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Gtx770 on i5 2500k stuttering laggy

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I have just purchased another GTX770 for SLi and install went well, I run heaven benchmark and got nearly double my single card score and both cards at 99% so all is good there.

But in BF3 in large city maps 64 man servers I notice some really bad stuttering / lagging and my fps counter drops in some parts to 60fps? I have the SLi status bar on and most of the time is about 3/4 full or more.

I am running an i5 2500k @ 4.3ghz I have been reading a fair bit about the CPU bottlenecking the GPU's in the past so I gather this is what happening here? :confused:
I thought I might get some slight drops in performance here and there on different maps but did not think it would be as bad as this.

In Nvidia control panel I have sli on and for the BF3 I have set max performance instead of dynamic, fastest refresh rate, render ahead limit set to game preferred.

Can an i5 be this bad?
 
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I have just purchased another GTX770 for SLi and install went well, I run heaven benchmark and got nearly double my single card score and both cards at 99% so all is good there.

But in BF3 in large city maps 64 man servers I notice some really bad stuttering / lagging and my fps counter drops in some parts to 60fps? I have the SLi status bar on and most of the time is about 3/4 full or more.

I am running an i5 2500k @ 4.3ghz I have been reading a fair bit about the CPU bottlenecking the GPU's in the past so I gather this is what happening here? :confused:
I thought I might get some slight drops in performance here and there on different maps but did not think it would be as bad as this.

In Nvidia control panel I have sli on and for the BF3 I have set max performance instead of dynamic, fastest refresh rate, render ahead limit set to game preferred.

Can an i5 be this bad?

An i5 will definitely bottleneck your cards a little bit in this game, even more so if you're at 1080p. Overclock that cpu as much as you can or ideally upgrade to an i7 as battlefield really benefits from the extra threads as i7 has.

Aside from that it sounds like you're suffering from some microstutter maybe? Have you tried altering the render ahead limit or setting an fps limit? I used to have to do such a thing with my crossfire setup on occasion before the frame pacing drivers came out.
 
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Im confused as to why its happening its not a lack of cpu grunt imo. I could run bf3 maxxed out on an amd athlon ii 640 and an ati hd7850. Both a lot lower spec than your setup. Are your gpu drivers upto date? It could just be somthing that simple?

Saying that i have no experiance with sli whatsoever so cant offer much insight lol

How does the game run with one gpu?
 
Soldato
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I think rather than "shutter", it's probably the feeling of lack of smoothness having quickly drop from 100fps+ down to 60fps within seconds on his 144Hz monitor.

Have to say this, but for BF3 multiplayer the i5 2500K would be a bottleneck even if overclocked if you are pushing 120fps+ on a 144Hz monitor rather than 60fps on a 60Hz monitor.

From what I recall a i5 2500K overclocked to 4.7GHz+ would roughly hold minimum frame rate of around 70fps, so your 60fps with the i5 2500K only at 4.3GHz sounds about right. You could try overclocking your i5 2500K higher, however while it would definitely give some boost for frame rate, it won't be huge (most like frame rate dropping down to 70fps instead of your current 60fps). If you got a i7 instead (and also high overclock it), I would imagine it should bring the minimum frame rate up to 80-90fps+.

Im confused as to why its happening its not a lack of cpu grunt imo. I could run bf3 maxxed out on an amd athlon ii 640 and an ati hd7850. Both a lot lower spec than your setup. Are your gpu drivers upto date? It could just be somthing that simple?

Saying that i have no experiance with sli whatsoever so cant offer much insight lol

How does the game run with one gpu?
That's because your CPU only need to push frame rate to as high as the 7850 itself can chuck out (30-40fps), whereas OP need the CPU to push the frame rate to as high as the pair of GTX770 (120fps+) to not bottleneck. So basically his CPU need to push 3-4 times the frame rate of your CPU.
 
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An i5 will definitely bottleneck your cards a little bit in this game, even more so if you're at 1080p. Overclock that cpu as much as you can or ideally upgrade to an i7 as battlefield really benefits from the extra threads as i7 has.

Aside from that it sounds like you're suffering from some microstutter maybe? Have you tried altering the render ahead limit or setting an fps limit? I used to have to do such a thing with my crossfire setup on occasion before the frame pacing drivers came out.

Hi LtMatt why would a 1080p res make it more noticeable? Confused on that one lol :)
I hope it's not microstutter I thought Nvidia was good on this front.
Thanks for your time.
 
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Hi LtMatt why would a 1080p res make it more noticeable? Confused on that one lol :)
I hope it's not microstutter I thought Nvidia was good on this front.
Thanks for your time.

Because the gpu's won't need to work as hard to render the fps. At 1440p the bottleneck would not be as bad because the gpu's would be working much harder thus the gpu usage would be closer to 99% on each gpu.
 
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I think rather than "shutter", it's probably the feeling of lack of smoothness having quickly drop from 100fps+ down to 60fps within seconds on his 144Hz monitor.

