Unexplained high GPU use with basic tasks

[Art]

Hi Guys,

Sometime in November I got myself a new graphics card, an MSI 6850 (this one).

It ran pretty perfectly for about a month and then I started getting graphics issues with BF3. Before the problems started I was regularly getting 30-40FPS at 1920x1080 and most things on High. When the issues start I seem to get 5-15FPS regardless of the resolution or quality settings. I get similar problems with X3: Albion Prelude. The other tell-tale issue is that if I try to watch a DVD or live TV using Windows media centre the video is laggy and stuttery. Everything else with the machine (like sound) is fine.

What I've noticed is that if I use MSI Afterburner to keep an eye on the GPU that even basic things cause a spike in the % GPU usage. If I load media centre the % GPU usage quickly hits 100% and hovers around there. The GPU temperature stays around 45-50°C with the fan speed at 50%, so this isn't an overheating issue.

I'm using the latest Catalyst drivers, but it happened with the last version as well. A couple of times I've tried to uninstall them and reinstall them but that seems to kill the drivers in the process: the screen turns mainly black with a few sprays of colour and windows vaguely render. If I load the machine up in safe mode at that point everything looks normal, so it definitely seems to be a driver problem. If I try to uninstall the drivers in Safe mode via the Catalyst uninstall option it tells me that it fails to load the detection driver and the only thing in the list of installed components is one of the Microsoft C+++ redistributables.

I've tried reformatting my machine, doing clean installs of the drivers and reinstalling the drivers onto a HDD instead of the SSD the OS is on. The issues just comes back after a day or two of usage.

The only odd thing I've been able to find is that DXDiag reports the card as having 2803MB of memory even though it is supposed to be a 1024MB card. I've not overclocked the card or any other part of my machine.

If anyone has any ideas why this is happening I'd really love to hear them, it's driving me nuts.

 

[Kotu]

I had a similar issue, when I setup afterburner to show the gpu core/ram speed it had them running at the wrong speed. In the end it turned out to be hardware acceleration for flash/videos causing it, if i had any browser windows open in the background (even in a tab not being displayed) then it stopped the gpu running at full speed.

 

[Art]

I had a similar issue, when I setup afterburner to show the gpu core/ram speed it had them running at the wrong speed. In the end it turned out to be hardware acceleration for flash/videos causing it, if i had any browser windows open in the background (even in a tab not being displayed) then it stopped the gpu running at full speed.

Thanks for the suggestion, any hints on a permanent fix? I'm not sure if we've got the same issue. Afterburner has my GPU running at 860 which seems normal. It keeps dipping back down to 100 but I'm assuming that's for power saving.

I've just tried sticking my old HD4770 in. There are zero problems with that card, putting my HD6850 back in brings the problems back.

 

[wazza300]

did you load defaults again in ccc? i had issue where it wouldnt throttle down correctly until i did this,worth a try,esp if youve just installed new driver version

 

[DazQ87]

It sounds like one of these silly powerplay things, my 5850s do it, if you open something like media player or watch a video on youtube etc the GPUs lock themselves to 400MHz clock rather than 775MHz, this has a massive hit on performance.

As others have said before, enable the GPU frequency section of the afterburner graphics and see whats going on, I suspect your GPU isnt clocking up to full speed for some reason.

 

[Art]

did you load defaults again in ccc? i had issue where it wouldnt throttle down correctly until i did this,worth a try,esp if youve just installed new driver version

The default profiles? Don't think I did no, I'll give that a try now.

As others have said before, enable the GPU frequency section of the afterburner graphics and see whats going on, I suspect your GPU isnt clocking up to full speed for some reason.

The clock seems to be fine:

(I'm not sure about the dips to 100 MHz clock though)

The flat part of the % use line is when the machine is completely idle, the spikes are just from browsing Firefox. The clock doesn't change when I load something in Media Centre.

 

[wazza300]

its ment to idle,theres about three mem and core clock settings,mine now at idle on 5870 are 157mhz core and 300 memory, another setting for watching video something like 400 core 800memory and then full speed 875 core 1250 memory when gaming

 

[Art]

its ment to idle,theres about three mem and core clock settings,mine now at idle on 5870 are 157mhz core and 300 memory, another setting for watching video something like 400 core 800memory and then full speed 875 core 1250 memory when gaming

So it's not idling the core clock properly. Hmm.

I'm still not sure whether this is a driver issue or a card issue. The drivers definitely crap out when I try uninstalling them but when the system is being problematic my old HD4770 has no issues at all.

When you said "defaults" did you just mean the default profiles from the AMD site?

 

[Art]

Apologies for the minor thread necromancy/double post, looking for a last bit of advice with this.

I'm still getting this problem. Since my last post I've tried running it in my Dad's machine. He didn't get the total lagfest that I get, but when just running a DVD through Windows Media Centre the GPU was hitting 30% just for that. I'm assuming that isn't normal. For a couple of days after I took it out of his machine it worked fine in mine, and now it has started playing up again (just in time for the weekend ).

The other final thing I've spotted is that when reinstalling drivers it always says it finishes with warnings, and that I should check the log. The log doesn't ever contain any warnings, and the errors section is empty.

The only thing I can think of is that it must (somehow) be the card: anyone have any last minute alternative suggestions before I ask for an RMA? The main thing I'm concerned about is that it sometimes takes a few days for the problems to kick in, so OcUK might not see the issues I'm having when they test it.