7850 - low FPS in TF2

[KIA]

Q6600 @ 3GHz
8GB DDR2
MSI R7850 Power Edition
Catalyst 12.8

My FPS is dropping to just above 30 during lots of in-game activity in TF2. The GPU utilisation is often at 0.0%, spiking to 20% from time to time. Why isn't the game taking advantage of the 7850's processing power?

A couple of screenies with FPS, load & temp stats.

http://i.imgur.com/PmMCp.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/vhnDK.jpg

TF2 settings.

http://i.imgur.com/pUbag.jpg

Any ideas?

 

[Geckovich]

Turn multicore rendering back on. Your 7850 is being crippled by being chained to a 5 year old 3ghz single core CPU.

 

[HankScorpio]

Q6660 is a quad core cpu

 

[Geckovich]

But without multicore rendering you're limiting the game to one core.

Turn that on and the FPS will be more like 200+ with everything maxed.

 

[KIA]

I disabled multicore rendering because it was causing micro stutter during strafing. I'll enable and and see how it goes.

Thanks.

 

[Defy Belief]

Source games are way more reliant on cpu power than gpu power.

Did enabling it fix it?

 

[psychodil]

But without multicore rendering you're limiting the game to one core.

Turn that on and the FPS will be more like 200+ with everything maxed.

All his CPU cores are getting utilised if you look at the screenshots

 

[Geckovich]

I disabled multicore rendering because it was causing micro stutter during strafing. I'll enable and and see how it goes.

Thanks.

Let us know, I had the same stutter issue but it was fixed months and months ago. Since re-enabling it my FPS has been pinned at the 300 cap at quiet times, maybe dropping to 100 during busy moments.

 

[Geckovich]

All his CPU cores are getting utilised if you look at the screenshots

I've got to admit I didn't notice that, didn't know afterburner could show CPU usage.

 

[scrlk]

From the man himself (Robin Walker):

There are a variety of reasons, actually. Some of them are:
- Our engine is designed to run on as wide a range of computers as possible. Many of the machines sold today have fast CPUs, and very bad GPUs.
- Our character & facial animation system is all done on the CPU, because GPUs haven't had the functionality required to do it until very recently.
- TF2's character animations are more detailed than most other games. More CPU is spent on the character animation setup than anywhere else in the rendering pipeline.
- TF2 is a more complex simulation problem than our other games. Players create more separate entities (projectiles/sentryguns/etc) that require simulation than CS or DoD, for instance.

Hope that helps.

Robin.

 

[spoffle]

Multicore rendering is about multi GPU setups, not multiple main CPU cores.

It sounds like something is bottled necked somewhere, or could even be a software bug.

Despite its age, an overclocked Q6600 is more than enough for TF2 as well as most other games, and isn't going to be any sort of bottle neck for a 7850

 

[Marine-RX179]

All his CPU cores are getting utilised if you look at the screenshots

And none of it are at 100% (or close to it). It's not uncommon for games to have "activities" across the cores, even if the game uses less thread than that.