Anything I can do to increase gaming performance at 1080p? (MSI r9 390)

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xen_05

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May 16, 2011
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I got a new video card for my machine recently, and after playing a bunch of games lately (God bless the Steam Winter Sale), I've found my performance to be... somewhat lacking. Definitely not terrible by any means; in fact, most of the games I've got play great. It's mostly some of the newer games that came out recently, including: MGS5, Witcher 3, and GTA5. With all the settings turned up to max (Except for some of the Nvidia specific ones), I can idle at around 60 FPS. Seems fine, right? However, when under load, performance dips to around 40-50 FPS, with GTA5 probably being the worst offender for me right now.


Is there anything I can do to improve my performance with all these games? Here are my specs:

Intel Core i7 4790 @ 3.6GHZ
MSI Radeon r9 390 8GB @1076MHZ
16GB DDR3 memory @ 1600MHZ
1TB 7200RPM Hard Drive
EVGA GQ 750+ Gold-Certified Semi-Modular PSU
 
Solution
coozie7
AFAIK GTAV is a bit of a bear, not sure about the others.

Usual obvious applies: Get all your drivers up to date, motherboard, sound, chipset, video.
Disable other running programs when gaming.
Clear out the clutter and defragment the HDD.

Check the game settings: High AA is still the quickest way to cripple the framerate, and AMD cards can suffer heavily here.
Any Nvidia specific settings should be disabled.
Some lighting effects like godrays can also slam the framerate down, they look great and can really help with the 'wow' factor in some games but in others the performance penalty can be too great to justify keeping them on.

Consider overclocking the CPU and GPU, it's not for everyone and you need to research the CPU overclocking...
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coozie7

coozie7

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Jun 2, 2007
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AFAIK GTAV is a bit of a bear, not sure about the others.

Usual obvious applies: Get all your drivers up to date, motherboard, sound, chipset, video.
Disable other running programs when gaming.
Clear out the clutter and defragment the HDD.

Check the game settings: High AA is still the quickest way to cripple the framerate, and AMD cards can suffer heavily here.
Any Nvidia specific settings should be disabled.
Some lighting effects like godrays can also slam the framerate down, they look great and can really help with the 'wow' factor in some games but in others the performance penalty can be too great to justify keeping them on.

Consider overclocking the CPU and GPU, it's not for everyone and you need to research the CPU overclocking particularly before making changes but it can give some impressive FPS boosts.
Consider swapping the memory for faster parts, chips like the i7 4790 like fast memory, I've just moved up from DDR3 1600 to DDR3 2400 RAM (thanks winter sales) and there's a significant improvement in my minimum frame rates, it's not earth shattering but noticeable.
 
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Solution
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burgessanthony

Dignified
Jun 27, 2012
3,016
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Nice system :)

Is your GPU at max usage when the dips happen? If so you are GPU limited, and I believe in GTA V this can happen even with yours and higher models with everything so you may have to play about with settings. Witcher is generally hard on GPUs especially maxed. Ive managed FC4, Black ops 3 and JC3 at 1080 and maxed so its not all games!

At 3.6ghz, your GPU is MAYBE also holding back (MAYBE). Games like high clock speeds over cores. If in some sections you see GPU at less than 100% and CPU usage high, it may be holding you back. I get this in FC4 in some area (mostly due to bad optimisation).

Make sure latest drivers and use 'AMD optimised' in Crimson settings for Tessellation.

Also, if you can put an OC on your RAM (2133 maybe) you might find an improvement.

EDIT - just to add to the above (totally agree with all of it) but the 390 is great at higher AA due to mem bandwidth and pure VRAM. But still use SMAA or equivalent for best performance.
 
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