Poor 4870 performance

I have been running 2 Sapphire 4870 1GB cards since February and have so far been disappointed. It benchmarks real well in 3D Mark Vantage but thats about it.

I have been playing Lord of the Rings Online with the graphics set to Ultra High and AA set to 8x. I can get upto 120FPS but will dip down to 15 -20 sometimes creating some awful jerking. I have tried this with only one card in the system and also in a crossfire setup. I even tried putting one of my 4870s in my cousins computer to see if it was my setup and I had the same results. My cousin was running a 9800GTX that would get up to 90FPS but rarely dropped below 60FPS in the exact same area. Now he has a GTX 270 and rarely drops below 90FPS in any area.

Crysis has been running horrible on her too, on medium settings I will get 25 - 30fps but its real jerky and some lighting effects look broken.

I have read alot about the 4870 and mostly I feel like mine should be running much better then they are.

Any tips that I could try to make this run better would be great.


My System
Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit was running Vista Ultimate 64bit both have same performance in my scenarios.
Antec 900 Case
Q6600 2.4GHZ have also tried 3Ghz and is mainly the same performance.
GA-EP45-UD3P
2X2GB G.Skill PC2-8500
2X Sapphire 4870 1GB
640GB WD Cavier Black
OCZ StealthXStream OCZ600SXS 600W
ATI Catalyst 9.4

Your cards are severely bottlenecked by your slow processor speed.

You cant compare you friends fps to yours unless he's using the exact same settings and has the exact same 2.4ghz clock speed.

Your running everything Ultra high with 8x AA, I mean cmon, simple answer is turn the settings down and turn the AA to 4x.

Here is the thing my cousin has the exact same processor he is running on an ASRock P43 chipset board and he only has PC2-6400. As I stated before, I placed one of my cards in his rig and it had the same massive dips in fps where his did not.

I did not spend $500 on 2 cards to start cranking stuff down, especially when I have seen it run better with just one 9800GTX. So are you telling me ATI cards need more bandwith then a 9800GTX?

In LOTRO 1x and 8x only make about a 2 - 5 fps difference in my performance. I usually run my cpu at 3Ghz by changing my fsb to 1066 anything past that and it seems to get unstable. It will run at 3ghz for a few weeks and sometimes it will default back to 2.4 after a reboot.

I game at 1680X1050, I have noticed in GPU-Z that my cards do not go over 50% in crossfire and if I physically remove one of the cards I can get it to get up to 62% usage. Is that pretty normal?

I was using Vista 64 I upgraded to Windows 7 about a week ago, I have ran the 9.4 drivers for about 3 weeks before I upgraded to Windows 7.

It seems like alot of the games I play just dont seem to play nice with ATI. I played Warhammer Online for a little while but they did something to there game that made me go from 60FPS on high settings to 20 -25FPS on the lowest settings.

I had an 8800GT before I bought the 4870s and I see only a fraction of improvement on Crysis, FarCry looks pretty good too but like any other game I can get High FPS but the sudden dips in frames just makes it feel jerky.

I will be anxious to try the 9.5 drivers today.

At that resolution you will never see the full potential of those cards.

So that is good news. You should not see that big of a hit at higher resolution since you are running crossfire

I have been reading some guides and I am going to try to achieve 3.2Ghz or 3.4Ghz depending on temps and stability tongiht. When I am playing the game G15 LCD shows cpu usage at about 20 - 25% with Core 0 and 1 at about 50% each and the Core 3 and 4 rarely ever get used. Call of Duty WaW seems to spread the load across all 4 though.

In the Catalyst Control Center, do you have Catalyst AI turned on? If not, you'll not notice any performance difference from CrossfireX.

Also, look in device manager and see what it says about what driver version you are running. Although I DL'ed the proper driver package for Win7 64-bit, it installed old drivers from several months ago. I installed the correct driver manually through device manager and my performance on my 4830 jumped significantly.

Go to 3d options and set the cat a.i to advanced.

Everything went up about 50 points with AI set to advanced -
I'm at:

P10261
GPU - 13072
CPU - 6237

Wow... you really owned me on CPU... I didn't realize there was that big of a difference between the two processors... guess I'll have to start on the OC process now... but we did just about match up on the cards, so now I know mines doing what it should... thanks for posting that...

3D mark does not give a fair rerpresentation of a comp's computer.

Sure 2.4ghz will run games fine. But it will still bottleneck two 4870's for sure. You wont see the full potential of the cards at that clock speed. Did you read the article on Toms about the 4770? A single 4770 was bottlenecked by a 2.8ghz 7850 X2. When the same card was run with an i7 965 the fps went through the roof.

Have you ever tried your friend's graphics card in your computer? And a full reinstall often helps things (especially if your drivers are a mess). Also, that jerking at certain times sounds more like hard drive reading to me. Maybe reinstall the game (and Windows, if you can) and give it a good defrag.

I have an APC battery backup and when under load I rarely exceed 350Watts and thats including my 22" monitor.

From everything I have read just one of my cards should perform much better then a 9800GTX. My cousin has a very similar machine and even running his at 2.4 GHZ with PC2-6400 Ram he still out performs me. We both have all the settings the exact same. Even when I placed one of my cards in his computer it did the exact smae thing it does on mine. It will get upto 90-120 FPS but when you go to turn it will kind of jerk and drop to like 20FPS briefly and then go back up to 90-120. His car would only get upto 90 but rarely dipped below 60.

I didnt say his PROBLEM was a cpu bottleneck issue.

I'm saying his cpu cant keep up with two of those card and he will never see their full potential at that clock speed.

Well I downloaded Catalyst 9.5 and my average FPS dropped by 20.