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r9 290x, getting poor FPS.. cant find my bottleneck! Please help

Tags:
  • Video Games
  • Lag
  • CPUs
  • Graphics Cards
  • FPS
  • Memory
  • GPUs
Last response: in Video Games
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February 28, 2014 3:07:59 AM

Dear Community,

Im getting FPS (20-30)drops in all games i play. (I play mainly Assasins creed 4 and WoW).

My setup =
MOBO- Asrock z68 Extreme4 Gen3
Cpu - i5 2500k @3.3, (currently not overclocked because of this problem, was before 4.5g)
RAM - 8g of ram DDR3 dual (slot 2&4)
GPU - MSI r9 290x
PSU - corsairs GS800
Storage- samsung evo 840 250g

When i run MSI afterburner i see my GPU useage is spiking all the time from 50-100%, sometimes from 0-100%.
I started reading my MOBO manual, and it said MAX shared memory 1759MB (below GPU Sections). Can this be my bottleneck?

Greeds Roger Holland

More about : 290x poor fps find bottleneck

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February 28, 2014 3:16:14 AM

your max shared memory is for igpus your r9 290x has plenty of its own memory, 4gbs. that being said i would update your drivers for the gpu to start see if that fixes it it probably came with the beta drivers.
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February 28, 2014 3:18:07 AM

usually when the GPU drops to 50% usage in game like what your describing there is a bottle neck and usually located at the CPU. But since you were OCed and still had this issue make me wonder if there is a program running in the background sucking up CPU power causing this issue. Try running task manager on the process tab and see what else pops up for CPU usage during gaming when the lag spikes hit.

what speed of ram are you running and what OS do you have?
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February 28, 2014 3:20:49 AM

Bad_Kitty13 said:
your max shared memory is for igpus your r9 290x has plenty of its own memory, 4gbs. that being said i would update your drivers for the gpu to start see if that fixes it it probably came with the beta drivers.


thx for making a reply. I've tryed the most uptodate driver and also the beta one. (currently using the beta one). It dint fix the problem sadly :( 
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February 28, 2014 3:23:13 AM

try a stess test like furmark or heaven bench. your gpu usage should be maxed. the max shared memory fefers to the intel hd graphics that are currently dissabled since you use a dedicated gpu. also monitor your temps cause if it reaches 95c, if nessesary 290 will drop its core mhz for better cooling. if temps are below 90c under load and usage keeps going up and down then it also might be a psu fault. anyway make sure you have the latest drivers installed. also try a mem test.
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February 28, 2014 3:23:26 AM

bgunner said:
usually when the GPU drops to 50% usage in game like what your describing there is a bottle neck and usually located at the CPU. But since you were OCed and still had this issue make me wonder if there is a program running in the background sucking up CPU power causing this issue. Try running task manager on the process tab and see what else pops up for CPU usage during gaming when the lag spikes hit.

what speed of ram are you running and what OS do you have?


Thx for making a reply. Im running w7 64bit. Im using corsairs ram, no idea what speed there at. When i use CPU-z to check my PC stats it says ''DRAM frequency 665.1 MHz. Thought they were 1333 mhz speed ones. How can u check to be sure?
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February 28, 2014 3:28:43 AM

chris987 said:
try a stess test like furmark or heaven bench. your gpu usage should be maxed. the max shared memory fefers to the intel hd graphics that are currently dissabled since you use a dedicated gpu. also monitor your temps cause if it reaches 95c, if nessesary 290 will drop its core mhz for better cooling. if temps are below 90c under load and usage keeps going up and down then it also might be a psu fault. anyway make sure you have the latest drivers installed. also try a mem test.


Agian, thx allot for ur reply's.
I've runned furmark stresstest a couple of times. The GPU load is almost always 100%, sometimes shortly drops to 98%. My temps are all time. Checking them always with HWmonitor. GPU doest go above 70 (putted fan speed's for agressive cooling). And CPU stays below 50 degrees.

What prog should i use for a memtest?
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February 28, 2014 3:33:48 AM

just curious but when your cpu was overclocked were you still getting the same drops?
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February 28, 2014 3:37:48 AM

Roger2525 said:
bgunner said:
usually when the GPU drops to 50% usage in game like what your describing there is a bottle neck and usually located at the CPU. But since you were OCed and still had this issue make me wonder if there is a program running in the background sucking up CPU power causing this issue. Try running task manager on the process tab and see what else pops up for CPU usage during gaming when the lag spikes hit.

what speed of ram are you running and what OS do you have?


