7990 + 7970 Trifire Choppiness/Stuttering

[DavieJG]

Hi guys,

I recently build a new system based on X99 and a 5820k.

I took the 7970 from my previous build and paired it with a 7990 from the MM to give a nice big graphical boost to go with my core system upgrade.

My favourite game is BF4 which i play at 1440p 60Hz. When I run just the 7990 I get pretty impressive frames. I cap it at 100fps to ensure it never gets near dropping below 60 for a seemless experience during the epic moments.

I use 90 FOV and a mix of ultra/high/low to give the best balance between eye candy and actually being able to see the enemy. I've also started playing with the oversampling options and I'm impressed at how much nicer the game looks so I'd like to dial this right up (150%+) and utilise my 7970 in trifire.

However, at pretty much any settings the trifire feels really choppy compared to the crossfire. It says it generates more frames just it just feels bad.

I know frame pacing etc isn't supposed to be perfect but i thought it had come a long way and that a major title like bf4 would support this well (DX11).

Does anyone have any experience with trifire in general or multicard with bf4 and know any settings to tweak to improve the experience or do i just right it off as a bad job?

Cheers.

TL;DR

7990 + 7970 is choppy/stuttering in bf4. Any tips for a smoother experience?

 

[Woodsta888]

I don't think capping at 100 helps with not going down to 60fps. Capping will just not make your gpu's run flat out and capping will reduce some screen tear the more you exceed your monitor's hz rating and is sometimes used to help in reducing stutter by limiting to one frame under the monitor hz but this can induce input lag. I'm no expert though

Xfire with 2 cards really is great. Any more and this is where it starts to get poor. Especially I think on the older 7 series.

Are you using Mantle or DX11 in BF4? And which frame pacing method if man? You need to get the GPU & CPU graph up in game and see what is causing the stutter. Green = GPU and yellow is the CPU. perfoverlay.drawgraph 1 in the console. Mantle will be more fluid but may not be the fix to the current stutter.

I had to go back to the WHQL drivers before last WHQL's as they ran BF4 better for me. 14.4? (can't remember)

I take it you have a 60hz monitor @ 1440p or a swift?. If 60hz then a 7990 should run the game at max at 60hz. What PSU are you running?

I'd turn off resolution scaling for now to get trifire working smoothly before adding in more stuff. I'd reinstrall drivers using Display Driver Uninstaller (DDU) and reinstall the latest drivers. Get the CPU & GPU graph up in game and note which is coinciding with stutter. Experiemnt with mantle and it's two framepacing methods or even try off. Try limiting the frames to 1fps under you monitor hz so 59 for a 60hz monitor. (This fixed stutter on my freinds 290) Failing this I'd pull out the 7990 and get it running smoothly on it's own then add the 7970 back in later without frame limiting. If you ad or remove the 7970 I think you should uninstall and reinstall the drivers every time you change the number of GPU's.

Also HAve a look in teh BF4 Benchmark thread and the 7990 owners thread.

 

[LtMatt]

Hi guys,

I recently build a new system based on X99 and a 5820k.

I took the 7970 from my previous build and paired it with a 7990 from the MM to give a nice big graphical boost to go with my core system upgrade.

My favourite game is BF4 which i play at 1440p 60Hz. When I run just the 7990 I get pretty impressive frames. I cap it at 100fps to ensure it never gets near dropping below 60 for a seemless experience during the epic moments.

I use 90 FOV and a mix of ultra/high/low to give the best balance between eye candy and actually being able to see the enemy. I've also started playing with the oversampling options and I'm impressed at how much nicer the game looks so I'd like to dial this right up (150%+) and utilise my 7970 in trifire.

However, at pretty much any settings the trifire feels really choppy compared to the crossfire. It says it generates more frames just it just feels bad.

I know frame pacing etc isn't supposed to be perfect but i thought it had come a long way and that a major title like bf4 would support this well (DX11).

Does anyone have any experience with trifire in general or multicard with bf4 and know any settings to tweak to improve the experience or do i just right it off as a bad job?

Cheers.

TL;DR

7990 + 7970 is choppy/stuttering in bf4. Any tips for a smoother experience?

Battlefield 4 using DirectX and 3/4 gpu's is never a pleasant experience. If you use 3/4 gpu's I would highly recommend using the Mantle API from the video options menu, it is buttery smooth no matter how many gpu's you have in your system.

The one drawback with Battlefield 4 is Mantle does use more video memory, so you may have to dial back the settings a tad to avoid going over the video memory limit, which will eventually cause some minor hitching.

My advice would be to enable the Mantle API from the video menu options, apply and restart. Then place this User.Cfg file in the BF4.exe folder. This will bring up an ingame OSD which will allow you to monitor FPS and most importantly, video memory usage under Mantle. You can now tweak the image quality settings to find the optimal settings for your setup.

Here is 4x290X 8GB cards at stock in Battlefield 4 3840x2160P at Ultra Preset +x4AA.

 

[DavieJG]

I've only experimented using dx11 as i never had a good time with mantle on my previous system but I'm willing to give it another go. I always run with cpu graph, network overlay, the works enabled. With two cards the CPU graph remains flat, maybe an occasional bump but nothing that translates to a hitch in game. There are some small spikes on the GPU graph also but again nothing that can be felt.

When I go to 3gpus I see slightly larger CPU spikes with a corresponding small GPU spike. It shouldn't be big enough to drop the frame rate low enough for me to notice but it kinda feels like the game stops for a split second.

I'll try your user.cfg to mine. It will be interesting to see what's in there that I don't have.

