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306.97 WHQL release

Rusty0611 said:
Well you don't have to believe it but it's true :D. BF3 MP64 is quite heavily CPU bound actually for some reason. If they aren't running i7's they'll be ever so slightly bottlenecked.

How else would you explain my jump in 10-15% in GPU usage on the same system? Gregster found the same thing when he moved to X79 although I believe his usage readings are a little more over the place.

An i5 is a nice chip, however if you want the utter max from your system and you play BF3 a lot then an i7 is better to get the max GPU usage. Some people are happy to take the 85% scaling with SLI as oppose to chugging more money on a CPU.

As I said, I am somewhat speaking from experience and I was perfectly happy with my set up with an i5 2500k @ 4.5 and SLI 680's. I then sold my CPU and motherboard and upgraded to Z77/Ivy for less than £100. The bump from i5 to i7 and PCI-E 2.0 and 3.0 was about 3-5% in BF3. Not worth it on its own but the reason was the releasing of the slight bottleneck and then minuscule bump from PCI-E 3.0.
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I agree with Rusty on this. On my 2500K @ 4.6, my GPU's would only run at around 85% max but since going to X79 on a 3930K chip, GPU usage is now 99% on both GPU's. I thought it was just bad drivers (not scaling well in this game) on BF3 but was surprised to see that happening.

It still could be driver related but I now get 2 GPU's running at 99%
 
hyperst said:
Well, this is something I found

http://static.techspot.com/articles-info/458/bench/CPU_02.png

To me it just looks like BF3 is just bad with SLI, the only thing that holds it back is a dual core cpu, either that or I got to sell my 3570k and get a 3770k:eek:
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Well I've never had anything but excellent SLI scaling in BF3. Other games can be a little less robust but generally decent.

Bear in mind before upgrading that I believe you'll see 5% FPS jump at the very best in BF3. That's like a minimum of 60 to a minimum of 63 :(.

Not worth it other than the principle of getting the utter max from your cards. You may even get less of a boost with SLI 480's as in theory the CPU bottleneck will be even smaller than what it already is as 480's aren't as fast as 680's.

If I was in your position I wouldn't bother.
 
Just installed - SLI 6** series users... any of you not going up from 'idle' clocks?

Mine are stuck at ~750 Mhz. They should be 1270 Mhz. It's like the boost is broken :D.
 
I have seen usage as low as 50% on both cards today, not impressed really, may as well be using 1 card, think next thing i upgrade will be gpu, to a single one and forget about dual gpu setups forever
 
But is this usage because you have vsync on and it's reaching the right amount of FPS with only ~50% load? I often see low load percentages on quad SLI 690s when vsync is on.
 
Installed them yesterday and 7-9-13 knocking an wood all seems fine even brought my 3dmark11 performance up a bit again.
 
Still having some 3dvision issues, like there are games if I alt-tab out of them, then alt-tab back in, it will never go back into 3d mode, have to quit the game and reload it.

Miles better than it was though, this is just a mild inconvenience by comparison.
 
topdog@OC said:
Still having some 3dvision issues, like there are games if I alt-tab out of them, then alt-tab back in, it will never go back into 3d mode, have to quit the game and reload it.

Miles better than it was though, this is just a mild inconvenience by comparison.
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I don't know if they can fix that - I think it's the way it just is with the screen effectively changing mode along with the drivers.
 
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