Thx for making a reply. Im running w7 64bit. Im using corsairs ram, no idea what speed there at. When i use CPU-z to check my PC stats it says ''DRAM frequency 665.1 MHz. Thought they were 1333 mhz speed ones. How can u check to be sure?


CPU-z shows the rate cut in half because the ram is DDR (double data rate) meaning the speed would be doubled. so your ram is running at 1333 Mhz.

Please check and see if there is something else running/using the CPU during the game sessions.
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February 28, 2014 3:45:49 AM

Bad_Kitty13 said:
just curious but when your cpu was overclocked were you still getting the same drops?


Sadly, yes. I started by normalizing my CPU agian to be sure of a stable system. Thats why its running at the 3.3g speed agian. It the i5 2500k a bottleneck for the r9 290x?. ATM memtesting, doing 4x2000mb test (got 8gig ram). But somehow the last 200mb ram test is going significantly slower :S
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February 28, 2014 3:52:19 AM

i wouldnt give up yet bgunner suggestion of seeing if you have cpu intensive background applications while your gaming is a wonderful suggestion. it could be causing your drops and creating a bottleneck
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February 28, 2014 3:52:27 AM

Memtest86+ should be run at Boot so I'm assuming you are on another PC? If not then you really should run memtest from a disk at boot.
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February 28, 2014 3:52:35 AM

bgunner said:
Roger2525 said:
bgunner said:
usually when the GPU drops to 50% usage in game like what your describing there is a bottle neck and usually located at the CPU. But since you were OCed and still had this issue make me wonder if there is a program running in the background sucking up CPU power causing this issue. Try running task manager on the process tab and see what else pops up for CPU usage during gaming when the lag spikes hit.

what speed of ram are you running and what OS do you have?


Thx for making a reply. Im running w7 64bit. Im using corsairs ram, no idea what speed there at. When i use CPU-z to check my PC stats it says ''DRAM frequency 665.1 MHz. Thought they were 1333 mhz speed ones. How can u check to be sure?


CPU-z shows the rate cut in half because the ram is DDR (double data rate) meaning the speed would be doubled. so your ram is running at 1333 Mhz.

Please check and see if there is something else running/using the CPU during the game sessions.


Wel allot of stuff is running when i check via CTRL-ALT-TAB --> procceses. Its the game u run that tops it by far. Below that is mostly my firefox with arround 60.000 kb, below that my virus programs with 10.000 kb. below that are allot of things seom 1.000 kb to 24kb. I counted them. Its arround 50 procceses. And it takes arround 280.000kb to run those.

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February 28, 2014 3:57:46 AM

what you are reading off is the mega bytes of ram the programs are using. you need to watch the CPU usage. It is done in a percentage. when the lag spikes hit look at it and see what else is using the CPU at the time.

EDIT: unless you use multiple monitors then you will need to do this in windowed mode.
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February 28, 2014 4:04:36 AM

bgunner said:
what you are reading off is the mega bytes of ram the programs are using. you need to watch the CPU usage. It is done in a percentage. when the lag spikes hit look at it and see what else is using the CPU at the time.

EDIT: unless you use multiple monitors then you will need to do this in windowed mode.


Im using 2 monitors. Im always running my games windowed so alt-tab works nicely :) 
Im checking the CPU usage now. Indeed in a percentage :p  soz about that. Were can i check what program is being used when a spike hits?
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February 28, 2014 4:10:08 AM

on your second monitor put up resource monitor under the CPU tab. the resource monitor will move what ever is using the most CPU to the top. If you use task manager on the processes tab then open up the window as big ads you can and when the lag hit watch for what is using the CPU. Both ways will take a few times of it happening to get exactly what is going on but with time you will get it.
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February 28, 2014 4:20:41 AM

bgunner said:
on your second monitor put up resource monitor under the CPU tab. the resource monitor will move what ever is using the most CPU to the top. If you use task manager on the processes tab then open up the window as big ads you can and when the lag hit watch for what is using the CPU. Both ways will take a few times of it happening to get exactly what is going on but with time you will get it.


http://nl.tinypic.com/r/2d7hi53/8

This way? Running World of Warcraft atm. Getting fps arround 30 sometimes. From 60 - to 30 is terrible for my pc specs imo.
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February 28, 2014 4:28:00 AM

are you trying to record your game? since you have fraps running. Change your task manager over to processes tab and not performance tab.
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February 28, 2014 4:45:30 AM

well from the picture i can see gpu flactuating as you mentioned. the cpu usage while playing wow is normal as the memory usage.
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February 28, 2014 4:59:57 AM

bgunner said:
are you trying to record your game? since you have fraps running. Change your task manager over to processes tab and not performance tab.


no was just checking if the FPS was right or not.

http://nl.tinypic.com/r/jimc84/8
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February 28, 2014 5:16:26 AM

Is t here a possibility that my RAM is to slow? 2x 1300 mhz?
The FPS drops occyr on buzy moments were allot of stuff has to be loaded/ proccesed.
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February 28, 2014 5:32:25 AM

from your pictures i cant see anything suspicius.cpu-ram utilazation is normal. close all internet tabs to kill flash player plug-in but i dont thing its a drawback.you should try 13.12 catalyst which was the latest non beta. when on gpu stess test the gpu usage is maxed but when on games that also cpu kicks in the problem occurs. corsair gs 800 is an overkill for you setup and should run just fine but there is a chance there is a voltage problem of the 12v rail.can you check through hardware monitor or bios the psu voltages to see if they are within range?
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February 28, 2014 5:35:32 AM

what settings are you running in wow? also WoW is a CPU based game and not as much GPU based. It is normal to have FPS drops when tons of things happen in MMO's.
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February 28, 2014 5:57:09 AM

bgunner said:
what settings are you running in wow? also WoW is a CPU based game and not as much GPU based. It is normal to have FPS drops when tons of things happen in MMO's.


ultra
also played on high and good.

You do see a preformance inscrease, but the spike drops still are there.

I just tested.
3 - man dungeon. 100% fine... never dropped below 55FPS
5- man dungeon. NOT fine... FPS drops to 25- 30, stays there a while and climbs back up on less heavy moments in the game. (when noting happens in the dungeon :p  every1 idles... then it climbs back up)

http://nl.tinypic.com/r/29xjlg8/8

This picture show RED when my FPS drops
BLUE shows when i play'ed the 3 man.

edit: also added HWmonitor for VOLTAGE and TEMPARURE's. I got no idea what normale voltage are. BTW also tryed a overclock to 4.8g in the meanwhile. Dint help any. Still got my overclock on 4.8 since it makes no difference..
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February 28, 2014 6:14:07 AM

i cant see any voltage readings on the 12v . the gpu default speed is 1000mhz, isnt it? 1030 shouldnt be a problem but try increasing the power limit to 10% .
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February 28, 2014 7:44:45 AM

Odd; 2500k, even at stock, should be able to max pretty much everything out there. 1333MHz RAM is a bit slow these days, but Intel typically doesn't need faster memory to gain performance. Hardware wise, I don't see anything obvious, bottleneck wise. Temps look fine, so I doubt throttling it going on.

Its *possible* the CPU is downclocking for some reason; that would most explain what you are seeing. Either that, or a SERIOUS S/W bottleneck. Assuming your games are getting 80%+ CPU time (Sort Task Manager by the CPU column), I wouldn't expect that either.

System looks fine, and I don't see anything obviously wrong, but FPS seems awfully low, I agree.
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February 28, 2014 12:03:42 PM

Sorry guys, went AFK for a long time. Burned out of this stuff :) 
I appriciate all the reply's! Thx for helping some1 randomly in the world out :D 

Even though my problem isnt fixed, thx!
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February 28, 2014 12:18:44 PM

could it be have something to do with speedstep option in bios? it is an option for downclocking your cpu when not under heavy load and maybe it is taking a little to long for cpu to grab info off ram so it is trying to enable speedstep then turning it off again once it gets the info. so for that milisecond it is causing your drop in fps hence the drops.
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February 28, 2014 2:53:47 PM

dear Roger2525, if the stalling came with the gpu upgrade(and its not a driver problem) then i dont think its a software probem.if your previous gpu ran perfectly then 290x should run also.is it possible you could run your gpu or psu on another system? if the stallings emerged later and not just after( the gpu ungrade) then i would try a windows re-isntall.
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August 15, 2014 10:29:06 PM

This thread is pretty dead but ran across it and had a similar issue with wow. Computer runs most games at 60+ fps with setting maxed. In wow I would drop to 30fps often. Drove me nuts... I moved and poof slamming vsync almost full time. The only thing that changed from one place to the other was my Internet speeds. First house had dsl 700k down with 70k up. Have cable now with 3000k down and usual upload speed is around 2000k. I just decided it was my connection. Could be wrong but it fit too well for me to doubt it.
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!