Upgraded to 7950 from 6950, no performance gain

[spoonycoot]

Like the title says I upgraded my Asus 6950 which was an oc edition, to the Gigabyte 7950 which also comes factory tweaked(900mhz vs 800mhz reference). I installed the card, ran catalyst, then rebooted.

Before the upgrade I could run Diablo III just fine on 1920x1200 everything maxed except shadows were on the medium smooth setting. Every once in a while I would get some slight stuttering which was slightly annoying.

With the new card I open Diablo III hopping to run it maxed. Increased shadow detail tho high smooth, and the performance was ridiculous. Constant stuttering and frame rate drops. You would think it could handle it. I'm really disappointed. Also in Guild Wars 2 I tried running it with super sampling instead of normal sampling and again it couldn't handle it.

Am I cpu limited, is Diablo really that cpu intensive? Could it be a driver issue, should I have removed the 6950 driver or does catalyst handle it?

System Specs:

Intel i5 2500k 3.3ghz
Asus P8P67 Deluxe (latest bios)
8gb g skill ripjaws 1600mhz 7-8-7-24
Windows 7

 

[purple stain]

You should of been maxing out Diablo III just fine with a 6950.And no you are not CPU Bottlenecked.

Try deleting all graphics drivers including the CCC suite.Reboot then install the drivers again.Use driver sweeper to ensure you've cleared out all of them.

http://phyxion.net/item/driver-sweeper.html


Diablo III benchmark
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/diablo-iii-performance-benchmark,3195-5.html

 

[suat]

Of course, you should have uninstalled the CCC first, remove the card 6950 from Device Manager and shut your computer down. Install 7950, power on your computer, install CCC and restart your computer.

Are you running 6950 and 7950 together ?

It is not a remote possibility, either, that the drivers are not yet mature for 7950.

 

[purple stain]

What kind of fps were you getting with the 6950?

 

[cooldudesubho]

You don't need to reinstall any driver.Both 6950 and 7950 uses same driver.D3 runs better on nvidia card.Also what ur fps like?

 

[spoonycoot]

Of course, you should have uninstalled the CCC first, remove the card 6950 from Device Manager and shut your computer down. Install 7950, power on your computer, install CCC and restart your computer.

Are you running 6950 and 7950 together ?

It is not a remote possibility, either, that the drivers are not yet mature for 7950.

I didn't think I needed to unistall the driver since I thought they both used the same driver. No. I'm not running both cards, just the 7950.



I ran fraps with it and did a bench mark.

All these were done with the same settings, The last two were done after a driver removal, then a fresh install.

2012-09-14 15:52:34 - Diablo III
Frames: 995 - Time: 9953ms - Avg: 99.970 - Min: 99 - Max: 101

2012-09-14 15:53:21 - Diablo III
Frames: 198 - Time: 1997ms - Avg: 99.149 - Min: 98 - Max: 101

2012-09-14 15:53:29 - Diablo III
Frames: 196 - Time: 2028ms - Avg: 96.647 - Min: 92 - Max: 101

2012-09-14 15:53:33 - Diablo III
Frames: 53 - Time: 530ms - Avg: 100.000 - Min: 100 - Max: 100

2012-09-14 15:54:14 - Diablo III
Frames: 11702 - Time: 120000ms - Avg: 97.517 - Min: 68 - Max: 102

2012-09-14 16:06:05 - Diablo III
Frames: 4672 - Time: 42277ms - Avg: 110.509 - Min: 96 - Max: 139

2012-09-14 16:30:37 - Diablo III
Frames: 4863 - Time: 49858ms - Avg: 97.537 - Min: 75 - Max: 138

2012-09-14 16:46:47 - Diablo III
Frames: 7761 - Time: 85878ms - Avg: 90.372 - Min: 0 - Max: 139

2012-09-14 16:48:50 - Diablo III
Frames: 7413 - Time: 85036ms - Avg: 87.175 - Min: 0 - Max: 105


It did the "stutter" everytime, sometimes it was mild, it was the absolute worst the last two benchmarks. This was all done from the same checkpoint. It seemed like I was dropping frames everytime, but according to fraps I wasn't. So what explains the stuuter if it's not the frame rate.

I also tried to capture video of this happening with fraps, but the times it did it really bad the video would for some reason be corrupt and wasn't recognized by media player and wouldn't play.

Also at one point I got the D3d graphics error. This happened during an alt- tab to see if fraps was still running.

 

[purple stain]

Yeah recording video with fraps while playing a game creates an even heavier load on the GPU so your fps will dip a lot.The stuttering is most likely a driver related issue.It happened to me with my 6870 crossfire.Eventually they released a driver that fixed it.

Other than the stuttering I don't see a fps problem.You should use driver sweeper and delete everything graphics related.Reboot and install the most current driver.

 

[spoonycoot]

I was having a performance problem before I even tried using fraps to record video.

Anyways, I used driver fusion to erase the drivers, for some reason even after that when I would analyze it still showed registry values. No matter how many times I deleted and rebooted they were still there. Reinstalled fresh driver. Fired up Diablo III, ran a benchmark and took a video with my phone. The quality sucks but you should be able to see what I'm talking about. Watch my character run.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TzuKUr0Xhg

2012-09-14 18:32:33 - Diablo III
Frames: 5199 - Time: 60000ms - Avg: 86.650 - Min: 34 - Max: 102

 

[purple stain]

Have you tried searching the Diablo forums for lag and stuttering? To be honest it looks more like lag than stuttering.

After watching that video it looks a lot like the problems I've been having with Starcraft 2.It was fine until the most recent patch.Blizzard may be to blame.And when I mean lag I don't mean like internet connection I mean GPU lag.

What HDD and PSU are you using?

 

[spoonycoot]

The game is on this drive wd1001fals-00j7b0, os is on an OCZ vertex 3.
PSU http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817207003
suppusodely a rebadged seasonic.

 

[purple stain]

Perhaps you could try putting the game on the SSD.

 

[spoonycoot]

After further research this seems to be a common problem for a lot of D3 players. Apparently there is micro stuttering and major stuttering. There doesn't seem to be one fix. Some fixes are gpu related, others blame hard drive access time and fix it with the game on a flash drive or ramdisk, others even blame network lag, because the game is so heavily connected with the battle.net servers. I should have known it was Blizzards problem. People have been reporting this issues since release, and as far as I can tell Blizzard hasn't acknowledged it, so that looks promising.

http://www.overclock.net/t/1263511/diablo-3-stutter-jitter
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5978349974
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5149178443?page=1

Thanks to all for your time and input.

 

[spoonycoot]

Best answer selected by spoonycoot.

 

[Mousemonkey]

This topic has been closed by Mousemonkey