I'm in need of some real help guys...something looks very wrong with my Crossfire

[TonyTurbo78]

Hi all..

Calling all gurus, I need some help here, either tell me something is totally wrong with my setup, or its doing as expected. My new Crossfire setup seems weird, something definitely doesn't feel right to me. Put my new card in today, running both cards at 1100/1500.

Ok 1st. Before I had my Crossfire working, when playing BF4 at 1080p Ultra settings but 2xMSAA I was getting solid 60fps with the odd crowded smokey areas dropping to low 50's. But now with Crossfire I'm getting horrendous performance and major lag everywhere. It's only running in the 30fps-40fps range but feels like I get huge frame drops and spikes. Very weird.

So went benching namely with Valley and Firestrike. Starting with Valley, performance was solid, across my 4 cpu cores they were only being used at 40% but both GPU's where being used at 98%. Recorded a score of just under 3400K.

Next was Firestrike, this is were its really baffling me, watching the frame rates whilst testing, it was going absolutely crazy. Especially the 2nd test, it had so much frame skip and jump, and my frames where ranging from 20's to 80's but the numbers where changing so quick in the blink of an eye, nothing was consistent. It was like watching the numbers roll up and down like at the petrol pump but only 100 times faster. On the last test, I was only getting between 10fps and 15fps. Surely this is not right.

Also, when I looked back at my MSI Afterburner for the logs during this test, my GPU core clock and memory clock kept changing from the set clocks I had to the low clocks as if its throttling or something. Does it do this between each test giving the impression that my clocks are throttling during each test?

Whats the best way to post screens showing you the right info to help me? Something really feels very strange to me. I have no idea if this is as expected or not. I knew I wasn't going to be able to run both GPU's at 100% with my I5, but performance now is even worse in some cases than it was with my single card.

Help please

 

[uksoldierboy]

I remember lematt mentioning something along the lines of disabling ulps for crossfire, maybe try that tony?

Afterburner has an option to disable it I believe.

 

[almighty15]

Have you upped the overdrive limit to 120%?

 

[TonyTurbo78]

yes ULPS disabled guys and I'm running +20 on the power

 

[rolypolyman]

Switch off ulps and power limit up to 20-25%. Not 120% almighty.

oops too late.

 

[rolypolyman]

BF4 Beta, is it optimised for xfire.

Are you on the latest Amd beta drivers?

 

[TonyTurbo78]

yes I am Roly, using the 13.11 beta v1

 

[tommybhoy]

Switch off ulps and power limit up to 20-25%. Not 120% almighty.

+1

@TONY,

Sounds like the boost problem, afaik you have a WF+Ice-Q setup, is the WF a boost version too?

If not, I can't recommend enough to either flash the Ice-Q with a non boost bios, or mod CCC to get the extra Power Limit, details are both in the op in the 7950 Ice-Q Owners Club thread, it sounds like FS is 'spiking' to me:

+20% Power Control/Limit GPU Spiking:

Spoiler

+30% Power Control/Limit No SPiking:

Spoiler

 

[TonyTurbo78]

yes it is a boost version...I followed matts guide and already flashed the card to get non boost. I can go to +50 now on the power option

 

[tommybhoy]

Give it +30/35 on the power, check if the spikes stop, if they do then your good to go but if not, run@(as close to matching)stock clocks with the +30/35 and hopefully it's a case of your 1100/1500 clocks aren't as stable as you thought and you need to re-adjust clocks and/or voltage for stability.

I5's/W7 can take a tanking(excuse the pun) in the BF4 beta causing big dips in gameplay remember, it's maybe not the best indication of CrossFire performance-it's running very well on W8/I7 for me but my cpu is running much hotter than normal.

 

[almighty15]

Switch off ulps and power limit up to 20-25%. Not 120% almighty.

oops too late.

It becomes 120% when you up it ( Even though there's no such thing as 120% )

 

[tommybhoy]

It becomes 120% when you up it ( Even though there's no such thing as 120% )

No it doesn't, Power Control is 0 by default in CCC, normal Power Control ranges from -20%, 0, +20%.

 

[TonyTurbo78]

Well, no idea what's happening. It doesn't look like it's throttling in certain things, but on fire strike I'm getting 60% CPU usage but only 50% on each Gpu. So weird . I just need to figure out if this is normal for crossfire with an i5 before I buy a 3770k

 

[Martini1991]

It allows for 20% more, that's 120% surely?

That's the whole point of it, going over the base value (20% over).

 

[LtMatt]

Have you got gpu overlays setup as per my thread here Tony?

Click.

If you can monitor both gpu usage as running games, benches that should enable you to pinpoint the issue much easier. The overlay won't work with 3dmark though, so forget that one.

Sounds like a throttling issue to me on either one or both of the cards. Are you sure ULPS is definitely off? That could be in the mix as well exacerbating the throttling problems.

 

[TonyTurbo78]

Thanks Matt I'm on the road at the minute so won't be looking at it again until later. Just looking quickly though, all my settings look correct, and def got ulps disabled.

The thing I don't get, how come during fire strike both my gpus and all my CPU cores are only being used at around 50%?

 

[TonyTurbo78]

Ok guys, just got home today, just started reading through Matts excellent guide to check all is correct with Xfire and ran some tests with monitoring displayed.

Everything had been set up correctly but I did do a few small things like change Afterburner monitoring time, show the Crossfire logo when its being used etc and change my Afterburner monitoring groups etc.

First test I ran, Valley. GPUS where being used between 90% and 100% at all times, both the clocks of the cards never dropped off of 1100/1500 through the whole test so no throttling there.

Then I ran BF4 to see whats going on there, I wanted to run a 15 minute test then wanted to go and look at my AB monitoring to see what usage was happening etc. Below you will see a screeny from the period I was running BF4 at Ultra 4xMSAA. Looks like my cards are only running at max 70% but we know the reasons behind that, as you can see the CPU cores are pretty much flat out. The good news is, solid 60fps, no dips, lags nothing so no idea why performance was horrendous last night. And, no throttling on either cards during BF4.

Spoiler

And if you notice, I have a much higher Valley score this time round, a couple hundred points better than previous.

Also played some other games, GPU cores showed consistent 1100/1500 so I'm guessing no throttling issues. I'm just going to redo 3dmark now and see what happens, hopefully I have better results there also. Can anyone else confirm why my CPU's seem so inactive during Firestrike? Is this primarily GPU dependant?

 

[LtMatt]

Good stuff Tony. The overlays help you see what's going on and make it much easier to diagnose any problems. You can also monitor cpu usage as well which really helps.

Not sure about the 3dmark questions though, sorry.