1090T bottlenecking 6870?

[eltocliousus]

I upgraded from my E8200 core 2 duo (stock) the other day as quite a few games (but skyrim was the tipping point) were giving me rubbish performance due to my aging processor which was bottlenecking my 6870.

I upgraded to a 1090T and after a day of fiddling and whatnot I've decided to keep it at 4ghz, 2800mhz Northbridge and call it a day, it benches a solid 7.2 in cinebench.

Now I was expecting to boot up Skyrim and expect a 50-70% atleast performance increase due to my GPU sitting at a constant 50% usage and my old E8200 always at 100% chugging along, but I'm getting the same if not a 1-2fps increase with the new processor, which is a shame, surely there's something wrong?

I've updated my video drivers (11.11, latest official stable release), I've yet to install Chipset drivers for my new motherboard due to not having an optical drive and proper broadband won't be fitted until saturday (currently tethering from my HSDPA phone) so a 400mb download isn't an option, but apart from that everything is updated and working properly.

I did what I did with my old E8200 and reduced purely GPU intensive options (AA, textures) and I get not a single FPS increase, even going from 8x AA to 0x AA which seems like a CPU bottleneck, but it can't be can it? Surely not.

When playing my GPU sits at around 40-50% usage at intensive areas, 95%+ in non intensive areas (when I get 60+fps) and the CPU, well it ranges from core to core but 40% maximum on a couple cores, some sitting at 7% (however I doubt Skyrim uses all 6 of them, most games I assume use 2-4).

I'm at a brick wall, I can lower shadows and a few other options and it's playable but that isn't why I spent all this money (granted it wasn't a whole lot going by enthusiast standards) to play on medium, I feel like I'm not getting the performance I should be on Skyrim and it's a bit annoying as I've waited almost two weeks for my new parts to arrive so I can have the best experience possible and after waiting it's no better.

Hopefully someone can swoop in save the day but I assume it won't be that easy, chances are I'll be disappointed and was overestimating my computers performance, but there's always hope.

I appreciate any replies, I've left a few screenshots to show usage levels on my components, hopefully it will help, thanks.

This is when looking at a intensive part of the game (looking into the middle of a large city with many NPCs and such), when I look into a less intensive place like in a small cave where I'll get a constant 60fps my GPU ramps up to 95%+ usage, this whole experience leads me to believe a CPU bottleneck but my CPU doesn't seem to care, it would rather sit back and chill out.

 

[Fefster]

i might be wrong but i think that skyrim likes fast dual core performance.In every review it seems that SB processor are way ahead of the competition.

 

[eltocliousus]

But if that is the case wouldn't my 1090T atleast try to keep up? It seldom goes past 40% load where atleast my E8200 tried to do its best (100% constantly).

 

[fourdegrees11]

But if that is the case wouldn't my 1090T atleast try to keep up? It seldom goes past 40% load where atleast my E8200 tried to do its best (100% constantly).

You're clearly GPU limited for increased performance. Your E8200 was being maxed, while the 1090 is cruising.

 

[eltocliousus]

That would make sense, but the GPU doesn't go past 50% usage at the intensive bits which is similar to my experience with the E8200 and only goes higher in the easy to render areas.

 

[Vesku]

Have you run a GPU bandwidth test? I'm curious since you say you haven't been able to install chipset drivers. I know AMD has an OpenCL bandwidth test, I think it's in their OpenCL SDK but a bit fuzzy on the memory there.

 

[TakeNoPrisoners]

That would make sense, but the GPU doesn't go past 50% usage at the intensive bits which is similar to my experience with the E8200 and only goes higher in the easy to render areas.

Skyrim only uses two cores. The per core performance of the X6 is similar to the E8200, so you will get similar performance.

 

[Vesku]

If you notice, TakeNoPrisoners, at the intensive portion where his GPU is at 50% not a single core on the x6 is pegging near 100%.

