6870 Memory Clock too low

[ghop]

I recently bought a Sapphire 6870 and have been slightly disappointed with the performance to tell the truth. I've not noticed a massive difference coming from an 8800GTX and some games even seem to run worse. I've reinstalled the drivers countless times now. The funny thing is, the games FPS are fine, it's just the fact that the games (especially GTA4) have a sort of 'micro stutter' effect which gives me a bit of a headache; whilst the FPS is around 50-60, the game doesn't look smooth. Yesterday I thought maybe I should download GPU-Z and check the clocks, and for some odd reason, the memory clock maxes out at 283.5mhz (sits at about 100mhz idle) whilst the core goes up from 100 to 900 (as expected) when playing a game or running a benchmark.

Is it supposed to be this low or is my card faulty?

Thanks

 

[ghop]

To save energy when your not doing anything that too graphically straining on your PC newer cards will lower their clocks. They should shoot back up again when your playing a game etc.

As for the micro stutter it's a fault with almost all ATI cards and GTA IV mainly down to it being a bad port. As for anything else though there shouldn't be any problems.

Thanks for the reply, I realise that it lowers the clocks when there's nothing demanding going on, but isn't 283.5mhz far too low for the 6870? Is it not supposed to be 1050mhz?

EDIT: The 283.5mhz is what the memory clock is under load, it's around 100mhz without load

 

[ghop]

Indeed. I'm tempted to 'overclock' it to 1050mhz and see if there's any difference but I don't want to invalidate my warranty on a possibly faulty card Really don't know what to do here. Is there any way to turn the power saving crap off?

 

[ghop]

Blegh, that doesn't sound good, had my eye on the Sapphire 6870 and play GTA IV myself.

The odd thing is, the frame rates are about 2 times as much than what I got with the GTX on the same settings, it just seems like a less smooth experience. I'm kind of hoping upping the memory clock sorts it somewhat. I'll give a few programs a go when I get home.

Try running MSI Afterburner to monitor the clocks, it will record the highest the memory clock reaches, also you could try running FurMark to see how high the clocks are actually going.

Did you fully clean the nVidia drivers off before installing the 6870?

I'm using GPU-Z to monitor them at the moment but I'll give Afterburner a go. I ran a windowed furmark beside the GPU-Z and whilst the core shot up to 900, the memory wouldn't go above 283.5. Odd. The nvidia drivers were all uninstalled, I've also used Driver Sweeper to get rid of any remnants. The last uninstall I did I completely wiped all the ATI drivers too and at the moment I'm just running the ATI driver from windows update. GTA4 seemed slightly better, but still much much worse than I'd expect.

 

[ghop]

Oh Driver sweeper

Could be your problem, fubar's most installs

I had the problem before using Driver Sweeper I used it to remove every trace of the ATI drivers so I could reinstall. Seemed to have done that well.

Downloaded afterburner and that thinks that memory goes from 300 to 1050, so that all seems ok, still having problems with the card on GTA4 though. Despite using higher settings, the game looks worse than it did on lower settings on my 8800GTX. What would cause this? My greatest fear is that the cards ram is bad as I've noticed some very small white artifacts in DR2 but only when talking to people..

 

[ghop]

Hey, I just built my new systems last week with a sapphire 6870 and it shows as 283.5 Mhz max memory clock in GPU-Z 0.4.7 for me as well but as the card is performing as expected I assume its because GPU-Z does not fully recognize the HD 6XXX yet. I think it is purely a calibration issue with the sensor reading with the software, thats fair enough as its a 3rd party program and should be sorted soon.
CPU-Z 1.56 barely displays anything about these cards.


I would suggest checking CCC settings for any performance shortcomings, I had a performance hit when I allowed the drivers to scale the display resolution during my tinkering.
I have not tried GTA so cannot comment on that but if you get 15-16k score in vantage its as intended I would assume.


edit* - I have win7 64bit and using the official 10.10 drivers (no hot fix)

Same as me. What other parts are you running?

I'd like to try vantage, but I can't seem to get a trial key for it. I've been rejected so many times by the capatcha thing that I've given up.

Could someone please try this to see if it's just me who can't get a key?

http://service.futuremark.com/3dmvantage-trial.action