So recently I picked up an R9 295x2 and have been having a hell of a time trying to get it to work. I've had experience with Nvidia SLI setups in the past, and while they've been finicky, they were never this bad.
Essentially the problem is that everything seems great on paper- the card is properly recognized for what it is, benchmark scores are right around where they should be, and even minimum FPS totals seem totally normal. But in practice there is unbelievably bad micro stuttering which I have noticed correlates with an extremely odd behaviour exhibited by the card. When using monitoring software such as MSI afterburner and checking the usage I noticed that it looked like this: http://imgur.com/gallery/zKCkNJj/new with the usage spiking repeatedly from 0 to 100 and back again.
I then tried running the card for a short period in Furmark since it was easier to see the GPU usage report in the overlay provided, and saw that what was actually happening was that the GPUs were actually alternating load- at any given time *either* GPU1 or GPU2 would be at 99-100% and the other would be at 0%. That sounds alot like how alternate frame rendering would work, but it should be happening far faster than would be noticed by monitoring software. In addition, whenever I used SLI setups in the past, any benchmarks would put both GPUs at 100% the entire time, never any dips to 0% like this.
I've tried everything from multiple PSUs (An EVGA 850W B2 and an EVGA 1000W G2, I am also using separate PCIe power connectors for each 8pin), to reinstalling drivers multiple times, to reinstalling windows, to installing old drivers but nothing seems to work. What is infuriating is that the cards perform otherwise totally fine, temperatures seem normal, they don't artifact at all and benchmarks return proper scores so I don't think the cards would be defective, but I don't know what I'm missing- hopefully one of you guys can help because this is getting extremely frustrating.
(Also I have an i5-4460CPU so I don't think there is a bottleneck)
Essentially the problem is that everything seems great on paper- the card is properly recognized for what it is, benchmark scores are right around where they should be, and even minimum FPS totals seem totally normal. But in practice there is unbelievably bad micro stuttering which I have noticed correlates with an extremely odd behaviour exhibited by the card. When using monitoring software such as MSI afterburner and checking the usage I noticed that it looked like this: http://imgur.com/gallery/zKCkNJj/new with the usage spiking repeatedly from 0 to 100 and back again.
I then tried running the card for a short period in Furmark since it was easier to see the GPU usage report in the overlay provided, and saw that what was actually happening was that the GPUs were actually alternating load- at any given time *either* GPU1 or GPU2 would be at 99-100% and the other would be at 0%. That sounds alot like how alternate frame rendering would work, but it should be happening far faster than would be noticed by monitoring software. In addition, whenever I used SLI setups in the past, any benchmarks would put both GPUs at 100% the entire time, never any dips to 0% like this.
I've tried everything from multiple PSUs (An EVGA 850W B2 and an EVGA 1000W G2, I am also using separate PCIe power connectors for each 8pin), to reinstalling drivers multiple times, to reinstalling windows, to installing old drivers but nothing seems to work. What is infuriating is that the cards perform otherwise totally fine, temperatures seem normal, they don't artifact at all and benchmarks return proper scores so I don't think the cards would be defective, but I don't know what I'm missing- hopefully one of you guys can help because this is getting extremely frustrating.
(Also I have an i5-4460CPU so I don't think there is a bottleneck)
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram