5850 to 7850... no gains?

Bleek · 3 Apr 2012 at 13:21

I need some help here.

First off I upgrade from a 5850 in XP 32bit, I had to use the 6000 series driver to get the 7850 working as there's no 7's series support for XP (yet).

No performance gains noticeable.

So I upgrade to Win7 64bit on SSD, fresh install, new 12.3 driver. Same performance as before, no better/worse than a 5850.

:confused:

Masterdeadly · 3 Apr 2012 at 13:31

What games have made you think there's no gains?

schumi84 · 3 Apr 2012 at 13:31

What are the other specs of the system?

HeX · 3 Apr 2012 at 13:32

What's the rest of your system?

Even at stock the 7850 is a fair bit fastetr than. 5850, so there is something certainly not right.

Bleek · 3 Apr 2012 at 13:32

Masterdeadly said:
What games have made you think there's no gains?

I was using Tribes Ascend as the benchmark as I've been playing that so know (with the help of Afterburner) where the FPS dips are etc.

Bleek · 3 Apr 2012 at 13:33

schumi84 said:
What are the other specs of the system?

Phenom II x3 720 @3.4GHz, 4GB ram.

I know it doesn't exactly mean a lot but the Win7 experience gives my system a 7.3 out of 7.9.

Native rez of 2048x1152 (cpu should have less say).

Bleek · 3 Apr 2012 at 13:34

HeX said:
What's the rest of your system?

Even at stock the 7850 is a fair bit fastetr than. 5850, so there is something certainly not right.

Exactly - I was expecting ~30%.

paradigm · 3 Apr 2012 at 13:35

At that res, VRAM is probably your biggest bottleneck, how much memory do the two cards have?

wazza300 · 3 Apr 2012 at 13:35

Bleek said:
I need some help here.

First off I upgrade from a 5850 in XP 32bit, I had to use the 6000 series driver to get the 7850 working as there's no 7's series support for XP (yet).

No performance gains noticeable.

So I upgrade to Win7 64bit on SSD, fresh install, new 12.3 driver. Same performance as before, no better/worse than a 5850.

is it a sapphire card? you have to use the driver from sapphire website for xp

Bleek · 3 Apr 2012 at 13:36

paradigm said:
At that res, VRAM is probably your biggest bottleneck, how much memory do the two cards have?

5850 was 1GB
7850 is 2GB

I've always played at this rez and never really had any issues until recently, hence the upgrade.

Bleek · 3 Apr 2012 at 13:36

wazza300 said:
is it a sapphire card? you have to use the driver from sapphire website for xp

I've upgrade from XP to Win 7 now.

Also the driver on the Sapphire website doesn't work, just bog standard AMD driver - I spoke to Sapphire support and they even admitted they don't yet support XP!

wazza300 · 3 Apr 2012 at 13:39

i think 8gb of memory would help you with a 64bit os,4gb is limiting imo

Bleek · 3 Apr 2012 at 13:41

wazza300 said:
i think 8gb of memory would help you with a 64bit os,4gb is limiting imo

Well you say that but I'm not maxing the CPU, GPU or RAM in game.

Also on XP (using the 6000 driver) there was no increase, I was expecting a marked improvement running the correct driver on Win 7 but bugger all!

wazza300 · 3 Apr 2012 at 13:43

idk,seems very strange to have the same performance as a 5850,something somewhere is limiting you

checked in gpu-z to see the cards running @16 pci-e?

Bleek · 3 Apr 2012 at 13:53

Ok did a quick test.

CPU at ~70% across all 3 cores.
GPU peaks at 91% but goes from 55-80% most of the time
RAM use solid at 2GB.

So that's what, closer to 50% capacity overall than 100%!

Bleek · 3 Apr 2012 at 13:55

wazza300 said:
idk,seems very strange to have the same performance as a 5850,something somewhere is limiting you

checked in gpu-z to see the cards running @16 pci-e?

Reads PCI-E 3.0x16@16 2.0 - is that correct?

oweneades · 3 Apr 2012 at 13:55

A couple of questions if I may:

1) Was the HD5850 overclocked at all? Hexus have shown that a HD5850 clocked at 860/4800 can compare quite favourably with a stock HD7850.

2) Have you tried any other game than Tribes? It could be a specific issue with the game itself not liking the new GCN architecture (or the drivers not optimised correctly for the game).

3) Have you actually benchmarked the game using Fraps? Do a 5 minute run through of a repeatable section once on the HD5850 and once on the HD7850 and compare the results. It is quite possible that the performance improvement is there you just havn't noticed it.

4) Possibility of a CPU bottleneck despite the resolution.

frank_grimes · 3 Apr 2012 at 13:57

Bleek said:
Ok did a quick test.

CPU at ~70% across all 3 cores.
GPU peaks at 91% but goes from 55-80% most of the time
RAM use solid at 2GB.

So that's what, closer to 50% capacity overall than 100%!

CPU bottlenecking the GPU would be my guess...

Simular thing happend to me - bought i nice new shiny 6950 got then had to build the rest of the PC around it!

Now get constant 99% GPU usage.

Bleek · 3 Apr 2012 at 13:58

oweneades said:
A couple of questions if I may:

1) Was the HD5850 overclocked at all? Hexus have shown that a HD5850 clocked at 860/4800 can compare quite favourably with a stock HD7850.

2) Have you tried any other game than Tribes? It could be a specific issue with the game itself not liking the new GCN architecture (or the drivers not optimised correctly for the game).

3) Have you actually benchmarked the game using Fraps? Do a 5 minute run through of a repeatable section once on the HD5850 and once on the HD7850 and compare the results. It is quite possible that the performance improvement is there you just havn't noticed it.

1) 5850 was stock.
2) To be honest, not yet!
3) I have done this by eye not with fraps through a repeatable area of a map and the peak and low is nigh identical (1fps in it).

Is there another benchmark tool I can run to compare numbers against other users, do people still use 3DMark?

Bleek · 3 Apr 2012 at 13:58

frank_grimes said:
CPU bottlenecking the GPU would be my guess...

Simular thing happend to me - bought i nice new shiny 6950 got then had to build the rest of the PC around it!

I'll bump it up to 3.5GHz and see what happens.