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R9 280X - High FPS Low Smoothness

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31 Oct 2013
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After a lot of messing around trying to get hold of a R9 280X TOXIC edition from Sapphire I gave up and went with a Powercolor 280X. It was cheaper but it's the same board so I thought it would be ok.

I was wrong. I've had nothing but problems with this card since I installed it. After removing every trace of Nvidia from my system it ran better but still didn't feel right, so I caved and formatted + reinstalled Windows 7 x64, installed all the latest drivers (from Guru3D ironically - because the AMD website was handing out a corrupt version which threw up an RSIS error) and the performance isn't much better.

So I've got most of my games reinstalled and I start to test them out, at first it seems fine but *something* just doesn't look quite "right" about the picture. It was really hard to put my finger on but to put it into context I've just come from an nvidia GTX 660 so I was expecting big improvements and this is really disappointing.

Basically AMD seems to have 'puffed up' the raw FPS numbers at the expense of smoothness of gameplay. That's my theory anyway because even at the same resolution on the 660, it was very slow, but it still played *smoothly*. My Powercolor R9 280X on the other hand is telling me via FRAPS that it's pumping out a solid 60+fps but my eyes and motor feedback from the screen are just screaming at me that something is off.

FPS were about 30% higher than my GTX660 which is roughly what I expected from benchmarks. Also, I can't measure for micro stutter but the juddery "speediness" (not a good adjective I know) became apparent after a few minutes playing it.

FURTHERMORE: I cannot overclock my monitor any longer. I comfortably overclocked my 27" 1440p monitor to 120Hz. With AMD it gets to barely 85 before it just freaks out and (thanks AMD drivers) it does not take well to my hot plugging/unplugging monitors.

To summarise I'm so ****ed off with AMD right now, either the card itself or the drivers are just straight up nowhere near ready. I feel (as someone with 20/20 perfect eyesight, been playing with graphics cards since the FX5200) that the R9 280X is a real let down. The only way I can describe it is... kind of like as if the card is hosing the monitor with FPS to the detriment of the less benchmarkable sense of 'smoothness', I'm not particularly talking about frame rate variability necessarily but I'm struggling to come up with reasons why it feels so different from my 660.

If anyone can shed any light on this or has any fixes please let me know before I just RMA this card and get a 780 instead. Does anyone know what this could be down to?



This was running on a i5 [email protected]
250Gb SSD Samsung EVO
27" QX2710 Evolution II the card is 24 hours old and installed on a fresh copy of W7 x64.
Firstrike: 6847
Cloudgate: 13069
Ice Storm: 95630

8Gb DDR III Ram
R9 280X Powercolor Radeon 3Gb
27" QX2710 Monitor
250Gb Samsung EVO

http://postimg.org/image/5xye3scr5/ screenshots
 
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Have you got the cards power limit set at +20% in CCC or afterburner?
Interesting you single that out LtMatt. Powercolor has their own propietary tool, powertune or something, so I used that. I tried a very conservative overclock and didn't see any perceptible improvement so I set it back to default.
 
Caporegime
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Interesting you single that out LtMatt. Powercolor has their own propietary tool, powertune or something, so I used that. I tried a very conservative overclock and didn't see any perceptible improvement so I set it back to default.

Leave the card at stock clocks. Use AMD's CCC overdrive feature and set the power limit at +50% and click apply. Now try some games. Any improvement?
 
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Soon as I get home I'll do exactly that. May I ask what it is exactly that makes you think the power limit may have something to do with the (I realise it's not specific enough) fast-but-not-smooth kind of results I'm getting?
 
Caporegime
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Soon as I get home I'll do exactly that. May I ask what it is exactly that makes you think the power limit may have something to do with the (I realise it's not specific enough) fast-but-not-smooth kind of results I'm getting?

It could be that the card might be throttling. Its a boost card and if you don't add some power limit when overclocking, or maybe even at stock, you might see the core clock dropping a bit when under heavy load. That would cause the symptoms you describe.
 
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Could it be that what you are noticing isn't the graphics card, but the difference between 60/85hz and 120hz?

That's a really good point.

I'm pretty sensitive to changes in refresh rate and fps so it's certainly possible. But the thing is that I was playing on a GTX 660 before now and that was perceptively smoother ingame despite the fps being lower. Obviously wasn't getting +60Hz in battlefield 4 with it that's for sure.

Sounds like it's kind of hard to separate the mixture of fps/refresh rate/drivers to work out just what is making this feel so rough in comparison.
 
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I hope you sort this out mate as I don't think that anything is wrong with amd hardware or even software at the moment. I had a gtx 670 sli setup recently and my last cards have been nvidia due to the smoother experience to my eyes.

I use a 120 asus 27" and this 7970 that I bought has been a dream. Amd drivers have really improved and I now believe that my gaming experience is smoother than even with the single 670 card, so much so that I though motion blur was enabled on bf3.

I don't agree that amd puffed up the numbers at the expense of smoothness though, and your firestrike score seems low. My 670 was 6265 and the 7970 is 8658 so something has gone wrong somewhere.

Hang in there mate.
 
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Hey Davanius,

When I ran 3DMark and the score came out as... "Better than 72% of the computers tested" I was kind of disappointed too, I mean a brand spanking new 280x is only better than 2/3's of the competition? In fact the first time I ran the benchmark it came out at "Better than 75%" so that was odd too. Also: The card has some bitching coil whine. Think whacking up the power limit, reseating the card and running a few benchmarks is in order. Now that I think about it, can anyone else confirm what kind of 3DMark scores a bog standard 280X should be pulling? Davanius's results here seem to indicate that mine is on the very low end of normal or even lower.
 
Caporegime
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The sort of people who run 3D Mark are enthusiasts though.

Compare it to what people have on the Steam survey and you are probably in the top 10% of GPU power.

The majority of people have Intel 3000/4000 inbuilt graphics!
 
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http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18485414

Look in there mate at the 7970's even though the lowest most likely has a small overclock.

Am I right in thinking that your card boosts to 1ghz?

If so maybe the card might be defective and if the coil whine is really bad, can you dsr it?

http://www.legitreviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/3dmark-firestrike-645x1123.png

The 280X is pulling around 7500, my Firestrike score was 6847. Pretty small difference, could be down to the fact that it's a Powercolor version but I don't know.

Considering just sending it back and getting a Palit GTX 780 Super JetStream 3 GB http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/palit_geforce_gtx_780_super_jetstream_review,1.html instead, compares very favourably to a Titan.
 
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Do whatever makes you happy mate, don't box yourself in waiting if you have a time limit for return especially if you are not really feeling the amd card.

Again, amd has come a long way recently with their drivers and smoothness in my opinion. I can't tell the difference between the two rigs that I have in gaming. One has a 860 i7 overclocked to 3.6ghz and a gtx 670 and the other with a 2600k @ 4.5 and a 7970 matrix.

All the best.
 
Soldato
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@ÜberTakter

Don't use the Powercolor tool. Is not that good imho and tried it with my 7950s PCS+ (2)

Wipe it out, and use MSI Afterburner. Set it to unlock the voltage (etc) and crack it up to +% more power


Deactivate the CCC profile also (overdrive, everything), so it will not conflict with the Afterburner one.
 
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