7970... Exactly the same performance as my 5870's

[ruhtraeel]

Hey, I just got a Sapphire 7970 OC w/Boost to replace my two crossfired 5870's.

I thought I would get a substantial FPS boost in newer games, but it seems to be getting the exact same FPS as my 5870's (at least roughly).

(Heavily modded) Skyrim still runs at like 20-25 FPS at some places, ARMA 3 still gets to like 25 FPS when looking at a town, and Crysis 3 gets to like 22 FPS when looking at an open grassy area with everything on Ultra and no AA.

Is this performance expected? At this point, it doesn't really seem like the upgrade was worth it.

The only game I've tested that seems to have gotten a good boost was Planetside 2.

 

[Enigmoid]

Hey, I just got a Sapphire 7970 OC w/Boost to replace my two crossfired 5870's.

I thought I would get a substantial FPS boost in newer games, but it seems to be getting the exact same FPS as my 5870's (at least roughly).

(Heavily modded) Skyrim still runs at like 20-25 FPS at some places, ARMA 3 still gets to like 25 FPS when looking at a town, and Crysis 3 gets to like 22 FPS when looking at an open grassy area with everything on Ultra and no AA.

Is this performance expected? At this point, it doesn't really seem like the upgrade was worth it.

The only game I've tested that seems to have gotten a good boost was Planetside 2.

For Crysis 3 and ARMA try overclocking your CPU.

 

[Black Octagon]

AFAIK yes, 2x5870 CF gives basically comparable framerates to a single 7970.

There should also be certain titles where the 5870s do not scale well, and in these cases the 7970 should perform better. Couldn't tell you what those titles are off the top of my head however. I do seem to remember reading that Planetside 2 doesn't scale well on multi-GPU rigs in general

 

[ruhtraeel]

For Crysis 3 and ARMA try overclocking your CPU.

How much would I need to OC it by? I've done 4.0, but that didn't give me a noticeable boost in Planetside 2 when I was using my 5870's, even when it was saying I was CPU bound.

I plan to test and look at usage when I get home.

AFAIK yes, 2x5870 CF gives basically comparable framerates to a single 7970.

There should also be certain titles where the 5870s do not scale well, and in these cases the 7970 should perform better. Couldn't tell you what those titles are off the top of my head however. I do seem to remember reading that Planetside 2 doesn't scale well on multi-GPU rigs in general

I thought I would get a goost performance boost in Skyrim, where I've read that VRAM makes a huge difference. This seems overstated though, as I am getting the same if not worse performance on it right now.

 

[Jaydip]

Unless you are pushing the vram there shouldn't be any noticeable difference.

 

[Mushkins]

Skyrim just runs like a dog, it's a poorly coded game. You can throw all the GPU power at it you want but there's still places the framerate tanks and all sorts of microstuttering and performance issues. There's a lot of tweaking guides that help make it run smoother, but I wouldn't really use it as a healthy performance gauge.

That being said, two 5870s is about on par with a 7970 raw performance wise. Now you have the added benefit of not having to deal with all the drawbacks of xfire/SLI.

 

[ruhtraeel]

I'm also somewhat worried about my performance in Borderlands 2 at 4480*1080. I get around 35 FPS with everything maxed, with no action on the screen at all.

 

[wand3r3r]

Is physx on low or high? It can sometimes be higher even on AMD card systems but will be absolutely detrimental to performance. Usually it's greyed out iirc with Amd, but when switching between AMD/Nv cards it can get to max and it kills the cpu.

 

[ruhtraeel]

Is physx on low or high? It can sometimes be higher even on AMD card systems but will be absolutely detrimental to performance. Usually it's greyed out iirc with Amd, but when switching between AMD/Nv cards it can get to max and it kills the cpu.

I currently have it set to max. I am using a Quadro FX 4600 as PhysX, but I remember before I even had the Quadro in my system and PhysX was running off my CPU, it could still maintain a solid 60+ at 1080P in Sanctuary, at the framerate only really dropped when a lot of stuff was going on.
Right now, even with nothing going on at the beginning of the Infinite Agony DLC area, I am getting around 30 something FPS. It's worth noting though that on GPU-Z, when I check the usage on my Quadro, it always says 0-1%, even though the PhysX box is checked off for both my 7970 and my Quadro.

I followed this guide:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZoIWTk9mK4

EDIT: Oh wait. Do you need to delete PhysXDevice.dll for every game you want to run Hybrid PhysX on?

 

[Black Octagon]

OP, when running your 5870s did you do any benchmarking with 3DMark, Heaven or anything like that? If so you can compare your numbers to what you now get on the 7970 to see whether there is much difference in processing power.

 

[ruhtraeel]

OP, when running your 5870s did you do any benchmarking with 3DMark, Heaven or anything like that? If so you can compare your numbers to what you now get on the 7970 to see whether there is much difference in processing power.

I'll try and remember to do that when I get home.

IIRC I got around 23000 with crossfired 5870's in 3dmark vantage.

 

[Arkaign]

OC that 2500k! Those things are made for clocking up, and for poorly coded games dependent on very high single threaded performance (Skyrim!), you will get a great boost just hitting something super easy like 4.4 or 4.5Ghz.

 

[ruhtraeel]

OC that 2500k! Those things are made for clocking up, and for poorly coded games dependent on very high single threaded performance (Skyrim!), you will get a great boost just hitting something super easy like 4.4 or 4.5Ghz.

