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Bottleneck....680 sli

What is wierd is when reducing AA I can get the green line to follow the yellow, but I don't see any real FPS improvement, just less gpu utilisation....

I think CPU is playing a big part. But I also think we'll see some future driver improvements.
 
lnoton said:
What is wierd is when reducing AA I can get the green line to follow the yellow, but I don't see any real FPS improvement, just less gpu utilisation....

I think CPU is playing a big part. But I also think we'll see some future driver improvements.
Click to expand...

I don't know.
If the CPU is a bottleneck then reducing AA wont give any fps gain because that is entirely GPU. You may as well go into the Nvidia control panel & turn on anything that will give you better IQ. Most things in there are entirely GPU dependent so this shouldn't lessen your performance but may use the extra % you have available on you GPU cores :)
 
It's a tricky one, some pain in the arse really. It doesn't happen in Single Player or Co-op, only in MP. It's worse on bigger maps than smaller ones but it still happens in the weirdest of places none the less. It also only happens at 1200p and below. I haven't seen this issue in Eyefinity or 2560x1440/1600, if you have this issue at these high resolutions please let us know!

With people from both sides having the same problem it's pointing to either extremely poor programming whereas the game can't push out more than a certain FPS in any given situation at any time.

For example, I was practicing flying on an empty 64 player Caspian Border CQ and when I landed on the road there was a lot of trees next to me on the left (not graphically demanding) and the antenna on my right (can't be much more demanding).

Out of nowhere GPU's drop from ~120fps at 99% to ~120fps at ~85% usage on both. When I tabbed out and checked CPU all 8 cores were about 65%. So why does this happen? If only we knew :p

It is definitely balanced out in the sense that it keeps it >97% in places where it would drop to sub 90 but it's still happens in others but usage is increased a small bit.
 
chief barker said:
Cheers for that Dave. ;)

I am due an upgrade so I wonder what CPU will lift that bottleneck?

Easier option for me would be a 980X 6 core. But would that help?

Or go balls out with a completely new mobo. cpu and ram?
Click to expand...

Give me a day or two to test a very special cherry picked i7 920 that i have purchased, guaranteed to oc to 4.5ghz on air, was half the price of 980X and
7.5+ GT/s QPI Bus Speeds.

I have same setup with 2x 7970 at 2560x1440 solid 60fps vsync running everything maxed at 3.8ghz (5 to 10 fps more at 4.1 ghz vsync off), this chip just made better sense than spending upwards of £600 to get virtually the same fps in games (dont drop below 60fps in any game anyway to much GPU POWER)

I only purchased the chip because i thought it was failing oc, but i got some 2000mhz mem and now the oc is fine again. ( Funny really been running 4ghz with 12 gig 1600mhz mem for 18 months before it started crashing)

Cannot see where all this bottlenecking is leading anyway with vync on at 60 fps maxed 2560x1440 you cannot get any smoother even if you had a 2700k at 5ghz or am i missing something.
 
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zuludawn said:
Give me a day or two to test a very special cherry picked i7 920 that i have purchased, guaranteed to oc to 4.5ghz on air, was half the price of 980X and
7.5+ GT/s QPI Bus Speeds.

I have same setup with 2x 7970 at 2560x1440 solid 60fps vsync running everything maxed at 3.8ghz (5 to 10 fps more at 4.1 ghz vsync off), this chip just made better sense than spending upwards of £600 to get virtually the same fps in games (dont drop below 60fps in any game anyway to much GPU POWER)

I only purchased the chip because i thought it was failing oc, but i got some 2000mhz mem and now the oc is fine again. ( Funny really been running 4ghz with 12 gig 1600mhz mem for 18 months before it started crashing)

Cannot see where all this bottlenecking is leading anyway with vync on at 60 fps maxed 2560x1440 you cannot get any smoother even if you had a 2700k at 5ghz or am i missing something.
Click to expand...


I look forward to your results mate, keep us posted.
 
chief barker said:
OK let's get to the bottom of this. As both I and the OP have the same CPUs.

But he has 2 680s and I have 2 7970. And we have the same issue.

Some are saying it's a cpu bottleneck some aren't

Anybody that has the same cards only in SLI/Crossfire but has a faster CPU please download this program and enable the overlay in game so we can compare results.

http://bf3.realmware.co.uk/settings-editor/downloads.

Can you also have the task manager running in the background to see how much % usage you are getting from your cores. I am only getting about 80% on all 8 threads.
Click to expand...

It would be nice is someone would test this for me. I am due an upgrade anyway, I have the right GPUs but I feel I don't have the CPU grunt to match. 1080p please.
 
im still mirky in my understanding at how a x58 920 overclocked to say 4ghz using 2000mhz ddr3 memory and 2 pci2.0 x16 slots is a bottleneck?
oh and i game at 2560x1600..

even if it aprox 3 years old its still very fast?

if this is the case they are alienating a lot of people by mnaking them buy new systems in a recession :D

or is this a frames per second thing? where got to have the most or system sucks? im puzzled as im hoping to jump on sli 680 ftw cards and i just cant see me wasting cash to upgrade the setup im currently using for a few frames more

:confused:
 
Hence the reason why i'm asking people with a 1080p display with a 680 SLI/7970 crossfire set up with a faster processor than a 920 @ 4 GHZ to post a result.

Nobody has come forward yet.

I think the game is broken or intentionally held back so people have to upgrade.

Or the drivers from AMD/ Nvidia need updating since the last patch.

I am still not convinced that my cpu is holding the cards back...the cpu is only using about 80% usage on all threads.
 
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For what its worth, I have a single 680 and a i7 [email protected]

I am only seeing on average 70-85% GPU usage in BF3, running @1080p,Ultra settings.

My old 580gtx was consistently running at 99% GPU usage.

