Radeon 7950 GPU Usage

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element6665

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Apr 9, 2013
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Hey everyone,

Searched around for this and found a little info but nothing concrete so I'm hoping someone can help me out. I bought a MSI 7950 OC boost edition GPU. The GPU core is clocked at 960mhz stock.

Today after playing Far Cry 3 I noticed that my GPU usage in afterburner was constantly fluctuating. I loaded up Kombuster to see if I could replicate this fluctuation and I could.

I'm running the card on windows 8 with 8GB of 1600mhz ddr3, corsair 800w psu, and a i5 3570k so I figured they wouldn't be causing a bottleneck.

After playing around with after burner I noticed if I turn my power limit % up to 15%+ I can obtain 100% GPU usage no problem. Alternately even down clocking the core without a change in power limit will result in the same gpu usage fluctuation.

So, I'm looking for thoughts on this? Clearly I could just turn up the power limit % and hit that full GPU usage no problem but I want others to weigh in on whats going on. Any suggestion/explanation would be much appreciated.

Thanks!
 
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element6665

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Apr 9, 2013
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Game performance is alright, however, since clock speed is fluctuating with gpu usage as well I will obtain slightly higher fps when turning up power limit and running at a steady clock.
 
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element6665

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Apr 9, 2013
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Yeah, I've installed 12.10 13.1 and 13.3beta drivers all from a completely clean slate with the same results. If it's normal behavior I'll just crank up the power limit. I just remember by 7850 running at 100% usage on the same titles at stock config. Of course it was a slower card.
 
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element6665

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Apr 9, 2013
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Thanks for the suggestion. Neither the cpu or gpu have any power saving options turned on.
 
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element6665

Honorable
Apr 9, 2013
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10,510
After doing some more tests I'm going to assume this is how the card is supposed to perform. Being a boost card I notice specific fluctuation in gpu usage in respect to clock. The GPU will clock at 880 it seems and boost to 960mhz. GPU usage will report 99% when core is clocked to 880 and drop to about 63% when the core clock boosts to 960.

As I and others have stated, increasing power limit % will rid this gpu usage fluctuation, however, those who try will notice this also pegs the core clock at the speed defined by, in this example, afterburner (or the "boost" speed). If my logic is flawed here any corrections are appreciated, however, I'm thinking this is more normal behavior with amds boost bios.
 
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DarkSable

DarkSable

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Sep 27, 2012
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I don't have experience with the boost clocks - my experiences with Tahiti were when they were first released. That being said, everything sounds, if not right, logical.

As long as it's not severely affecting your gameplay, I wouldn't worry about it too much.
 
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