Have to say this, but for BF3 multiplayer the i5 2500K would be a bottleneck even if overclocked if you are pushing 120fps+ on a 144Hz monitor rather than 60fps on a 60Hz monitor.

From what I recall a i5 2500K overclocked to 4.7GHz+ would roughly hold minimum frame rate of around 70fps, so your 60fps with the i5 2500K only at 4.3GHz sounds about right. You could try overclocking your i5 2500K higher, however while it would definitely give some boost for frame rate, it won't be huge (most like frame rate dropping down to 70fps instead of your current 60fps). If you got a i7 instead (and also high overclock it), I would imagine it should bring the minimum frame rate up to 80-90fps+.

.

Ok i kind of get this, Its a shame as a single GTX770 runs so smooth and now i'm getting the stutter/lagg :( would it be beneficial to go into the Nvidia control panel and set some settings in there to max to push the GPU more?
 
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Ok i kind of get this, Its a shame as a single GTX770 runs so smooth and now i'm getting the stutter/lagg :( would it be beneficial to go into the Nvidia control panel and set some settings in there to max to push the GPU more?

I have noticed the same thing before with my 670's and in my case, I had to lower the mesh quality a notch or two. After that, no problem.

When I looked into this a while back, some claimed that an update from dice caused it and that it was happening to i7 users as well.

I don't have any proof or links right now regarding this before anyone gets worked up. ;)
 
Soldato
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Yeah it's dice and their **** coding, months back when I played with an 2500k and 670 I never dropped below 60 FPS on maps like karkand. I installed the game recently with an 680 purchase and I was hitting as low as 40 fps on karkand when looking across the city.
 
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I have noticed the same thing before with my 670's and in my case, I had to lower the mesh quality a notch or two. After that, no problem.

When I looked into this a while back, some claimed that an update from dice caused it and that it was happening to i7 users as well.

I don't have any proof or links right now regarding this before anyone gets worked up. ;)

Hi Davanius,

If you get time could you tell me what sort of settings you have enabled on Nvidia control panel and are you running ultra in BF3 with mesh on medium?
 
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My settings in the control panel never change much after every driver install.

I only ever really change the refresh rate to 120hz, enable sli and physx set to auto.

Power management mode to prefer maximum performance in global settings and then set up the 3d vision.

I don't do anything else. Sometimes drivers don't perform as well as the previous ones so you could also try older ones.

If your other games are alright then try not to let bf3 issues ruin your experience. Sometime when I have issues with a game and I have tried everything to sort it with no avail, I chalk it down to the game.

Edit: It runs better on medium but I have settled for high. Please note that I have tried it with one card with the same results. In my opinion, it's bf3. I don't think that an i7 will solve it. But I accept that I could be wrong.
 
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OP I don't think its your CPU. Run the performance overlay in BF3 to make sure, but I would suggest you check your Nvidia Driver Version, ensure that VSync is off. Have you confirmed SLI is working as expected in othe games?
 
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OP I don't think its your CPU. Run the performance overlay in BF3 to make sure, but I would suggest you check your Nvidia Driver Version, ensure that VSync is off. Have you confirmed SLI is working as expected in othe games?

I am running 326.80 and i heard reports of them being very good with SLi.

Vsync is off and SLi is working.
Thanks
 
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After a quick googling, this is the first result.

http://battlelog.battlefield.com/bf3/forum/threadview/2832654490021812682/

Someone there mentions the same thing about mesh quality and others mention poor optimization. It's more or less the same results to what I found when searching for answers a while back.

Stuttering and lags could also be overheating of cpu etc so do check on that.

interesting read on Battlelog forums thanks for that, I will have a play tonight with mesh etc.. I hope BF4 is much more optimized for dual cards :rolleyes:

I do now understand that the GPu's are producing more than the CPU can cope with but still gutting.
 
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This is the main reason I always just buy the single most powerful GPU I can afford and don't bother with sli. Just too many issues with stutter and games that don't work well with it.

have to say if i had the money in the first place i would have gone 780 only, but then i here so much bout 50-70% gains in SLi i thought it would have worked out better for me :(

Now to save up for a 3770K and now i'm not going to change motherboard to get Haswell. :)
 
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Its a shame to be sure. I have a 680 SLI setup and it has executed flawlessly so far in an X58 system, especially for BF3 - I had some issues with Nvidia drivers, but they ironed them out eventually. Just upgraded to Z68 yesterday with i7 2600k - would be interesting to compare our respective results once I have her ready to rock.
 
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That's because your CPU only need to push frame rate to as high as the 7850 itself can chuck out (30-40fps), whereas OP need the CPU to push the frame rate to as high as the pair of GTX770 (120fps+) to not bottleneck. So basically his CPU need to push 3-4 times the frame rate of your CPU.

Ah right gottcha :)
 
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