I think my steps are:

1. Switch to mantle/new user.cfg
2. Test with 2 gpus low/med/high
3. Test with 3gpus low/med/high
4. Dial settings up/down to maintain <3gb vram.

 

[rtho782]

I had the same trifire setup at 1600p60 and later 1440p144 and absolutely hated it. It was an awful mess of microstutter even when I had decent FPS, stupid levels of noise/heat.

When I got my first 980, I was much happier with my experience, even though a single card was overall slower than my trifire setup.

I think with 290's you'd have a better experience (XDMA etc) but non-XDMA crossfire is a bit broken imho.

 

[DavieJG]

I've heard that the bandwidth limit of the old crossfire link allows 4Mps @ 60hz so theoretically 1440 should be OK as that's 3.7M. Both of your setups exceeded this limit so not surprised it was always troublesome

 

[DavieJG]

Switched over to mantle and WOW the difference. Game feels smooth, responsive and looks absolutely stunning.

I tweaked around with various settings and it does go a bit crazy if it hits the vram limit.

The settings I'm using shows around 2.5GB used and this only grows around a few MB a round so it would have to be a seriously long session to run into issues.

Given that this is my favourite title i'm now more than happy with my purchase given it was a relatively cheap upgrade.

Thanks for all the help guys. Very simple fix in the end!

 

[Final8y]

Battlefield 4 using DirectX and 3/4 gpu's is never a pleasant experience. If you use 3/4 gpu's I would highly recommend using the Mantle API from the video options menu, it is buttery smooth no matter how many gpu's you have in your system.

On the 7 series DX11 in bf4 is ok but Mantle is much nicer.
But on the 3x290s on even DX11 BF4 is a pleasant experience for me and Mantle is monumental experience.

 

[Final8y]

Switched over to mantle and WOW the difference. Game feels smooth, responsive and looks absolutely stunning.

I tweaked around with various settings and it does go a bit crazy if it hits the vram limit.

The settings I'm using shows around 2.5GB used and this only grows around a few MB a round so it would have to be a seriously long session to run into issues.

Given that this is my favourite title i'm now more than happy with my purchase given it was a relatively cheap upgrade.

Thanks for all the help guys. Very simple fix in the end!

Also you may be using an old bf4 Mantle cache, so i would delete those 2 files here.
C:\Users\****\Documents\Battlefield 4\cache and delete MantlePipelineCache and MantlePipelineCache2.

 

[Final8y]

I had the same trifire setup at 1600p60 and later 1440p144 and absolutely hated it. It was an awful mess of microstutter even when I had decent FPS, stupid levels of noise/heat.

When I got my first 980, I was much happier with my experience, even though a single card was overall slower than my trifire setup.

I think with 290's you'd have a better experience (XDMA etc) but non-XDMA crossfire is a bit broken imho.

MyTrifire 290s is much smoother than my Trifire 7950s.

 

[Marine-RX179]

MyTrifire 290s is much smoother than my Trifire 7950s.

lol you don't say.

If it doesn't, they should have gone right back to the retailer for a refund

 

[Final8y]

lol you don't say.

If it doesn't, they should have gone right back to the retailer for a refund

LOL! the thing is was not expecting to see so much of a difference, i had low expectations as i have never seen such a jump in smoothness before and maybe it will take A-sync for me to see another.

 

[Marine-RX179]

LOL! the thing is was not expecting to see so much of a difference, i had low expectations as i have never seen such a jump in smoothness before and maybe it will take A-sync for me to see another.

I think probably the better frame pacing on the 290 make a difference, especially comparing to the 7000 series when crossfiring. I guess in a way we got Nvidia to thank for kicking up a fuss about the "poor" fame pacing on the 7000 series card, and we got better cards as a result.

Meanwhile Nvidia themself launching new cards like 970 that have much worse frame pacing than the 600 series, due to how Nvidia seek to cut down the spec to the bare minimum (while still make it seem attractive enough) using weird non-traditional approach, and making it a "poor build card" comparing to the 670.

For the sake of marketing the 970 as a 4GB card, they actually made the card having 3.5GB on 224-bit bus and 512MB on 32-bit bus, thus making it inferior to what a 970 3.5GB on 256-bit bus would had been...

670 didn't have so much of these coil whine and stuttering issues...really feeling that Nvidia is pulling a "Corsair" these days...

 

[LtMatt]

Switched over to mantle and WOW the difference. Game feels smooth, responsive and looks absolutely stunning.

I tweaked around with various settings and it does go a bit crazy if it hits the vram limit.

The settings I'm using shows around 2.5GB used and this only grows around a few MB a round so it would have to be a seriously long session to run into issues.

Given that this is my favourite title i'm now more than happy with my purchase given it was a relatively cheap upgrade.

Thanks for all the help guys. Very simple fix in the end!

On the 7 series DX11 in bf4 is ok but Mantle is much nicer.
But on the 3x290s on even DX11 BF4 is a pleasant experience for me and Mantle is monumental experience.

 

[DavieJG]

Also you may be using an old bf4 Mantle cache, so i would delete those 2 files here.
C:\Users\****\Documents\Battlefield 4\cache and delete MantlePipelineCache and MantlePipelineCache2.

How would these get outdated? My trifire PC is only a month old. Is it likely to have out of date files in that period? Did they come from a previous mantle version?

 

[LtMatt]

How would these get outdated? My trifire PC is only a month old. Is it likely to have out of date files in that period? Did they come from a previous mantle version?

It won't do any harm to delete them, but it's unlikely to be the cause of any problems. They will be recreated when the map loads.