1090T bottlenecking a 7970?

Is the 1090T at stock clocks?

It is overclocked to 4.0 GHz. Like I said, Skyrim is the only game that seems to be having problems. Though to be honesty, I had to reinstall Windows so I've only really tested Skyrim and Shogun.

HD 7970: Bulldozer vs. Sandy Bridge vs. Nehalem
CPUs tested:
Bulldozer - Flagship AMD FX-8150
Sandy-bridge - i5-2500k
Nehalem - i7-920

I know that they didn't test your CPU in this review. But it's a nice idea to check how much you would gain using these CPUs with a HD7970.
Example, Skyrim, in 1920x1200, max details, 4x AA, a sandy-bridge deliver aprox. 50% more fps than bulldozer and aprox. 30% more fps than nehalem. (your cpu should be between bulldozer and nehalem, close to nehalem)

Six 1090T cores at 4GHz with an HD7970 wins, easy.

wrong


most games cant use more than 4 cores


in other words 2 of the cores will be idle


cpu's with more than 4 cores are not designed for gamers and are designed for rendering/workstations


for example if all you do is game, a quad core is all you will need

if you do a lot of video encoding/transcoding, rendering .etc then it would be worth getting a cpu with more cores

Don't do that, The 1090 is enough for a 7970 its about equal to a 920. Skyrim is kinda a Skippy game from time to time. But if you want to later upgrade to ivy.

I've decided to keep the card and my CPU for now. It does seem to run most games without issue. Can anyone explain why I'm having such problems with Skyrim? It runs horribly for no apparent reason.

driver issues or you got a bad 7970 maybe? Your 1090t isn't bottlenecking, try google and see if others are having the same problem.

Skyrim is a badly optimized game that is VERY dependent on your CPU. An overclocked 2500k with a decent video card (let's say a 6770) has no problem playing Skyrim. In GPU dependent games like BF3 you should have really smooth gameplay.

I play skyrim maxed out with my 1100t OC 3.9ghz and a 6950. And it feels smooth it skips at times(mainly in the city) but its pretty smooth and looks great.

as the guy above me said you need a sandy bridge cpu to play skyrim at its best settings. you dont have a sandy bridge so your experience isnt as good as it could be.

How on earth are you doing this? Mine will not run smoothly on any settings.

Their has to be something wrong with your game,drivers. Are you running it on the latest drivers? And what fps are you getting while playing? I can say regardless to what others are saying here the 1090t is fine for skyrim


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYF-xHPN0Tw


Not my video but still proof.

But i can say the 1090t is limiting your performance and if you had a 2500K you would not be getting those low FPS(20's). but a 1090t is still good enough for the game. Also the game is glitchy.

I get 60 inside and in caves, 40 outside, and 20 in cities. It's awful. I just ran Battlefield 2 as well, and I was only getting 45. The GPU was only running at about 50%. There has to be a bottleneck.

Its a problem with skyrim, also what is your power supply?

i have a 7970 on a i7 950 and it runs smooth as can be in all situations.
i turned down AA to 2x but turned on fxaa and AF is at 8x. it looks the same to me but runs smoother.
to pick up some extra frames install this
http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=4387

My PSU is 700W. Can anyone explain the Battlefield 2 thing?

Which 700w psu

hes not. simply as that. well he might for his definition of maxed out but generally maxing out a game is running at 1080p with everything turned up at 60fps. hes not getting those fps with that cpu. i have the same gpu and a total average in caves outdoors and cities i might be getting 60 fps only because im not in the cities much.

its been proven that there is cpu gains up to a 4.0 ghz sandy bridge in skyrim. it only uses two cores as well.



whats wrong is that his cpu is too slow.

I cant believe all these people know so little. Im in the same shoes, with a 1055t. Have to OC it to 3.5 to get good frames on skyrim and BF3. It massively bottlenecks my 5850 crossfire so I know its bottlenecking you. My city frames are not as bad as yours though. Make sure you patch skyrim there is a new patch that makes it far smoother.

Your going to have to OC much harder lol, and than replace it in the near future. Also I always wandered if you underclock your cards so the bottleneck with the cpu becomes less and perhaps stabilizes the FPS. Just something I have been wandering.

PS 1055t = 3.4GHZ = 42 FPS/ 3.5GHZ = 50 FPS outside
Yeah the bottleneck is that big.

No mention of RAM or OS?

I tripled my RAM recently and got huge performance gains. 4GB->12GB. Some newer games are just incredibly RAM inefficient.

^^ Who would buy a 7970 and only have 4 GB of ram?

skyrim is a 32bit program therefor it will benefit very little from more then 4 gb of ram. i have never even seen a game use more then 2.5 gb of ram.

oh btw most games are only 32 bit programed.

What CPU-NB OC if any are you guys running? I can say for a fact, with my 1100T setup, the difference between 2000 and 2600 concerning 3d performance was quite impressive to say the least. I leave my HT at 2000 / stock clock.

