Overclock 2 EVGA GTX 660 Superclocked

Hello forum,

I recently purchased Battlefield 4 just to find out that my specs are not optimal for some multiplayer maps, specially the ones that are extremely large and with a lot of vegetation. The issue is FPS drops in certain maps, no all of them and not all the time. I'm using Fraps to monitor the FPS and it doesn't go higher than 60 (what is that about?). I'm seeing the overlay of the SLI working on the games so I suppose it's working. So on certain maps after 15 min of gameplay it starts to get a little bit slower and I see the FPS drops to 10 or so when I move or turn around suddenly. I use also Nvidia Experience and I "optimized" the game with the profile that they suggested me which is almost all in Ultra settings, 4X FXAA, HBAO, no motion blur and 60 Field of View.

I started to investigate if I do a little overclock of my 2 cards would help but I don't want to mess up my cards. I'm using EVGA Precision X V.4.2.1. Latest Nvidia drivers updated yesterday, clean installation.

Also before we start overclocking, if get to that part, I would like to say that I tested my cards with MSI Kombustor to test my SLI because I thought that that might be the problem and I noticed that when I run any Kombustor stress test 1080 or 720 the only card reaching 95%+ usage is the main one and the other is at 3 or so %. Why? Is Kombustor not recognizing the second card or that's why BF4 sometimes experience FPS drops? Because the second card it's like not working at all?

The interesting thing here is that I have also Batman Arkham Origins and I know they are not the same in terms of graphics however BAO is not that behind and it runs smoothly, 55 - 60 all the time, and lets take note that this game also uses PhysX.

My specs:

Motherboard: Gigabyte 990FXA-UD3 latest BIOS
Processor: AMD FX 8150 Black Edition 8-core OC @ 4.2 Ghz
Memory: Kingston Hyper-X KHX16009D3B1 4 GB x 2 (8 GB) @1600
Video: X2 EVGA GTX 660 Superclocked 2GB (SLI)
PSU: Cooler Master Silent Pro 1000W 80 Plus Bronze
Cooling: Corsair H100i
Case: Cooler Master Haf-X

Drives:
ADATA XPG SX900 128GB SSD (Boot)
Seagate 1Tb (Storage)
WD Green 1Tb (Storage)
WD Mybook 1Tb (Storage)


Thank you in advance. Hope you can help.

Firstly, abandon GF experience. It's rubbish, and although it says it optimizes games, that's a joke. With latest driver it installs automatically, and I ran GF experience just to see what it was like. With a 560ti and a Q6600 it told me to set BF4 on the same settings you have above. Rediclous. It's just not gonna work.

With your own issues, firstly I would dial back AA and post processing. Turn off HBAO or at least reduce it to SSAO. See how it goes then. With such high in game settings you will be touching the 2gb limit on your GPU/s. Don't forget that just because you SLI doesn't mean the Frame buffer is doubled. Your still working off a max of 2gb. Take a look at this graph below, which a fellow poster put up in another post. It shows the vram usage at various resolutions, and different settings. At the settings you have applied you gonna be pushing 2.5+gb of vram usage, which is why you have slow downs.

http://www.guru3d.com/index.php?ct=articles&action=file&id=7368

Thanks to all.

I contacted EA and they say that I should be OK with Ultra, 4X FXAA and HBAO with my current PC specs, so I think is the game as ZionAZ said. How come Batman AO and Crysis 3 run perfectly? Is there another way to unlock the frames other than turn off V-Sync? I hate that terrible line when you move to fast with out V-Sync enabled.

Also, yes SLI is enabled I can see the overlay of "SLI" and the green bar on my left side of the screen.

So anyone knows why MSI Kombustor just uses 1 GPU on it's tests and the other is only at 3 or 5%? How can even things out and use the cards evenly?