[jjj751]

So I recently found a good deal on a XFX 7970 Ghz edition so I decided to buy it and crossfire it with my current 7970. The issue is MSI afterburner won't allow me to change the voltage of either card to overclock. In addition the new cards slider's can slide way farther than the older one that I've had since early 2012. I have tried deleting and re-installing the drivers to no avail. Pictures below about what I am talking about. GPU 1 (XFX 7970 GHZ Edition) is the new card. GPU 2 (XFX 7970 Black Edition) is the older one.

GPU 1:


GPU 2:


Next issue I have been having is when gaming. I have been playing BF4 a lot and I feel that I should be getting more FPS than I have been getting in a lot of maps. There will be times I will be getting 100+ frames but then there times where I'm getting like low 60's, and in some instances will drop down to 50's. I'd say most of the time I'm getting around 60-70's FPS. Is this normal? My CPU shouldn't be bottlenecking since according to task manager I'm using like 75% of the CPU at most when gaming.

This part of the map doesn't have much happening but my FPS isn't really that high as you can see:


Related to this is my GPU usage. GPU 2 is under 99% load while GPU 1 is at like 50-70% load. It goes up and down:


Lastly is BF4 supposed to be using all my VRAM? I'm playing with max settings at 1080P:


Any help with this would be great. Let me know if you guys need any more info.

 

[eXXon]

Is Voltage control enabled in AB?

 

[iamhollywood5]

Quote:

Originally Posted by jjj751

Next issue I have been having is when gaming. I have been playing BF4 a lot and I feel that I should be getting more FPS than I have been getting in a lot of maps. There will be times I will be getting 100+ frames but then there times where I'm getting like low 60's, and in some instances will drop down to 50's. I'd say most of the time I'm getting around 60-70's FPS. Is this normal? My CPU shouldn't be bottlenecking since according to task manager I'm using like 75% of the CPU at most when gaming.

This part of the map doesn't have much happening but my FPS isn't really that high as you can see:


Related to this is my GPU usage. GPU 2 is under 99% load while GPU 1 is at like 50-70% load. It goes up and down:

Welcome to AMD crossfire.

The build I had before my current one had 2x 7970s, and ever after the frame pacing drivers it was more headache/hassle than it was worth. I had those same exact problems with BF4, nothing I tried fixed it. I just gave up, and when the demand for AMD cards skyrocketed for crypto mining, I sold them off and went back to a single-card setup (first a 290X, now a 780 Ti). Even with Nvidia, multi-GPU can be a pain, although not quite as much as AMD. I probably wont touch multi-GPU again for a while, I'm much happier with just 1 of whatever the fastest single-GPU is available at the time.

One thing you can do about the unbalanced usage is disable ULPS. This should make the two cards share the load equally and have identical usage. Why AMD still hasn't fixed that bug I don't know, but that's one workaround.

 

[sat1va]

It's fairly normal for your fps to decline in some areas of the map / action packed moments. I see my rig drop down to 60 fps is some areas. I play bf4 maxed out at 2560 by 1440, 4770k @ 4.2 and my 7970s at 1200 / 1500.

Afterburner claims that BF4 uses well over 3gb of my VRAM, i think it might be a bug. Although im on 2560x1440 maybe that's why.... Can anybody else with 7970x2 confirm this?

Your GPU usage does not look healthy, both should be running consistent with each other. Take both cards out, uninstall drivers then test / monitor both cards individually to make sure neither are faulty. Once confirmed put them both in together and do another clean install of drivers.

Make sure you have disabled ULPS disabled in the registry. I can't change voltage with MSI afterburner either, however sapphire trixx lets me run them both at 1.3Vs.

Hope this helps

 

[jjj751]

Thanks for the help guys. I decided to re-install MSI Afterburner and that seemed to have fixed the uneven GPU usage. They are now both a few percent from each other when under load. Still am not able to change voltages but I now have power limit control. I have noticed that the bios on the cards are different. Do you think that is the cause of me not being able to change voltages? Just played a couple maps on BF4 and it plays noticeably smoother now that both GPU's are working evenly. FPS average is now in the 90's.