Would I need to tweak voltage to get to 4.4 or 4.5? I previously went to 4.0 because I didn't want to tweak voltage, but I think once I start looking at it, a whole new world of overclocking/risks appears.

What type of boost would I be looking at? I don't want to shorten the lifespan of my CPU for very little gain, as this CPU I think has to last me for another 4 years until my/my dad's company throws out their current hardware (Sandy Bridge 8 core 16 thread Xeon)

 

[Arkaign]

I had a 2500K @ 4.8 that I handed down to a friend shortly after building it, and have built a couple hundred 4.4+ boxes for gamers over the past couple of years. I never do max OC for customer builds, and I find that 2500K can do very high clocks without going crazy on the volts (clocks don't kill chips, voltage does!).

That said, I'd recommend capping voltage at 1.4v if you want the thing to last for years. Try 1.375 first and a 45x multi. Check temps.

 

[BrightCandle]

I went from a 5970 (basically a pair of 5870s in one card) to 2x 7970's for precisely this reason. A pair of 5870's is comparable (slightly quicker actually) than a single 7970. You need two 7970's to beat the performance of your previous setup.

 

[lavaheadache]

I"m 100% sure you are seeing cpu bottlenecks, atleast in Skyrim. I get the occasional cpu bottlenecking in Skyrim with a Titan and 3770k @ 4.5

 

[bystander36]

I"m 100% sure you are seeing cpu bottlenecks, atleast in Skyrim. I get the occasional cpu bottlenecking in Skyrim with a Titan and 3770k @ 4.5

Given that he is only getting 20-25 FPS on Skyrim, I'd bet he just has too high of settings for the mods he has running. My i7 920@3.9Ghz never gets lower than 55 FPS, with mods while in 3D Vision (2 images are rendered per frame).

 

[raghu78]

OP try the most demanding DX11 games like metro last light, crysis 3, farcry 3, BF3, Tombraider with highest settings and MSAA. also try benchmarks like 3dmark 2013 or heaven 4.0. you should see good improvements in all these cases.

Metro Last light

http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/metro_last_light_graphics_performance_review_benchmark,6.html

1920 x 1200

HD 7970 Ghz - 47
HD 6970 -24

http://www.techspot.com/review/670-metro-last-light-performance/page4.html

1920 x 1200

HD 7970 Ghz - 46
HD 6970 -24
HD 5870 -18

http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/geforce_gtx_760_msi_hawk_review,16.html

1920 X 1200

HD 7970 Ghz - 64
HD 5870 - 29

http://www.techspot.com/review/645-tomb-raider-performance/page4.html

1920 x 1200

HD 7970 Ghz - 53
HD 5870 - 23

even in best cases CF scaling is 1.7 - 1.8x. so in these games you are going to see a 30 - 40% perf improvement even over HD 5870 CF.

 

[RaistlinZ]

Time to overclock that 7970.

 

[felang]

For Crysis 3 and ARMA try overclocking your CPU.

Definitely overclock your CPU, should be able to get 4.3GHZ easily. Even if you want to be extremely "safe" you could still raise voltage to 1.35V and up the multi gradually while monitoring temps with stress testing software. I´m partial to OCCT myself, as gaming never even gets close to that amount of CPU usage. Just use the standard cpu test for 20 minutes at a time untill you get an error, then back down multiplier by 1x and make sure you can go a full hour with no errors.

 

[Red Hawk]

First off...your thread title is a little misleading. It makes me think that your new 7970 has the same performance as a single 5870. 5870s' is the plural possessive, while 5870's is the singular possessive.[/grammarnazi]

Anyways, were your 5870s the 2 GB model or the more common 1 GB model? If they were 1 GB I would expect the 7970 to be better at memory-heavy games. It should also be better at tessellation. You won't see much of an advantage in games which are shader or compute bound, other than less microstutter thanks to being a single chip obviously. The real advantage of a single 7970 over crossfired 5870s is lower power consumption, lower temperatures, less noise, and none of the downsides of crossfire. If you wanted a complete performance upgrade over your 5870s you should have gone with crossfired 7970s as well.

I'll echo the recommendation to OC that 2500K. The 2500K is very overclockable; I've never touched the voltage and I keep it at 4.0 GHz; I imagine a little more is easily achievable still without touching the voltage. I wouldn't worry about damaging the chip, since as Arkaign said it's higher voltages which wear out chips, not higher clock speeds.

 

[ruhtraeel]

Hey, so I ran 3DMark Vantage, and the results are alarming. Apparently I get a much lower score than expected?

http://www.3dmark.com/3dmv/4789525

My 3DMark 11 scores also seem low.

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/7071309

I also think I should be getting a higher FPS in Borderlands 2 at 4480*1080. I get around 35 FPS when I'm not even doing anything.

This is weird, because I can see the card clocking up like it has to, in AMD overdrive.



EDIT: Turns out my 2500k clocked itself at 2.1ghz for some reason. Bumped it up to 3.7/4.0 ghz; here are the results.

http://www.3dmark.com/3dmv/4789577

 

[Borealis7]

just a reminder of how AWESOME the 5 series was

 

[ruhtraeel]

Nevermind. After even the preset overclocks that came with my Mobo, everything now runs max at +30 FPS.

This card rocks.

 

[SlowSpyder]

Nevermind. After even the preset overclocks that came with my Mobo, everything now runs max at +30 FPS.

This card rocks.

I don't know if there is a 7970 in existence that can't hit 1100MHz. You know what to do... :twisted: