just added second amd 7950, now low fps and gpu usage

[timaishu]

Specs: amd 6350, 8gb ram, two HIS iceQX2 7950, gigabyte 970a-ud3, nzxt hale82 850w psu.

 

I am running skyrim following the STEP guide along with an ENB. Previously with only one 7950, I was averaging about 30-45 fps depending on the area along with 99% gpu usage. Just got my second identical 7950 today and my fps tanked to around 20-24 and gpu usage is about 40% (I am getting this information using the Skyrim Performance Monitor application).

 

My only guess is the fact that my mobo only supports 16x/4x on the PCI-E ports. I actually have a 16x/16x mobo on the way, but I don't see how this would make a difference. Any ideas? I cant seem to find a solution with all the googling I did.

 

This is driving me nuts.

 

No my cpu is not bottlenecking, yes I updated my gpu drivers(fresh install), yes it performed perfectly before the second card was added. I tried viewing gpu usage with afterburner and its showing about 30-40% on one gpu and nothing on the second. I removed all overclocks.

Edited December 3, 2014 by timaishu

[HeyYou]

In crossfire, the cards will operate at the speed of the slowest card...... Disable crossfire, you will probably pick up some performance.

[timaishu]

Correct, with single gpu it works fine. What do you think the cause is for the slowness?

[ZeroKing]

It is reported by some people that ENB doesn't work well with AMD CrossFire.

 

Test your performance without ENB first, to see if your ENB is the cause of your low performance.

[timaishu]

So I restored my 100% vanilla skyrim folder and same thing, gpu usage is no higher than 30-35%.

 

The interesting thing is msi afterburner shows a similar picture, one gpu is hover around the % I mentioned but the other is at zero. I my computer detects the card as gpu-z shows them both, I was able to enable crossfire, and my 3d mark score went up around 4k points. Im am going to see if a reformat plus a 16x/16x mobo will fix the problem as I don't want to return the mobo, I would incur a 15 dollar restocking fee plus shipping. So I might as well keep it and sell off my old board to recoup some of the costs. Perhaps this might fix the problem, but Im not holding my breath. I might return the card anyways though if the ebay seller will allow, there is an insane amount of capacitor whine. My old card has no whine at all.

Edited December 3, 2014 by timaishu

[mfcfbro]

Try running with only the new card installed. If it runs slowly, you may have picked up a defective card. Especially if the symptoms carry over to other games.

Also it's worth mentioning that a lower bandwidth slot shouldn't affect it that much, but it is also chipset dependant.

[timaishu]

Yeah I wouldn't think its the slot, I actually ran my old card in the 16x slot and then the 4x slot and ran 3d mark and the results were off by only around 40points.

 

I just ran a game of BF4 and the results were the same, worse fps.

 

Check out this screen shot I took after the game. Something funny is going on here. Im actually a bit bummed that its not skyrim at fault, there is something else at play here.. Looks like, with bf4, that one card is being used around 70% I would guess and the other zero. With skyrim, one card was running around 30% and the other zero. I will do some experimentign tomorrow. Running just the new card to see what happens, and swapping the two cards into different slots.

 

http://i.imgur.com/VeGTJXy.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/5fpLqqP.jpg

Edited December 3, 2014 by timaishu

[mfcfbro]

The only real definitive test is to run the new card on it's own. If it is slow or buggy, get it replaced. If it works fine, I'll help you troubleshoot from there, it's my actual job. :p

PS: Skynet haha

[timaishu]

Thanks for the offer buddy. So far what I just did is ran a DDU full driver removal. I actually forgot about that piece of software as I have not used it in quite some time. Booted into safemode, ran ddu, fresh driver install. I will report back. Gonna play a few games and see what happens.

 

EDIT: Okay, some partial good news. Redoing the drivers fully from scratch fixed the issue of one gpu not firing up. I test BF4 and was on Ultra at 1440p and was getting around 40-50fps with +-100% gpu usage. So BF4 is working as its supposed to. Bad news with skyrim though is that its still stuck at 30ish% gpu usage even though its splitting the load between both gpus according to afterburner. My fps is still lower than on a single card. I will try the new card solo tomorrow and see what happens.

Edited December 3, 2014 by timaishu

[camaro_69_327]

Just putting this out there...

 

With Nvidia ....every single time I RE-install a driver it Defaults to SLI being disabled.

 

Have you tried Furmark?.....Furmark will test both cards at once, see if they both fill and heat to the same place in unison.

 

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EDIT : to add....Does not look like that motherboard is SLI/crossfire compatible?.....Can you link to a spec page that shows it IS compatible.....if NOT SLI/ Crossfire ready then shouldnt be working..??

 

Never mind found it on the spec page ...Flexible graphics capabilities - Up to 2 VGA cards are supported for 2 way AMD CrossFireX™ (running at x16, x4 bandwidth)

Edited December 3, 2014 by camaro_69_327