R9 290 bottlenecking OC'd X3430

[smeders]

Hi,

I have a Gigabyte R9 290 4GB Windforce edition card in my PC. However I've noticed some very odd performance with it. In GTA 4 its seemingly bottle necking my 6 year old Xeon X3430 OC'd to 3.8GHz! GPU will be on solid 100% most of the time and struggling to hit over 30fps sometimes and my CPU will only be on around 65-75%. In another game War Game Red Dragon, the 290 is all over the place. Have it on "insane" settings and one minute is at 100% to keep above 60fps then drops down to 80% then runs at 0% for a while even when i put more units on the map and mess about with the camera.

I know GTA 4 is a awful game on PC but surely a 290 should be able to keep it running over 60fps on 1080!? Do you think its faulty?


Thanks

[shaithis]

You really want to be looking at task manager when the CPU hits 100%. make sure that 90%+ of that time is occupied by the running game.

If you find it's less than that, then you need to track down a problem with background tasks occupying CPU resource......otherwise you may be hitting a limit of the CPU (although I can't think of many that should bottleneck an i5@3.8GHz)

[DanceswithUnix]

Just a thought, the CPU isn't slowing down due to getting too hot is it?

[kalniel]

Hi,

I have a Gigabyte R9 290 4GB Windforce edition card in my PC. However I've noticed some very odd performance with it. In GTA 4 its seemingly bottle necking by 6 year old Xeon X3430 OC'd to 3.8GHz! GPU will be on solid 100% most of the time and struggling to hit over 30fps sometimes and my CPU will only be on around 65-75%. In another game War Game Red Dragon, the 290 is all over the place. Have it on "insane" settings and one minute is at 100% to keep above 60fps then drops down to 80% then runs at 0% for a while even when i put more units on the map and mess about with the camera.

That's not evidence of CPU bottleneck by the way. Only way to see that is to change the speed of the CPU, keeping everything else the same, and seeing what the effect is. If your GPU is 100% loaded then that's further evidence (though not conclusively) that it's not CPU bottlenecked.

I know GTA 4 is a awful game on PC but surely a 290 should be able to keep it running over 60fps on 1080!? Do you think its faulty?

No. There's no guarantee a 290 should stay above 60fps in a game as poorly optimised as GTA4. Throwing more hardware at it won't always solve the issue either since it can be little things like swapping out data even when it's not technically needed, poor threading etc.

[smeders]

Apologies, may not be clear. It looks like the GPU in bottlenecking my CPU. If the CPU was bottling necking i would understand given its age. My CPU hits 65-75 tops on GTA 4 and no more than 40-50% on War Game. Yet my GPU is all over the place ranging from going 100% 1 second to 0% the next! on GTA 4 its mostly on 100%

[shaithis]

Apologies, may not be clear. It looks like the GPU in bottlenecking my CPU. If the CPU was bottling necking i would understand given its age. My CPU hits 65-75 tops on GTA 4 and no more than 40-50% on War Game. Yet my GPU is all over the place ranging from going 100% 1 second to 0% the next! on GTA 4 its mostly on 100%

Turn down some graphics settings

[kalniel]

Apologies, may not be clear. It looks like the GPU in bottlenecking my CPU. If the CPU was bottling necking i would understand given its age. My CPU hits 65-75 tops on GTA 4 and no more than 40-50% on War Game. Yet my GPU is all over the place ranging from going 100% 1 second to 0% the next! on GTA 4 its mostly on 100%

Sorry, I misread.

GPU bottlenecking is good. *Something* has to be the bottleneck, or you'd have infinite fps A GPU bottleneck is the norm for gaming and is preferable as you can adjust the settings and/or buy a better graphics card down the line, without having to upgrade a whole raft of support components.

[gupsterg]

@Smeders what are temps on the R9 290? it could be throttling.

[smeders]

Round 72-76, according to HWiNFO64 no signs of throttling. Also nowhere near the 90 limit I believe the 290 has. Im just confused how it can go from 100% to 0% to 88% to 100% then 0% for a while

[kalniel]

Round 72-76, according to HWiNFO64 no signs of throttling. Also nowhere near the 90 limit I believe the 290 has. Im just confused how it can go from 100% to 0% to 88% to 100% then 0% for a while

GPUs can sometimes have to wait for CPU/other data, particularly if there's a single threaded or hdd bottleneck. If you max out the CPU on a single thread it won't show 100% load because you still have idle cores, depending on the reporting tool.

Or they might not have to render anything new for a while and the load might drop.

[smeders]

GPUs can sometimes have to wait for CPU/other data, particularly if there's a single threaded or hdd bottleneck. If you max out the CPU on a single thread it won't show 100% load because you still have idle cores, depending on the reporting tool.

Or they might not have to render anything new for a while and the load might drop.

I have all cores displayed and none are hitting 100%. Only thing i can think of is maybe a HDD bottleneck? However war game runs smooth at 60FPS on 0% or 100% use and is around 70. Thats what im not getting

[kalniel]

I have all cores displayed and none are hitting 100%. Only thing i can think of is maybe a HDD bottleneck? However war game runs smooth at 60FPS on 0% or 100% use and is around 70. Thats what im not getting

I think you're basically reading too much into what's quite a rough analysis tool. If it's smooth then don't worry. If it's not smooth then you can investigate what might be causing the issue, but the % load is not a great way of doing that. You can overlay traces from the HDD, memory, CPU and GPU for eg. to see how they interact if you must, alongside tracking all the other processes going on. But you probably won't be able to do anything useful with the knowledge.

[smeders]

Ah ok fair enough! So the thing about the usage jumping all over the place on afterburner and HWiNFO is a non-issue?

[gupsterg]

My systems specs as in my profile plus current CPU OC 4.4GHz Cache 4.0GHz , XMP enabled , Sapphire R9 290 Tri-X GPU 1000Mhz RAM 1300MHz (5200MHz) , Win7 x64 SP1 + Catalyst 15.4 beta.

I had Steam / FRAPS / MSi Afterburner loaded plus no tweaking / disabling of stock windows services after a fresh install, I had done the -norestrictions comandline.txt to GTA IV.

GTA IV all settings maxed at 1920 x 1080 60Hz V-Sync OFF, small run of FRAPS straight after intro finish and gameplay begin:-

2015-04-28 23:17:40 - GTAIV
Frames: 9414 - Time: 149605ms - Avg: 62.926 - Min: 42 - Max: 97

Above log in MSi AB was at least 15min run IIRC, displayed on 20" 1680 x 1050 full screen size window.

Green line denote beginning of loadup of game from Steam, as first time used GTA IV faffing about in the menu meant intro start where you see blue line. I disabled some case fans GPU temp hit 75c with standard fan profile.

[smeders]

Textures arnt loading correctly either in gta 4! :/

[watercooled]

Firstly it's important to understand that words like 'ultra', 'insane' etc are completely arbitrary terms and tell us nothing about the underlying settings in the game engine. It's like 10 vs 11 on a volume control - there's no reason to think 11 on one system will be louder than 10 on another. In reality, the presets are just a specific selection of completely variable values selected by the game developer.

In many games, the 'ultra' preset is way beyond the point of diminishing returns for visual quality and on some like in this case it may be pushing the values to silly levels for little benefit. It's not hard to take an old game, manually modify the engine settings and kill performance on the fastest, most modern hardware available. It probably won't make it look much better though.

Unless you have reason to believe you should be getting better performance e.g. benchmarks from similar systems, just lower the settings. I think there are also lots of large mods for GTA which IIRC can improve both visual quality and performance - as others have said it's not a particularly well optimised game on top of what I've said.