 

[eltocliousus]

I wouldn't be too bothered if it was my GPU throwing a tantrum as I could just lower AA and enjoy a teen bonus in FPS but sadly it does nothing except look like someone threw jaggies into the blender of my already 16-18fps game concoction adding insult to injury.

 

[TakeNoPrisoners]

If you notice, TakeNoPrisoners, at the intensive portion where his GPU is at 50% not a single core on the x6 is pegging near 100%.

That is due to the way windows juggles processes, even a single threaded process won't max out one core.

My calculations show about 26% of the entire CPU is in use, which means about a core and a half is being maxed out.

 

[tweakboy]

But if that is the case wouldn't my 1090T atleast try to keep up? It seldom goes past 40% load where atleast my E8200 tried to do its best (100% constantly).

Welcome to what I call ATI CCC driver hell.

Ive had your exact issues when I had my x800. I would update driver and I would get 10fps. Then suddenly I got a modded driver from Omega and my FPS was 50fps and fast.

What your experiencing is a driver issue. 4Ghz 1090T CPU is more then enough for any game, skyrim or BF3. Your video card is a fast fast video card. You should get sustained 60fps in skyrim with 8xAA and 16xAF .

My advice is go to safe mode and uninstall all ATI junk. Thenk reboot and go back into safe mode and install the latest WHQL. "If those are the ones your using and give this problem then try a older driver version or try the 11.11a

One thing tho. DONT INSTALL CCC , Use Ati Tray Tools instead.

gl

 

[eltocliousus]

I've had problems with performance before on my E8200 & 6870, I didn't expect to get great performance on that dual core but I remember playing GTA4/Arma2 and others with friends (one had a dual core Athlon, the other a Q8300, both with 5770's) and they'd be bragging about playing them with fantastic frames and high to max settings, while I with a superior computer to both (except maybe the Q8300 beating my E8200) was sat on medium lagging my ass off, I just clocked it up to them lying for the sake of it but maybe not.
Even now my Q8400/5770 friend is playing Skyrim max'd with 4xAA with a constant 30+fps, and I can count my FPS with my hands at points.

Tweakboy, can you give me a link to what drivers I need exactly? I may be asking a bit much but I'm a little confused on what you mean, a quick link to the driver I need for my XFX 1gb 6870(is it tray tools or something?) would definitely improve my night tenfold.

 

[eltocliousus]

And before someone asks, I have an eXtreme 650w (I'll be honest, it makes a high pitched screech under high load, I assume this is coil whine and I can live with it until christmas once I can treat myself to another) but I've ran Furmark & Prime95 at the same time and both components max out without problem so a power issue I don't think it is.

 

[Vesku]

That is due to the way windows juggles processes, even a single threaded process won't max out one core.

My calculations show about 26% of the entire CPU is in use, which means about a core and a half is being maxed out.

He has a screen of the per core usage, on a single or dual thread program it will still be maxing out individual cores but roughly 33% of the whole processor. Just launch Performance Monitor from the Task Manager Performance tab and you can see more detail on usage. I will check Skyrim when I get home on my x6 but I would expect it to be pegging ~2 cores to 100% at any point in time.

 

[IGemini]

If you notice, TakeNoPrisoners, at the intensive portion where his GPU is at 50% not a single core on the x6 is pegging near 100%.

That's because Windows 7 threads the processes to other cores to distribute load. Skyrim does in fact "use" two cores and is not optimized to effectively use more. That's why the X6 isn't loaded considerably. My quad-core Q9650 tops at roughly 50% per core playing Skyrim. Two cores NEVER hit close to 100% when I've played Skyrim.

 

[eltocliousus]

I understand the logic behind it, does this mean the 1090T is bottlenecking my 6870? Surely they didn't design Skyrim to only be max'd on thoroughbred dual cores and sandy bridges did they? Even my Q8300/5770 friend is stating he's playing on high with a very smooth experience.

 

[IGemini]

No, the CPU is far from the bottleneck, especially in Skyrim.

