to believe something else is the cause.

Odd that your getting usage spikes, are you using full screen mode or windowed?

You maybe hitting a bottleneck somewhere else or having an issue with a certain feature. I know for a fact many people report problems on i7 processor in BF4 with Hyper Threading enabled so you might want to look into that.

On the Crysis 3 note, that game has always been odd when running on any system and changes constantly. Sadly its not well optimized even on the most powerful rigs.
 
First thing... did you nuke the OS? Are CFX really active, full load on each card...

the dumb question... is v sync off? No pun intended.
 
First thing... did you nuke the OS? Are CFX really active, full load on each card...

the dumb question... is v sync off? No pun intended.

Nuke the OS? :P But yeah CF is active. But no, i don't get full load on both the cards. Massive usage spikes.
 
might not be throttling up all the way install msi afterburner and lock it to max nominal clocks and see what happens
I'm certain that it's not downclocking due to Crossfire - only from personal experience I've seen that as soon as you add a second card, they no longer use dynamic clocks/boost.

Downclocking would happen if there was a problem e.g. heat.
 
On the HDD, but with my 6950CF i had it on the HDD aswell and no problem.

the way they do xfire now puts more stress on the mobo which could be causing the hold ups which is why you are seeing dips in fps.

i would throw bf4 on the ssd and see if it helps any.

I ran the same settings as anandtech did in there bench. They got 77 with one card. I got 60 with 2. Something is wrong.

as your system is not the same as their testbench, you will see differences in results. you can only use charts like those as comparisons for other hardware in the same machine. not use them to say what your machine will get.

also what does just 1 card get?
 
Yes it sounds like crossfire's simply not working. I get 50-70 in BF4 at 1440P with one 290X. Keep troubleshooting it. I assume you are running full screen.
 
which slots are you using
 
the way they do xfire now puts more stress on the mobo which could be causing the hold ups which is why you are seeing dips in fps.

i would throw bf4 on the ssd and see if it helps any.


as your system is not the same as their testbench, you will see differences in results. you can only use charts like those as comparisons for other hardware in the same machine. not use them to say what your machine will get.

also what does just 1 card get?

Around 30-40 FPS and two card get between 40-60 FPS. When i play at window mode. 1 card seem to work at 100% but still 30-40FPS.

Yes it sounds like crossfire's simply not working. I get 50-70 in BF4 at 1440P with one 290X. Keep troubleshooting it. I assume you are running full screen.

Yes i am.


which slots are you using

The two blue slots. They are PCI-E 16X i think.
 
Around 30-40 FPS and two card get between 40-60 FPS. When i play at window mode. 1 card seem to work at 100% but still 30-40FPS.
Ok so then your getting some interesting FPS, like I said before I would check your processor on this one especially considering your running at stock. BF4 has issues running Hyper Threading on the i7's which has cause poor performance issues. Also you might try enabling Mantle and see if that helps (Or Vice Versa).
Yes i am.
Ok well that knocks that out of the picture.
The two blue slots. They are PCI-E 16X i think.
Running two cards with that board would be at 8X which is more than fine so thats not the problem unless your board is running them at 4x or something. You can check that in CCC when checking hardware.
 
Ok so then your getting some interesting FPS, like I said before I would check your processor on this one especially considering your running at stock. BF4 has issues running Hyper Threading on the i7's which has cause poor performance issues. Also you might try enabling Mantle and see if that helps (Or Vice Versa).

Ok well that knocks that out of the picture.
Running two cards with that board would be at 8X which is more than fine so thats not the problem unless your board is running them at 4x or something. You can check that in CCC when checking hardware.

Yeah it was 8X. So that's not the problem either. I saw that the CPU usage was around 60-90% on all cores on Crysis 3.

I got 38FPS Avg in some places when playing Crysis 3 in fullscreen. That's worse than my 6950CF.
 
Yeah it was 8X. So that's not the problem either. I saw that the CPU usage was around 60-90% on all cores on Crysis 3.

I got 38FPS Avg in some places when playing Crysis 3 in fullscreen. That's worse than my 6950CF.
Well something has to be a miss here... I get above that running at 4k reolution so something is not right...

Might I inquire what driver version your using?

You should be getting averages much closer to this area...
 
Well something has to be a miss here... I get above that running at 4k reolution so something is not right...

Might I inquire what driver version your using?

You should be getting averages much closer to this area...

Just my thinking. I was using 14.4 and today i installed 14.7 beta. Got the same result.
 
What driver do you have installed? Do you use vsync? I have two 290x GPUs and run 1440p on 2x ultra settings vsync at 100Hz and get a pretty steady 100 fps with the 14.4 drivers.
 
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