R9 290 vapor x downclocking by itself in certain games

[Injectelo]

Hi all,

I recently purchsed an R9 290 vapor x and I noticed that it downlocks in certain games.

I tried out 4 games:
Dota 2 (correct clocks)
Titanfall (correct clocks)
Rust experimnetal (downlocks) (weird is that it shows correct clocks at the game's main menu but downlocks in game)
Team Fortress 2 (downlocks)

Any1 care to explain why this is happening? How can I solve this issue?

Things to know:
CPU: i7 930 @ 2.8
GFX: Sapphire r9 290 vapor x
Clean install (even formatted the pc)
Latest CCC
Windows 8.1 64
Temperatures are normal at about 40-60
Didn't overclock anything.

Thanks in advance.

 

[(sic)Klown12]

Due to Powertune, it will down clock if the scene it's rendering doesn't fully stress the card. This is most noticeable when using V-sync, but can also happen due engine frame rate limits or a non-GPU bottleneck. You can use a third party tool like afterburner or Trixx to force full speed all the time, but you end up with higher power consumption and temps.

 

[KaRLiToS]

Have you monitored your FPS with an application such as FRAPS?

Is vsync on?

 

[Injectelo]

Hey guys,

-Vsync is off. FPS dips to ~40 (unacceptable with a 290!) in hectic combat. (TF2)

-Is there anyway to turn powertune off besides afterburner? (tried it off with rust, not tf2, didnt change anything, then again rust is unoptimized prealpha)

-WTF is up with powertune anyway, such a frustrating feature to have on a gfx card:twisted:

-Are we sure powertune is the culprit? could anything else be at play here?

Thx <3

 

[RussianSensation]

Set PowerTune to +20% and set Maximum Performance for desktop in Windows settings. Almost all the games you listed are going to be CPU limited with a stock 930. You need to overclock you i7 to 4Ghz or get an i7 4790K if you don't overclock. Monitor your GPU usage in MSI Afterburner. I wouldn't be surprised if your GPU utilization is only 50-60% in some of these games since a 2.8Ghz 1st gen i7 has no chance of letting your 290 use its power vs. pairing it with a 4.4Ghz Haswell. You are literally probably losing 30-40 fps in performance easily because of your CPU. Think about it, a 4.4Ghz 4790K is 2x faster in IPC than a 2.8Ghz 930.

 

[Silverforce11]

Those games will not push the GPU hard enough for powertune to kick in.

It's a case of CPU bottleneck. R290/X will dynamic adjust clocks down if its not required to run at max. This occurs either with vsync on or CPU bottleneck.

 

[Flapdrol1337]

Yeah, in those games you'll be cpu limited. Doesn't matter as long as the performance is good. Could get 40% extra performance by overclocking though.

 

[Injectelo]

Is my i7 930 seriously causing a bottlenick? I mean it's old but not THAT old..? (It's still an i7 for crying out loud )

Edit: Appreciate your feedback guys. Looks like it's time to upgrade!

Thx all.

 

[sm625]

I would imagine it could run TF2 at its lowest clocks. I believe DOTA 2 has a setting allowing you to cap fps. I bet if you set that, it too would downclock.

 

[Flapdrol1337]

Is my i7 930 seriously causing a bottlenick? I mean it's old but not THAT old..? (It's still an i7 for crying out loud )

Edit: Appreciate your feedback guys. Looks like it's time to upgrade!

Thx all.

It's still a decent cpu, but you bought a very fast gpu, team fortress was developed with very low end gpu's in mind, so you're always going to be cpu limited if you have a very powerful gpu.

with your new cpu some games are still going to be cpu limited, but at much higher fps.

 

[digitaldurandal]

Set PowerTune to +20% and set Maximum Performance for desktop in Windows settings. Almost all the games you listed are going to be CPU limited with a stock 930. You need to overclock you i7 to 4Ghz or get an i7 4790K if you don't overclock. Monitor your GPU usage in MSI Afterburner. I wouldn't be surprised if your GPU utilization is only 50-60% in some of these games since a 2.8Ghz 1st gen i7 has no chance of letting your 290 use its power vs. pairing it with a 4.4Ghz Haswell. You are literally probably losing 30-40 fps in performance easily because of your CPU. Think about it, a 4.4Ghz 4790K is 2x faster in IPC than a 2.8Ghz 930.

Why would you suggest a K model processor for someone who doesn't overclock? That makes no sense.

 

[digitaldurandal]

It's still a decent cpu, but you bought a very fast gpu, team fortress was developed with very low end gpu's in mind, so you're always going to be cpu limited if you have a very powerful gpu.

with your new cpu some games are still going to be cpu limited, but at much higher fps.

Turn on 8xMSAA and see if you keep about the same framerate.

What resolution is this at by the way?

 

[Injectelo]

Turn on 8xMSAA and see if you keep about the same framerate.

What resolution is this at by the way?

