7850 - experiencing major fps drops

please provide pc specs, Res, and settings you use

at the moment, im running at 1440x900, cpu is fx4100 and 8gb vengeance ram at 1600mhz, also run at maxed settings

When you say you are running things at max settings do you mean that AA is turned all the way up or are you using a different form of AA such as FXAA? AA uses a bunch of GPU RAM (VRAM). It would make a huge difference.

Another thing to note is the amount of ram on your graphics card. Is it the 1GB version, or is it the 2GB version. I have a 1GB card and I can run games like crysis 2 at max or near max settings with mine at 1080p.

I am a bit surprised by your FPS drop in Diablo 3, it shouldn't be that hard on your card.

i got the 2GB version and it plays diablo fine but every 10 seconds my fps drops to around 5 for a few seconds in the games i listed

Well, your pc is spec'ed well enough, did you install the newest drivers? if so, try reinstalling. or you could just have gotten a slightly bad card, ive had bad cards before

its playing every game perfectly apart from batman d3 and sleeping dogs

It's probably software - bad cards tend to exhibit problems All the time - corruption on the desktop and in games, or crashing as soon as a level is loaded.

Hunting down offending software is a pain, though - I hate when something like this happens. DL GPU-Z or Afterburner so you can monitor your video card during games, CPU-Z so you can make sure your memory and CPU look good, and HW monitor to check for temperature/power issues. Task manager, too - CPU load and keep an eye on processes that consume a ton of memory/CPU time.

problem seems to be only when i engage in combat even on lowest settings

CPU hiccuping. Combat includes physics, AI, and ballistics that are all calculated by the CPU. Yours is not bad, but it's no i5...

If it's a small stutter, I'd say it's normal. If it's a huge one, or a ton of little ones during combat, I'd say you've got some other software sucking up some CPU time. You'll see the same type of thing on any system if you record video while playing a game.

i have everything closed off and im still getting fps drops, when it drops, my cpu usage shoots to %100 and gpu to %100 for about 2 seconds

is your FX-4100 at stock if it is that's your problem

nah, its ocd to 4.4 ghz

ok that's ruled at. Do you use AA/AF when gaming

i use x4 AA

that's why it lags a HD 7850 can't handle that high of AA and ultra settings. turn AA off and you'll be golden

It seems to only happen in diablo 3 mainly now, my pcs works fine in wow with everything at full and 8x AA

Diablo 3 stutters all the time for me too. Has something to do with the Always Online thing - even with Vsync I get stutters. Still happening in any other games?

I am a long time techie/IT guy and I know alot about PCs, cards and performance. I would have to say the 7850 is one of the weirdest, kinda dumbest cards iv ever ran across. Its designed for DX11, if you run any games in DX10 or DX9, especually the newer games you will get that stupid random LARGE FPS drop, I have a HD 7850 right now im using and mine does the same thing, as crazy as this sounds, you have to use DX11 and crack everything up, including your AA and for the most part it will all go away. I cant understand it, but it works. I run with a Phenom II x6, 8 gigs of ram and a 1gb gigabyte HD7850 and I was getting the FPS drop on almost all of my games every 20 seconds, it was driving me insane so I spent alot of time tweaking and messin with it until i realized the 7850 is retarded and you gotta crank everything up and use DX11 ONLY.

Lol well my answer helps but tonight I found out the actual resolution. Goto your cards manufacturing website and download the latest BIOS, i noticed mine was 1 set behind so I downloaded the latest BIOS and updated my card and I can run it in any mode now and it works just fine, no issues with FPS drop anymore, runs better actually.