6990 Performance - dissapointing?

[davexxsmith]

Hi, I recently purchased a HD 6990 to go in my PC. I'm not sure if the performance I'm getting Is as good as It should be, my specs are:

i7 2600k sandy bridge 3.4ghz.
Asus P8H67-M motherboard.
12GB RAM.
2x500GB HD.
Win7 64bit.
HD Radeon 6990.

Initial setup consists of 1 23" 1920x1080 monitor. After upgrading from nvidia GTX 460 756MB (Less than 1GB card) it didn't seem to give much of a performance increase as I would have expected, especially for how much It cost. I also had a 4870X2 card and the 6990 doesn't seem much better than that either. I recently changed my setup to use eyefinity with 3x 23" monitors all 1920x1080 resolutions, although impressed by how good three monitors look I'm still disapointed with the system performance. Even with only one monitor when playing some games such as Left 4 dead 2, World of Warcraft and APB (All points bulliten) I have to drop settings to good or even low to get acceptable fps. I understand games like World of Warcraft are not the best for crossfire setups, but still expected better performance than what I'm currently getting. It seems a shame having to drop the system to only run one monitor when I see people on YouTube with worse cards than mine running games such as these on higher settings and getting better fps than me, any help would be appreciated.

Cheers, Dave.

 

[bystander]

I'd suggest you run 3dmark11 and post the result, just so we can make sure things are working correctly.

Now onto your experiences:
At 1080p, you don't need nearly the power of a 6990 in order to max out the refresh rate of the monitor. If you were getting over 40 FPS on your 460, you probably can't tell any difference with the 6990. Remember, your monitor can only display 60 FPS, anything higher is wasted.

Going to Eyefinity definitely put the 6990 to use, but now you are running at a VERY high resolution, and that can put the hurt on even a 6990. You now are needing the card to work 3 times as hard as before.

Anyways, take a look at this: http://www.overclock3d.net/reviews/gpu_displays/his_hd6990_eyefinity_5760x1080_review/1

 

[bystander]

One more thing you might have to be concerned about. PowerTune on Overdrive of CCC probably needs to be turned up otherwise your cards will probably have to throttle down in order to stay within specs.

 

[WaywardX]

I'm not sure about the other two titles, but i am certain that WoW has issues with crossfire(including dual-gpu cards) and will run off only a single gpu, even if they're on the same PCB as in the 6990.

 

[davexxsmith]

I'm looking in CCC and I'm not 100% sure what you mean about turning up Powertune. I've looked in Overdrive section and cannot see a powertune option.

 

[davexxsmith]

@WaywardX Yeah WoW has a issue with crossfire but I also had a 4870x2 which is also a dual gpu card and seemed to have about the same performance.

 

[davexxsmith]

I did a Heaven DX11 benchmark and got 12 minimum and 186 maximum fps, I would have gave a screenshot but I failed to save it to my desktop.

 

[bystander]

I did a Heaven DX11 benchmark and got 12 minimum and 186 maximum fps, I would have gave a screenshot but I failed to save it to my desktop.

Please do 3dmark11, or if you run Heaven DX11 benchmark, do it at 1080p, not eyefinity. I don't know what eyefinity results should be.

 

[davexxsmith]

It was in 1080p and on a single monitor, here are the results from the log:
22:20:57 Time: 259.459
22:20:57 Frames: 20870
22:20:57 FPS: 80.4366
22:20:57 Min FPS: 12.6451
22:20:57 Max FPS: 186.821
22:20:57 Scores: 2026.2

 

[bystander]

@WaywardX Yeah WoW has a issue with crossfire but I also had a 4870x2 which is also a dual gpu card and seemed to have about the same performance.

WoW does work reasonably well with crossfire with some cards and not so well with others. I know the 4870x2 and 5870's get great performance from crossfire.

However, that's not really the point I was making. If you are on a single 1080p screen, both solutions give you max FPS for your monitor and will not look different. FRAPS may be able to show you a difference, if you don't have v-sync on, but you can't tell it with your eyes due to the refresh rate cap on the monitor.

 

[bystander]

It was in 1080p and on a single monitor, here are the results from the log:
22:20:57 Time: 259.459
22:20:57 Frames: 20870
22:20:57 FPS: 80.4366
22:20:57 Min FPS: 12.6451
22:20:57 Max FPS: 186.821
22:20:57 Scores: 2026.2

That's an excellent score. What settings did you use. Such as tessellation quality, AA and what not.

 

[davexxsmith]

WoW does work reasonably well with crossfire with some cards and not so well with others. I know the 4870x2 and 5870's get great performance from crossfire.

However, that's not really the point I was making. If you are on a single 1080p screen, both solutions give you max FPS for your monitor and will not look different. FRAPS may be able to show you a difference, if you don't have v-sync on, but you can't tell it with your eyes due to the refresh rate cap on the monitor.