1920x1080

Whether its 8xMSAA or no MSAA, fps still drops to 40s

 

[Termie]

Is my i7 930 seriously causing a bottlenick? I mean it's old but not THAT old..? (It's still an i7 for crying out loud )

Edit: Appreciate your feedback guys. Looks like it's time to upgrade!

Thx all.

Just to be clear, your CPU actually IS that old. Six years if you consider it a derivative of the 920, released in Oct. 2008. Impressive that it's still viable for gaming, but yes, it will bottleneck you in every game while using a Radeon R9 290.

And there's absolutely nothing wrong with your video card, nor is there anything you can or should do to fix it. You're running very old games on a very new card, and if it were running at 100% clocks, you'd be wasting clock cycles like no tomorrow.

 

[gradoman]

1920x1080

Whether its 8xMSAA or no MSAA, fps still drops to 40s

If you overclock, you could determine if it is in fact a CPU bottleneck. I think that's what's holding you back here, but yeah, you'd have to try OCing to be sure.

 

[tential]

Why would you suggest a K model processor for someone who doesn't overclock? That makes no sense.

Because the i7-4790k is the fastest model out (single threaded that is).

If you didn't want to bottleneck a "top end" model like the R9 290 then you'd want as much CPU horsepower as you could throw at it.

If OP was OCing, he could simply keep his processor and OC it, or maybe pick up a 4770k on the cheap off ebay and OC it to the 4790k levels, but if he didn't want to bother with OCing and still wanted to get he fastest single threaded performance processor out there that's the 4790k.

4790 is 3.6 Ghz, 4790k is 4 Ghz....

 

[SPBHM]

Hey guys,

-Vsync is off. FPS dips to ~40 (unacceptable with a 290!) in hectic combat. (TF2)

-Is there anyway to turn powertune off besides afterburner? (tried it off with rust, not tf2, didnt change anything, then again rust is unoptimized prealpha)

-WTF is up with powertune anyway, such a frustrating feature to have on a gfx card:twisted:

-Are we sure powertune is the culprit? could anything else be at play here?

Thx <3

40fps sounds right for 2.8ghz "1st gen" i7 on TF2 with a lot of action,
basically your CPU is limiting performance, the GPU usage is low, the card goes to a lower power state (designed to save power when not much GPU usage is required)

with the old cards you could disable ULPS and it would always stay at the 3d clock I think, not sure is the same with the 290

I had this problem a few years back with old games performing worse because of the 2d clock (stutters and such) I would normally just enable a ton of AA to make the GPU usage higher and stabilize the clock for the games to run better, but you could manually disable editing some file from catalyst profile.

 

[RussianSensation]

Why would you suggest a K model processor for someone who doesn't overclock? That makes no sense.

No, it actually makes sense in his case:

1) i7 930 is a 2008-2009 CPU and he is still using it. That means $100 extra over an i5 over the next 5 years he keeps his CPU given his usage pattern is only $20 a year! I would not buy an i5 today if I intended to keep using it for 5 years like he used his 930.

2) i7 4790K has a 4.4Ghz boost, and when you add HT, it's up to 30% faster than an i5 4690K. No other Intel CPU boosts that high. Since OP doesn't overclock, the high boost in this case is a solid gain over the i5 4690K. In fact, a max overclocked 4.7 Ghz 4690K can't even match a stock 4790K overall. Since his games are actually CPU limited, the high boost clock of the i7 over i5 in this instance is a direct benefit for 2-3 threaded games. At the same time he is safe in case games use > 4 threads in the next 5 years.

Think about it, $100 extra and the OP can upgrade 2-3 more times on the GPU side without fear of major bottlenecks. It's way better to buy an i7 4790K than an i5 4690K and a $40 air cooler to try and match the i7. Before this, the clock speeds between an i5 and i7 were only 100mhz apart. But if budget is a concern, sure I agree that buying a $190 i5 could be an option.

The alternative is to buy a $40-50 cooler like Thermalright True Spirit 140 or similar and overclock the 930 to 4.0Ghz. It should be very easy to do since you one up the Multiplier and jack up BCLK and add a minor voltage bump. This would allow the OP to coast another 5-) months until BW or maybe even Skylake. I7 920-930 were amazing overclockers. 4Ghz should be very easy with a powerful CPU cooler.

 

[Actaeon]

with the old cards you could disable ULPS and it would always stay at the 3d clock I think, not sure is the same with the 290

With ULPS enabled on my 290Xs, during idle the first card stays active at a minimal power state (300~mhz core). 2nd card is completely off, the fans do not spin. Under load, both cards are on and clocks jump up.

I disabled ULPS using Sapphire TRIXX and both cards are now active, but during idling they are in similar minimal power state with the lower clocks. The clocks ramp back up when under load.

As far as I can tell, all ULPS did was not turn off the 2nd card under load. Did not see any changes to the primary card.