Low FPS on AC4 for no reason

xenoran

Honorable
Dec 14, 2013
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10,510
i seem to be having some FPS problems with multiple games,

I have an i7-3770k at normal clock settings of 3.5ghz
for my gpu I'm using 2x 7970 crossfire both slightly OC to 1075/1575 and power limit is +20%

with my cpu and gpu I should not have any issues running games however with some, most recently AC4 I have a problem of my cpu only using 50% usage per core (which isn't a problem but does tell me its not bottlenecking) and both of my gpu are only using apprx 30% usage when I have all settings in game maxed except MSAA and im getting 20-30 fps in most cases, and when I turn MSAA up my frames drop but my gpu usage stays the same, its almost like my gpu is refusing to go any higher

When I run benchmark programs such as OCCT or furmark or Valley they have no issues getting my gpu to run over 80% at stay at 60fps

Any ideas?
 

timil

Distinguished
Jun 3, 2011
341
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18,790
Game optimized for NV but it's not very optimized in general, here's what you do:

-Don't enable HBAO, it's for NV, only use SSAO.
-God rays are extremely demanding and AC4's implementation of the god ray effect is very poor and pathetic, not worth enabling in my opinion.
-Make sure AMD Catalyst is latest, version 13.11 Beta 9.5.
-Make sure game patch is latest.

It sounds like there is a problem with the power saving features of your GPU, it probably isn't exiting 2D clocks when run AC4.

Also, being a shitty console port and optimized for NV, I highly doubt AC4 support crossfire very well, if at all. Disable crossfire and try game.
 

xenoran

Honorable
Dec 14, 2013
19
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10,510
One more thing I noticed, my GPU usage goes up when I enter a menu for the game such as pressing Esc to enter the options menu or anything my gpu% goes up and my fps goes to 60, I understand why my fps goes up because not much to render on a menu but the curious thing is that my gpu usage% goes up