Well I also play a game called All points bulliten, and even though I get a constant 62fps on eyefinity I still notice very choppy gameplay, to play the game smoothly I have to turn eyefinity off and yet it still gives me the exact same fps

 

[davexxsmith]

That's an excellent score. What settings did you use. Such as tessellation quality, AA and what not.

Tessellation: Normal
Shaders: High
Anistrophy: 4
Anti-aliasing: off.
Full screen is on.

 

[bystander]

Tessellation: Normal
Shaders: High
Anistrophy: 4
Anti-aliasing: off.
Full screen is on.

Just as a comparison. This is with 6970's (6950's unlocked) at 885mhz and 1375mhz memory and i7 920 at 4.0ghz.

FPS: 109.6
Scores: 2760
Min FPS: 26.3
Max FPS: 271.9
Hardware
Binary: Windows 32bit Visual C++ 1500 Release May 21 2010
Operating system: Windows 7 (build 7600) 64bit
CPU model: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU 920 @ 2.67GHz
CPU flags: 4009MHz MMX SSE SSE2 SSE3 SSSE3 SSE41 SSE42 HTT
GPU model: AMD Radeon HD 6900 Series 8.861.0.0 CrossFireX 2048Mb
Settings
Render: direct3d11
Mode: 1920x1080 fullscreen
Shaders: high
Textures: high
Filter: trilinear
Anisotropy: 4x
Occlusion: enabled
Refraction: enabled
Volumetric: enabled
Replication: disabled
Tessellation: normal

Looking at my score, it does look like yours should be a little higher (it will be lower than this due to lower clocks on the stock 6990, but it is the same cores.

 

[davexxsmith]

Just as a comparison. This is with 6970's (6950's unlocked) at 885mhz and 1375mhz memory and i7 920 at 4.0ghz.

FPS: 109.6
Scores: 2760
Min FPS: 26.3
Max FPS: 271.9
Hardware
Binary: Windows 32bit Visual C++ 1500 Release May 21 2010
Operating system: Windows 7 (build 7600) 64bit
CPU model: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU 920 @ 2.67GHz
CPU flags: 4009MHz MMX SSE SSE2 SSE3 SSSE3 SSE41 SSE42 HTT
GPU model: AMD Radeon HD 6900 Series 8.861.0.0 CrossFireX 2048Mb
Settings
Render: direct3d11
Mode: 1920x1080 fullscreen
Shaders: high
Textures: high
Filter: trilinear
Anisotropy: 4x
Occlusion: enabled
Refraction: enabled
Volumetric: enabled
Replication: disabled
Tessellation: normal

Looking at my score, it does look like yours should be a little higher (it will be lower than this due to lower clocks on the stock 6990, but it is the same cores.

Is there anything that I can do to make it perform better? At the moment I'm kind of regretting buying a 6990 and wish I went with the 2 6950's unlocked to 6970's. Your max is 90 fps better than mine which is a huge disappointment.

 

[bystander]

Is there anything that I can do to make it perform better? At the moment I'm kind of regretting buying a 6990 and wish I went with the 2 6950's unlocked to 6970's. Your max is 90 fps better than mine which is a huge disappointment.

I have seen people have troubles with their SSD using poor software support or having a bios giving troubles. The problems people had with it, was often shown through choppy play. You may want to make sure you are using the best software/drivers for it, and you have the most up to day bios.

Your CPU may play a factor in the score, at least a little. I have my i7 920 at 4.0ghz, yours is at stock 3.4 (although yours should be close to my performance at 3.8 as it is newer tech).

Other than that, you may have stuff in the background that is slowing your system down.

 

[davexxsmith]

I'm going to wipe my C drive and try again, cheers for your input.

 

[bystander]

I'm looking in CCC and I'm not 100% sure what you mean about turning up Powertune. I've looked in Overdrive section and cannot see a powertune option.

In the Overdrive, above the fan control, there is a "Power Control settings" bar. At 0 it limits you to the spec PCIe max TDP, but you can increase that by up to 20% so the card can receive more power and then it won't throttle down when stressed.

 

[davexxsmith]

I've increased it by 20% but I'm still going to wipe my C drive, it has alot of rubbish on it that could also be slowing it down. cheers.

 

[bystander]

An update on scores. I dropped the clocks down to 6990 levels (830/1250) and my score was 2605.

 

[davexxsmith]

Hm, there is also a bios update out so I'm going to do that aswell. Hopefully this will give me better performance.

 

[bystander]

I didn't ask, but what version of Heaven did you run? I was using Unigine Heaven Benchmark 2.1. If you aren't using the same version, the scores may differ.

Edit: Wow, I'm out of date. They are up to 2.5.

 

[davexxsmith]

I'm running Heaven Benchmark 2.5, the newest version.

 

[bystander]

I'll update you on new version.

 

[bystander]

Good news for you, my score dropped to:
FPS: 85.3
Scores: 2148
Min FPS: 12.5
Max FPS: 188.5

I'm not sure what the differences were in versions, but 2.1 looked better and performed better.