Tweakboy may be right about Catalyst being a problem but uninstalling it isn't really necessary. The two things I think would help are 1) unchecking "Enable Surface Performance Optimization in the Catalyst AI and 2) use FXAA in game, preferably with a good FXAA injector mod (over at Skyrim Nexus). You get way more performance out of just using FXAA than maxing out AA&AF in Skyrim without as much of a framerate hit.

 

[eltocliousus]

I'll try FXAA without AA/AF and disable surface performance optimization now, bare with me.

 

[eltocliousus]

Ok I tried that, I even accidentally lowered the resolution from 1080p to 720p without knowing until I was in-game, it gave me a whole 1fps, thanks anyway Gemini.

 

[upsdriver]

When looking over the city in Skyrim, my fps drops to the low 30s from 40-60 (vysnc off). At this time GPU usage drops to ~70% from 99% and I'm seeing 30-40% usage on non-idle cpu cores. I'm running an i7 860 at 3.6ghz and 5850 stock.

Skyrim does in fact "use" two cores and is not optimized to effectively use more.

Does that mean there is a high thread queue? If so, why don't the threads run faster when there is idle cpu on the two cores it's using? Is it due to a memory bottleneck?

 

[eltocliousus]

Something else that's weird, I gave GTA:Episodes a try and although the CPU is being used (50%+ on all cores, jumpy though, 95%+ on GPU) and I'm getting a good 30-50fps on maximum every few seconds it either stutters, goes in slow motion for a second (the sound doesn't) or repeats a sound for a split second as if I'm about to crash.
Could just be coincidence though, or hell I just had a thought, when I changed the components (motherboard/CPU/RAM) I did a clean windows install but kept my steam games (among other files) and steam itself installed on my storage drive and just booted it via that and it seemed to work fine off the bat, it might be a long shot but with my playing all these games off steam, you don't think reinstalling steam/the games will help? I can't just do it willy nilly due to tethering from my phone so I'd have to wait until Saturday to find out.
May be a long shot though.

 

[upsdriver]

Something else that's weird, I gave GTA:Episodes a try and although the CPU is being used (50%+ on all cores, jumpy though, 95%+ on GPU) and I'm getting a good 30-50fps on maximum every few seconds it either stutters, goes in slow motion for a second (the sound doesn't) or repeats a sound for a split second as if I'm about to crash.

Try reverting your cpu and ram back to stock speeds and see what happens.

 

[LoneNinja]

Skyrim is very CPU dependent, poorly threaded, and apparently offloads shadow rendering to the CPU rather than GPU. An I3 runs this game better than anything AMD makes, no AMD set up will maintain 60fps.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/skyrim-performance-benchmark,3074-9.html
http://www.techspot.com/review/467-skyrim-performance/page7.html
http://www.hardwareheaven.com/reviews/1316/pg16/intel-sandy-bridge-extreme-and-x79-chipset-launch-core-i7-3960x-processor-review-skyrim.html

 

[eltocliousus]

I'll give that a go, I can't see it being the problem as although I have it at 4ghz (1.43v), the northbridge at 2800mhz (1.35v) I've prime95'd for a few hours with no problems so it's definitely stable, but I'll try it regardless, just to rule out what is causing these issues.

At the minute I'm reinstalling steam (not the games, just the program) and downloading my motherboards chipset drivers as I don't have any installed just yet.

 

[eltocliousus]

Skyrim is very CPU dependent, poorly threaded, and apparently offloads shadow rendering to the CPU rather than GPU. An I3 runs this game better than anything AMD makes, no AMD set up will maintain 60fps.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/skyrim-performance-benchmark,3074-9.html
http://www.techspot.com/review/467-skyrim-performance/page7.html
http://www.hardwareheaven.com/reviews/1316/pg16/intel-sandy-bridge-extreme-and-x79-chipset-launch-core-i7-3960x-processor-review-skyrim.html

I'd love to have the 40fps (or atleast 25-30) the X4/X2's are getting, I do get that at points in the open and looking at a certain area but most of the time (in towns, I'll be honest) I'll get 18-20.