Maybe the 680/7970 drivers are not fully optimised yet. Its early days.

AM
 
funny thing is ive never seen outside of certain graphic benchtesting software a game hit me for over 60% on the cpu all 4 cores?

even crysis 1 and metro didnt hit me as hard as that it all came down to my gpu's hence i was always under the belief that games was almost 80% down to graphics card power hence the higher the resolution and aa the more burden taken off cpu?

thats why more and more people buy fast cards and game at high resolution triple screens and 2560x screens?

maybe im wrong and fell of the wagon in game tech :D <<(dinosaur :o)
 
HornyRhino said:
im still mirky in my understanding at how a x58 920 overclocked to say 4ghz using 2000mhz ddr3 memory and 2 pci2.0 x16 slots is a bottleneck?
oh and i game at 2560x1600..

even if it aprox 3 years old its still very fast?

if this is the case they are alienating a lot of people by mnaking them buy new systems in a recession :D

or is this a frames per second thing? where got to have the most or system sucks? im puzzled as im hoping to jump on sli 680 ftw cards and i just cant see me wasting cash to upgrade the setup im currently using for a few frames more

:confused:
Click to expand...

At 2560x1600 it doesnt matter. There are no 120Hz monitors of that resolution so 60fps is all you need. The main reason for wanting to know what is going on is because those with 120Hz monitors (so max 1080p at the moment) aren't able to get a steady 120fps no matter what. The SLI cards (470/480, 680 and 7970 in crossfire) are all not using 100% usage and it seems to point to a CPU bottleneck.

The same thing happens at 2560x1440 if not using vsync, but I use adaptive vsync now anyway.
 
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oh ok :D thanks for the info. :)

i wasnt aware of that fact, so yes if you going lower res yet higher frames the cpu would be slightly strained more..

hope someone with more modern setup can asnwer your question..AFK
 
chipachap said:
It's a tricky one, some pain in the arse really. It doesn't happen in Single Player or Co-op, only in MP. It's worse on bigger maps than smaller ones but it still happens in the weirdest of places none the less. It also only happens at 1200p and below. I haven't seen this issue in Eyefinity or 2560x1440/1600, if you have this issue at these high resolutions please let us know!

With people from both sides having the same problem it's pointing to either extremely poor programming whereas the game can't push out more than a certain FPS in any given situation at any time.

For example, I was practicing flying on an empty 64 player Caspian Border CQ and when I landed on the road there was a lot of trees next to me on the left (not graphically demanding) and the antenna on my right (can't be much more demanding).

Out of nowhere GPU's drop from ~120fps at 99% to ~120fps at ~85% usage on both. When I tabbed out and checked CPU all 8 cores were about 65%. So why does this happen? If only we knew :p

It is definitely balanced out in the sense that it keeps it >97% in places where it would drop to sub 90 but it's still happens in others but usage is increased a small bit.
Click to expand...

I agree. I run in 1440p@60fps and 900p@150-200fps with three 7970s and I see the same behavior. [email protected] and 64GB ram.

This was discussed on here last week, Multiplayer does not operate like Single player at all.

What I find is that the FPS/GPU usage drops one a certain player thresh-hold is reached, two or three cards, it does not matter. I do not believe it is driver related, it is engine related.

I like to keep BF3 at 120fps minimum so I have dropped down a notch or two to keep the rate up, I will have a fourth card built and installed in the coming weeks, I still expect MP BF3 to behave in the same way - 50-70% GPU usage.
 
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My 920 HT-on @ 4Ghz 2x GTX 480 = 98/99 usage constantly in BF3
My 920 HT-on @ 2.67 2x GTX 480 = 65 - 99 usage constantly in BF3
If that is any help
 
Besty said:
I agree. I run in 1440p@60fps and 900p@150-200fps with three 7970s and I see the same behavior. [email protected] and 64GB ram.

This was discussed on here last week, Multiplayer does not operate like Single player at all.

What I find is that the FPS/GPU usage drops one a certain player thresh-hold is reached, two or three cards, it does not matter. I do not believe it is driver related, it is engine related.

I like to keep BF3 at 120fps minimum so I have dropped down a notch or two to keep the rate up, I will have a fourth card built and installed in the coming weeks, I still expect MP BF3 to behave in the same way - 50-70% GPU usage.
Click to expand...

Yeah exactly, it's like once it goes past 24 players it doesn't know what to do with itself. I don't know if the engine limits itself to a certain FPS in places once there's so much happening in the background to keep headroom for mass explosions or something but if the Frostbite 2 engine is going to be used in future games with poor utilisation like BF3 it's not a good sign..........and I won't be impressed.

From bench's it looks like hyper-threading and faster PCI-E slots help the situation but it hasn't been fixed. I never had this problem in Eyefinity which leads me to think the engine works differently at such large resolutions.

I'm going to try and email Dice with bench's posted here and links to all our problems to see where that gets us.
 
Well I've found a way to make my GPUs run at 90%ish+.

Anti Aliasing Transparency 8x
Anti Aliasing 16xQ CSAA

Don't need any POST AA now...and literally everything is as crisp as possible. Played for a good 2 hrs and you can certainly see the difference. POST makes stuff too soft, but solved some AA issues. Transparent objects (blades of grass etc) and car windows always looked a little jaggy...but still great. Now, no jaggies full stop. Even the chain fencing looks as crisp as life.


Now...this will sound strange.....I'm sure my FPS average is higher! Top of the hill top looking down at the forest flag on a 64 player caspian server...102fps. Use to be 90ish.

Something very odd with this game engine on how it achieves its FPS based on settings and workload between the components.

Still...very seen it look so beautiful.

i'm new to nvidia..what other options can I play with inside the control panel to improve quality?
 
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