[falkon114]

Hey everyone, my wife's GTX 650 started dying a couple weeks ago so I figured I'd upgrade my own card and give her my old GTX 660. So, I ordered an MSI R9 390 from Amazon.

I went through with DDU and uninstalled all my Nvidia drivers, then downloaded the latest driver suite from AMD, and now my games are performing absolutely terribly. As in, worse than my GTX 660 with graphics turned down.

Here's a video of what I'm talking about. This happened to be captured in game without me even knowing it was capturing, but it illustrates whats going on:
https://youtu.be/ulLY4OvUOlI?t=124

My build (And yes blah blah I know the CPU isn't great etc, but I want to know why my games are performing worse than before, with a better GPU, not an analysis of how my system could have been built)

AMDFX4170
16Gb RAM
ASRock 970Xtreme4
128SSD for OS
1.5TB 7200 platter drive for games
MSI R9 390 (tried both overclocking and staying stock)
SeaSonic M12II 620w Bronze
Windows 8.1x64

Here's a graph showing my resource monitor during games when this happens. Is my Disk IO causing this?

Pagefile and power settings:
https://imgur.com/a/QxIAL

Temps

Thanks

 

[GoLDii3]

What power supply do you have?

 

[falkon114]

Quote:

Originally Posted by GoLDii3

What power supply do you have?

Ah yeah I knew I forgot something. Updated in the OP.
SeaSonic M12II 620 Bronze

 

[Pandora51]

Temps are while gaming?

 

[falkon114]

Yes. I ran Unigine Heaven benchmark and the highest temp I saw on the GPU was 75, but I manually kicked fans up to 100% after that and they stayed around 72 for the duration of the benchmark.

I've also noticed that the GPU core clock generally stays around 300mhz, though during and after the benchmark they kicked up to the 1050mhz range, or whatever I set in Afterburner (1075 I think was the highest I saw, give or take) but gaming performance didn't improve anyway.

 

[Pandora51]

And benchmarks run fine or will the gpu underclock in every scenario?
Edit: Ah you wrote that already.

Anyways sounds like a driver issue.

 

[GTR Mclaren]

Do a full format of your PC

 

[infranoia]

It's a driver issue, but not necessarily Crimson that's at fault. Framerates are solid except when they are not. That's classic disk I/O blocking behavior, the perfmon even shows it.

Make sure your BIOS is the latest one from August in case there are any PCIe bugs, and make sure you're up-to-date with all other devices, and running in AHCI mode for that platter.

http://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/970%20Extreme4/?cat=Download&os=BIOS

And this sounds old-school crazy, but be sure to defrag your platter as well.

 

[Boinz]

Did DDU run in safe mode, and THEN you restarted? did you also uninstall geforce experience and any other nvidia things from the control panel?

 

[rdr09]

I see 125 C. Whatever it is . . . it is worth investigating. I'll start by using another app like HWINFO64 to verify. Could be your North Bridge. I also see a core maxing out at 100%. Could be a cpu dependent game that's making the gpu useless in some instances.

 

[falkon114]

Quote:

Originally Posted by infranoia

It's a driver issue, but not necessarily Crimson that's at fault. Framerates are solid except when they are not. That's classic disk I/O blocking behavior, the perfmon even shows it.

Make sure your BIOS is the latest one from August in case there are any PCIe bugs, and make sure you're up-to-date with all other devices, and running in AHCI mode for that platter.

http://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/970%20Extreme4/?cat=Download&os=BIOS

And this sounds old-school crazy, but be sure to defrag your platter as well.

I ran the ASRock BIOS update .exe utility and when my computer went to restart, it crashed horribly. It looks like it reset my SSD to IDE mode, so I changed it to AHCI and things have booted since. I did defrag my platter.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Boinz

Did DDU run in safe mode, and THEN you restarted? did you also uninstall geforce experience and any other nvidia things from the control panel?

Yeah I uninstalled all Nvidia things from the Control Panel prior to booting in safe mode and using DDU.
Quote:

Originally Posted by rdr09

I see 125 C. Whatever it is . . . it is worth investigating. I'll start by using another app like HWINFO64 to verify. Could be your North Bridge. I also see a core maxing out at 100%. Could be a cpu dependent game that's making the gpu useless in some instances.

I've noticed that this program has reported these insane temps for a lot of other people, so I don't think that's an issue but I'll try this tool as well, thanks. About the CPU dependency... the games i'm really noticing these issues (not that i've played any other except League of legends which has fine framerates.. with v-sync off) are in racind games, Grid 2 and DiRT Rally. Coincidentally, both are produced by Codemasters, and both of which have reported people with these issues. I found one XML file hack that made DiRT at least playable but still nowhere near the performance i'd expect.

