New build with R9 280, low frame rates

[Teh Lemur]

Hi guys. I've just put together a new build, fairly standard stuff - Asus Z97-A, i5 4790K - with an MSI ATI R9 280, all running stock with no overclock for now.

I'm seeing some very odd behaviour, because everything is rock-solid stable, no glitches or crashes whatsoever, but I'm getting nowhere near the performance I should from the GPU.

I first noticed the problem when Saints Row IV auto-selected "Low" quality settings for me. If I change to "Ultra" quality, as I expect would be fine with this card, I get under 20 FPS in the game. Investigating further, I found that I was only getting a score of 2200ish in 3DMark Firestrike, instead of the 7500 or so that charts lead me to believe I should expect.

Can anyone suggest what might be going wrong here? It's a brand new build with fully up-to-date motherboard and GPU drivers, so I can't see why it would be a driver problem. Any ideas how I could go about troubleshooting this?

 

[Headfoot]

Check that neither your processor nor GPU are throttling heavily due to thermal issues. Could be your CPU is stuck at super low state because of misapplied thermal paste. Once when I was a kid putting together my first computer on my own, I forgot to take off the plastic sheet that keeps the bottom of the heatsink free of dust during shipping. I kept wondering why my temps were so bad...

Run SuperPi or some other CPU only benchmark and make sure its not a CPU issue. Then run furmark or other GPU bench with MSI Afterburner up to monitor temperatures. Verify that it is running at full clock speeds. It could be that you have a defective 280 that you have to RMA.

 

[Kenmitch]

What OS? If 7 did you do the .net update?

 

[Teh Lemur]

Thanks for the suggestions guys. I've tried checking out the temperatures, and I don't think it's an overheating issue. I've no idea if I've applied the .NET update at this point, I'd imagine Win7 auto updates would have done by now though.

I seem to have found a temporary fix for the problem now, though I'm still not sure what caused it in the first place. By messing around in the AMD Overdrive tab of CCC and setting a mild overclock, it seems to have woken the card up. Prior to that I think it was stuck in its low clock speed state for some reason, even when I was in-game. I don't know if it will just work from now on, or whether I'll need to mess around in CCC after every reboot.

 

[el etro]

Try another driver or use the card second BIOS, before use afterburner to do this.

 

[IllogicalGlory]

It might be a good idea to monitor clock speeds using MSI Afterburner's OSD function.

 

[Stuka87]

You didn't state what resolution you are running at. If you have a 1440P 27" display or something that 20fps with Ultra settings may not be too far off.

 

[SlickR12345]

Update bios, update graphics drivers, update chipset drivers, make sure the GPU is properly attached and isn't loose or anything of that nature, then download gpu-z and cpu-z and monitor the temperatures and frequency

 

[Teh Lemur]

You didn't state what resolution you are running at. If you have a 1440P 27" display or something that 20fps with Ultra settings may not be too far off.

I'd hope that even at 1440p, an R9 280 would do a fair bit better than 20 FPS in an undemanding game like Saints Row IV. I'm getting around 20 FPS running the game in 1080p with Ultra settings.

EDIT: 20 FPS, not 60

 

[Teh Lemur]

Try another driver or use the card second BIOS, before use afterburner to do this.

Thanks for the suggestions. I'm using the latest stable drivers from the AMD site, what drivers would you suggest I switch to? What is the card second BIOS?

 

[Stuka87]

I'd hope that even at 1440p, an R9 280 would do a fair bit better than 20 FPS in an undemanding game like Saints Row IV. I'm getting around 60 FPS running the game in 1080p with Ultra settings.

So it runs fine at 1080P, but not at 1440P?

 

[Teh Lemur]

So it runs fine at 1080P, but not at 1440P?

No, I'm running at 1080p, and only getting 20fps (sorry, typo in my earlier comment, fixed now). It's weird though, sometimes the card will leap up to the performance levels I expect (around 60fps in Ultra settings) and stay like that for a whole session, but then after a reboot I'm back to square one.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Did you monitor the GPU clock and temperature with for example GPU-Z?

 

[Teh Lemur]

Did you monitor the GPU clock and temperature with for example GPU-Z?

Yeah - card clock went up to the expected value (972MHz) on starting a game, and the temperature seems reasonable.

 

[Stuka87]

And CPU temp is ok too?

If you lower the graphics settings to "low", does the game then run fine, or is it basically the same?

 

[Teh Lemur]

And CPU temp is ok too?

If you lower the graphics settings to "low", does the game then run fine, or is it basically the same?

CPU temp is also fine. If I stick the graphics settings on Low, it all runs nice and smoothly at around 60 FPS.

 

[Stuka87]

In that case, go through those ultra settings. It is most likely enabling SSAA or something. Super Sampling being enabled could make the card render at 4k if its turned up high enough, and then down sample to 1080.

 

[psolord]

My Ultra settings for the game set AA to 8XMSAA and my single 7950 (same as r9 280) runs it at 70-90fps. At least the initial indoors section.

Catalyst Omega.

Have you fiddled around with any power options that may not allow the card to run at its max?

 

[Teh Lemur]

Not much point messing around with the settings in-game, since I'm seeing equally bad performance in all the benchmarks I've run. I'd assume that I have a defective card, but it's a weird defect... sometimes it works fine, other times it runs slow, but it never glitches or crashes. That makes me suspect a driver issue, but it's a fresh install of Windows 7 with the latest AMD drivers, so I can't see how anything has become corrupted.

 

[psolord]

Try taking it out and putting it in the secondary slot (if you have one).

Ok that sounded like instructions from a Brazzers director.

 

[Teh Lemur]

Try taking it out and putting it in the secondary slot (if you have one).

Ok that sounded like instructions from a Brazzers director.

LOL, it does doesn't it? I'll give that a go now, cheers.

 

[Teh Lemur]

Have you fiddled around with any power options that may not allow the card to run at its max?

No, I pretty much installed Windows, ATI's latest drivers, motherboard drivers and Steam, in that order, then fired up Saints Row IV to check out the card's performance without messing with any settings at all. Everything was on default, other than switching from "Low" to "Ultra" settings in-game.

 

[Teh Lemur]

It seems that yet another driver re-install - with the new Omega drivers - seems to have solved the problem.

I'm still annoyed that all I did was install the recommended drivers on a fresh install of Win7, yet I ended up with all this hassle and confusion. But at least now I don't have to RMA the card, so I won't be without a gaming machine over Xmas.

Thank you all for the help trying to sort this.

 

[psolord]

Glad you solved it.