Gtx770 on i5 2500k stuttering laggy

ashmanuk67 · 19 Sep 2013 at 08:10

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?

ashmanuk67 · 19 Sep 2013 at 09:14

LtMatt said:
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.

ashmanuk67 · 19 Sep 2013 at 11:08

Marine-RX179 said:
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?

ashmanuk67 · 19 Sep 2013 at 11:23

Davanius said:
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?

ashmanuk67 · 19 Sep 2013 at 12:08

Random Guy said:
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

ashmanuk67 · 19 Sep 2013 at 12:51

Davanius said:
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.

ashmanuk67 · 19 Sep 2013 at 12:55

IvanDobskey said:
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.

ashmanuk67 · 19 Sep 2013 at 14:53

Random Guy said:
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.

I would be very interested in your thoughts on your upgrade

Also i will give the 327.24 a go, you never know

ashmanuk67 · 19 Sep 2013 at 22:58

Well an interesting update to my issue

I did turn MESH down in BF3 but could not see much change.
I then downloaded the latest Nvidia beta driver 327.24 this has made it better but overall still laggy and stuttering

Then i followed a link from the Battelog forums kindley posted by Davanius

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pl3u9eiskM4

Please have a look at this as i done what the guy said in the video and this has made a huge difference :eek:

CPU CORE PARKING never heard of this before but for me it has made BF3 run much better.

Have you guys done this?? if so did make your BF3 run better?

ashmanuk67 · 20 Sep 2013 at 19:52

The way it's running at the moment I don't feel the need to upgrade my processor but I shall see how BF4 plays

Thanks for the link Random Guy

ashmanuk67 · 21 Sep 2013 at 08:09

Mmm ok we'll sounds like there is room for improvement

I think I need to start selling stuff on the bay lol

Why an i7 2600k? I can only see 3770's on OC's

ashmanuk67 · 22 Sep 2013 at 22:25

LtMatt said:
You shouldn't be getting stuttering with an i7. What is all this talk of core parking? I don't remember having to do anything like this when i was on Windows 7 to get smooth performance in Battlefield 3. The game is not demanding at all any more, even at 1440p.

On certain maps with lots of players i do feel its quite laggy just something not right, But CPU Core Parking has made a big difference

Can anyone recommend a place to buy i7 2600k or i7 2700k??

ashmanuk67 · 23 Sep 2013 at 08:10

shankly1985 said:
This is probably because you using High performance power setting... a lot of people forget this also disables core parking

Lol ok so there's me hacking the registery and all I had to do was the above :rolleyes:

ashmanuk67 · 23 Sep 2013 at 08:39

Do what LtMatt said and enable the in game monitor as this will show you how your CPU & GPU work together.

ashmanuk67 · 23 Sep 2013 at 15:16

Please guys don't mind me I love to learn new things

Regarding the renderperfvisiable 1 or what ever it is

my GPU and CPU are very close together though the CPU does spike more than the GPU, so is this good??

ashmanuk67 · 24 Sep 2013 at 08:17

Hi LtMatt, my CPU and GPU are very close together and low down the bar graph, the CPU does spike and jump around a lot more.
Answer to your question is the game does run smooth over 90% of the time which I think should be expected, we'll the 10% that is

Reading up on the render.perfoverlayvisible 1 I'm actually quite impressed with my i5 2500k

but I think I would like the extra threads of an i7 26/2700

ashmanuk67 · 24 Sep 2013 at 08:46

We'll funny you say that

I never get 99-100% usage anyways, when I run GPU-z I set GPU to average and on both cards are around 50-68% usage.
So looks like I really do need an i7

ashmanuk67 · 24 Sep 2013 at 09:06

LtMatt said:
You're missing out on 20-50% usage per gpu.

Please excuse my ignorance here but does this mean the game will run smoother/better or your just using more power from the GPU's ?

ashmanuk67 · 24 Sep 2013 at 14:14

LtMatt said:
In your case and judging by the thread title, id say both.

True but i have mostly sorted out the stutter by doing this core parking thingy

So now i just need to make both cards run to here max performance as poss.

Would you or anyone else say it would be better to go used i7 2600k or a new 3770k??