...looks like you might not have been running optimally with your 6870 and it's misled you as to the problem you are experiencing. Here is an users opinion from the AMD forums....

" 11.11a are running very well for me in Skyrim & many other games, I have yet to notice any negative effects, Overall a lot better than the 11.11 official drivers.

For me that is."

...now those drivers are specific to the 6800/6900 GPU series, it may be that you'll have to wait for optimization from AMD for the 7970 card. meanwhile I'd update your Windows properly and make sure you have the latest drivers installed for all your hardware, including downloaded the latest video driver for the above video card.

im playing skyrim with a single 5850 and my 1090t stock and i dont get any slow downs

Partially true. While applications compiled as 32-bit are limited to just 2GB of Address Space usage under Win32, under Win64, that upper limit is extended to 4GB if compiled as Large Address Aware [though most apps fail to reach this amount].

Farther, Windows now pre-caches a lot of data in RAM, so there is a slight upgrade in performance from 4GB to about 8GB of RAM or so [less paging]. You get serverly diminishing returns at about 6GB or so though...

But yes, when you look at most gaming benchmarks, even the PII series trails Sandy Bridge processors. You are, frankly, bottlenecked with that processor in applications that do not scale to use at least four cores. IPC matters more then core count in games.

you do you just dont know it.

I got rid of slow downs by underclocking my 5850 crossfire from 700+ to 400-500MHZ. Need to test that out more.

I'm having a similair issue, I use a QX6800 OCed to 3.27 GHZ with a 7970, and I'm not getting the frames I should, most everything RUNS, but I see weird spiking issues in some games. Like I get 45 fps maxxed in deus ex hr, when that card is capable of way more. Do you think my old processor is causing that problem? I also have an old motherboard with an nvidia chipset which I think may also be causing problems. I see some weird variation though. Obviously its powerful because I can do things like play the witcher 2 at 3840X1080 (20 fps in combat, 40 fps indoors) with ubersampling on, but nothing is running solidly.

I do realize I should generally upgrade my cpu, but I'm waiting for ivybridge before I throw down any money.

i would appreciate any help on this.

there is no doubt its your cpu. its over 3 years old.

Well if that's the case, that's a relief, I was wondering if it was my CPU or the nvidia chipset in my motherboard. I don't really have the greatest idea about how the processors mathematically scale from generation to generation. I was a little bit hesitant to assume it was my processor, because the thing was really good when I bought it, and it is a Quadcore with a decent clock speed, although I do realize it is not as good as an i7 running at the same clock.

So I will just take it as is until ivybridge comes out, otherwise I'd be paying about 400$ for a stopgap.

Yeah, and as luck would have it, I just saw a 2500k and motherboard for $280 on craigslist, gonna snag it hopefully.

you will need ddr3 ram fyi which is another 20-30 dollars these days

I already have 8 GB of DDR3 I picked up while it was on sale.

good deal. hope it all works out

Hopefully, the guy is playing hard to get, some guy is offering a ridiculously good mobo for 40$ so I'm hoping to buy the processor from one guy and the mobo from the other, sigh, craigslist and people who don't respond within 10 minutes to any and every email. Don't people have smartphones  

whats the mobo?

sabertooth p67

Well that deal fell through, but I managed to get my hands on an i7-2600k for 230$, now I'm cooking with gas.

Right, I haven't replied to this thread in a while, but I have new info to add here. Not only is it not running very well in Skyrim, but also in Assassins Creed Revalations. The CPU maxes out around 50% (3 cores maxed out) and the GPU at 40%. It's blatantly obvious there is an overclock here. Should I pickup a 2500k? Is it worth it? Also, I've noticed some annoying coil whine and I've had random crashes (while playing Revalations) after which the computer hangs within a minute. Is this the GPU or the PSU?

if your cpu usage is 405 thats a massive bottleneck. you will see at least 20fps increase with an overclocked i5 2500k

Thanks. I'll definitely look into that. Is it as easy to overclock as I've heard?

Also, is the high pitched coil whine a bad thing? I've heard other people have had the same issue but with no real problems with the card.

Finally, how would I know if there are problems with my PSU? After a power outage today my computer crashed a couple of times.

theres a big issue with this bench..
We used the same Windows installation on all systems and moved the HDD between test rigs.
so that hardware abstraction layer would be corrupt on at least 2 of the systems...

not so much as to show the tests as completely useless but it is flawed.
depending on which system the hdd was installed on first would vary the results some what... still they would probably make the gap between the 3 a little wider if anything.

An update. After much struggle and strain, I am finally up and running on my i7-2600k, with a Z68 mobo, and my hd7970 working properly, I now slaughter games. I can even run witcher 2 with ubersampling, which is remarkable for a single GPU.

Now all the people who think there phenoms thinking that they are getting good fps or should i say the max they could get out of their gpus just look like noobs now. I said it before and ill say it again, phenoms can't play this game in the same league that a sb cpu can.