Also, when I had the same settings in League of Legends as I did with my GTX 660, my framerate in teamfights would drop into the 20s... my 660 never went below high 40s. Same settings, same machine.

 

[Sand3853]

Your gpu clocks aren't going above 320mhz by the look of it. I suspect your card is stuck in ultra low power state or something similar. Your core clock max (in hwmonitor) should be much higher, which is why you are having problems in games. If you haven't yet, I'd suggest getting MSI Afterburner and running the riva tuner while you attempt a gaming session. That way you can at least confirm that either a.) HWmonitor is or is not displaying correct results and/or b) Your card is (or is not) clocking higher than 300mhz under load.

 

[falkon114]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sand3853

Your gpu clocks aren't going above 320mhz by the look of it. I suspect your card is stuck in ultra low power state or something similar. Your core clock max (in hwmonitor) should be much higher, which is why you are having problems in games. If you haven't yet, I'd suggest getting MSI Afterburner and running the riva tuner while you attempt a gaming session. That way you can at least confirm that either a.) HWmonitor is or is not displaying correct results and/or b) Your card is (or is not) clocking higher than 300mhz under load.

After I ran Unigine benchmark, I was able to see the core clock hitting the right frequencies in games.

Nonetheless, I had Amazon ship me a replacement, so I will install that tonight and see if, all other things unchanged, there's an increase in performance. And then I'll go from there.

Alright, I installed the replacement GPU. Here's what it looks like. There are some frames dropping in games, but things are playable. Maybe a faulty card previously, coupled with my weak CPU I guess.

Here are the Unigine results with no overclocking:
Settings:

Result:

Afterburner monitoring:

Does that seem pretty decent?

 

[falkon114]

Er, also I'm curious. This graphics card is supposed to have 8GB VRAM, no? Why is Unigine only picking up 4GB?...

 

[Sand3853]

That looks a lot better, and I'd think in line with what you would expect with an fx 4170 paired with a 390. Your overall limitung factor, as you know, is the poor single threaded performance of your cpu, but results look similar to my 8320 + 290x. Im sure if you clocked your chip up to 4.5 things would smooth out some.

Im also curious about the 4gb reading on the card... glitch on the programs part? Or do you happen to have a 4gb 390?

 

[falkon114]

I'll see about OCing the CPU and see what happens then.
Googling R9s with this issue it looks like a bug in UNigine itself. GPU-Z reports correctly.

If the proc is the limiting factor, whats the best AM3+ proc for gaming? FX8300?

 

[Sand3853]

I think either the 6300 or any of the 8 series fx chips would net you a solid gain over what you are currently running. I'm running an 8320 that runs 4.4ghz @ stock voltage and is currently sitting at 4.8. Paired with a 290x everything has been nice and smooth gaming wise, and not overly toasty either. That being said, the 6 series chips are nice in their own right, and the ones I've had in the past clocked even easier.

 

[neurotix]

Any Piledriver CPU would be better.

It doesn't matter if it's a 43xx or a 83xx really because most games still don't use more than 4 threads. Although, most games require a quad core minimum, and some won't run without being extremely choppy on a dual core (DA:O).

The core count isn't important, the speed of it is. A 5ghz 4370 will outperform a 4.5ghz 8350 in most games. And with less cores, your chances of getting a high overclock like that are better.

The FX-6300 might be the sweet spot, if you can't afford the 8350 and a good board needed to overclock it high (~$150 dollar board).

The problem with this is that for the same price as a FX-8350 and high end board to reach 5ghz, you could basically get a locked i5 and cheapo motherboard for it that will drastically outperform the FX in pretty much every game.

You really DO need a great motherboard with 8+2 phase VRMs, a great cooler and a LOT of electricity (power bill) to run an 8-core FX at 5ghz. I did it for over a year so I know. If you cheap out on the motherboard or the cooler, it will probably blow up.

A 5ghz FX still can't touch even a locked i5, especially Haswell or newer, in a lot of games. I switched and saw a huge fps increase even with my 4770k at stock.

 

[p4inkill3r]

You aren't going to be hitting super high frequencies on your motherboard, sadly enough. Taking your CPU now up a bit will give you tangible gains, but I wouldn't spend much more money (if any) to change chips utilizing that board.

Are you using 2x8GB or 4x4GB RAM sticks and are they all from the same kit?

 

[falkon114]

Quote:

Originally Posted by p4inkill3r

You aren't going to be hitting super high frequencies on your motherboard, sadly enough. Taking your CPU now up a bit will give you tangible gains, but I wouldn't spend much more money (if any) to change chips utilizing that board.

Are you using 2x8GB or 4x4GB RAM sticks and are they all from the same kit?

Thanks for the replies everyone.

I'm using 2x8GB sticks. Here's what that looks like in CPU-Z