Why does Saints Row IV run so bad on a R9 290X?

[mathesar]

I used to play Saints Row IV on a GTX 480 and it ran great, I never finished the game and recently started playing again on a 290X 4GB but framerates are all over the place.

It has a hard time maintaining 60fps @ 1080P, sometimes when gliding around the fps will drop into the upper 30's (?!) doesn't matter if Vsync is On or Off and the difference between Medium and Ultra preset are very similar in performance.

Anyone know of any tricks to improving performance on AMD cards with this game?

Tried rolling back a few drivers but it only made it worse, AMD 15.11 Beta is the best performing drivers I've tried (for any game).

Other newer (more demanding) games run better than SR4 such as Arkham Knight.

PC
i7 920 @ 3.4Ghz
12GB Ripjaws DDR3 @ 1650Mhz / 8-9-9-24 1T
Diamond 290X 4GB
Win 10

 

[clutchc]

That's strange, indeed. Have you tried running DDU from safe mode to uninstall all remnants of Nvidia and AMD video drivers, re-booting, running CCleaner to clean up software conflicts, registry errors, and resource-wasting junk files and other crap, then installing the latest driver for your card and OS?
DDU: http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/display_driver_uninstaller.html
CCleaner: https://www.piriform.com/ccleaner/download

There will be a small amount of CPU bottleneck with the older i7-920, but if it was OK with the GTX 480, then it should be OK with the R9-290X. So I'm going to rule that out...

 

[mathesar]

That's strange, indeed. Have you tried running DDU from safe mode to uninstall all remnants of Nvidia and AMD video drivers, re-booting, running CCleaner to clean up software conflicts, registry errors, and resource-wasting junk files and other crap, then installing the latest driver for your card and OS?
DDU: http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/display_driver_uninstaller.html
CCleaner: https://www.piriform.com/ccleaner/download

There will be a small amount of CPU bottleneck with the older i7-920, but if it was OK with the GTX 480, then it should be OK with the R9-290X. So I'm going to rule that out...

I did a clean / formatted install of Win 10 a couple days ago but the problem persists, I thought about the CPU thing too but yea it ran great on the 480 with same CPU and I was running slower memory back then too (6GB @ 1300mhz vs. 12GB @ 1650Mhz & faster timings now), also when monitoring CPU usage it's extremely low while playing SR4 (well below 50% total load) from what I understand a bottleneck is visible if CPU usage is high (above 65-70%) during gameplay.

From what Ive been able to find from Google searches it appears to be an AMD specific issue with their newer cards, but runs fine on older AMD GPU's and Nvidia.

When I use the games own "Auto Detect" feature it chooses Low so there's some kind of incompatibility going on, With the GTX 480 it would choose the High preset on Auto.

 

[clutchc]

In fact, anything under 100% CPU usage is (technically) not a bottleneck condition.

But, are you using the Win 10 version of your gfx driver? How about other drivers on the system, are they all updated for Win 10?

 

[renz496]

Dx9 game?

 

[mathesar]

In fact, anything under 100% CPU usage is (technically) not a bottleneck condition.

But, are you using the Win 10 version of your gfx driver? How about other drivers on the system, are they all updated for Win 10?

Everything is updated for Win 10, I was surprised Creative has Win 10 drivers for my X-Fi Xtreme soundcard as of last month, it's older but still sounds better than the onboard Realtek audio after testing my headphones & speakers between both.

I solved a small part of the performance issues by installing Intel Rapid Storage (RST) which my motherboard originally called for on the now very outdated Install CD, I figured Win 10's storage driver would be good enough or perhaps better but I was wrong, luckily Gigabyte has a newer version of RST on their site for my motherboard model. (tried latest version directly from Intel but it was incompatible).

The issue was a brief pause in gameplay every time the game would auto save which happens *a lot* in SR4, anytime you collect a data orb etc. After installing RST there's no pausing at all now.

But that still leaves the sudden framerate drops when gliding / sprinting, I found an area overlooking the city where the framerate sat at 50FPS standing still, I started changing graphic settings but none of them affected the 50fps until I changed "Scene Detail" if I lower that to Medium it jumps up to 60fps (Vsync) so I've settled with that for now, the rest are on High, still see some sudden FPS drops at times but it's not as bad.

There is also a long standing bug where the car engine sounds are completely mute but someone found a fix by accident, if you put steam in Big Picture mode and then launch SR4 the car sounds are present (lol) ..so yea it's a shame the developers seemed to of abandoned patching even this seemingly easy to fix bug.

Yikes sorry for the long message, I had 2 cups of coffee this morning.

 

[clutchc]

From your description, it sounds like the game may still be buggy. I know that doesn't explain the sudden loss of performance with the better card, but a poorly written game can have some weird outcomes. Is this a Steam game that is always fully updated? Or the retail version you have to update yourself?

 

[mathesar]

From your description, it sounds like the game may still be buggy. I know that doesn't explain the sudden loss of performance with the better card, but a poorly written game can have some weird outcomes. Is this a Steam game that is always fully updated? Or the retail version you have to update yourself?

It's the Steam version so its all updated.

 

[mathesar]

Dx9 game?

SR4 is DX11 without any option to change it. I guess there was a way to change it in SR3 for improved performance..

 

[renz496]

So the game support DX11 properly. DX11 should be faster than DX9 unless the DX11 vesion of the game use specific graphical effect that exclusive to DX11 such as tessellation and DOF. Probably it was driver issue on AMD end. If the stuff being enable usually DX9 might end up faster because they did not use graphical effect that is taxing to the gpu. I think it was the same with DX10 vs DX9.

 

[rcald2000]

Your low CPU usage doesn't support what I'm about to say, but could it be CPU throttling brought on additional heat generated by the 290X? What is the temp of the (1) CPU and the (2) GPU? What is the utilization on the (3) CPU cores and the (4) GPU? I know you stated an approximation of the CPU utilization in your post, but could you re-check it. That CPU is seven years old. Could the thermal compound be degraded?

(5) What motherboard model do you have, and is it the latest BIOS version? !Caution, as I have no experience with Windows 10 but I've heard it gets locked in to specific hardware.

 

[mathesar]

Your low CPU usage doesn't support what I'm about to say, but could it be CPU throttling brought on additional heat generated by the 290X? What is the temp of the (1) CPU and the (2) GPU? What is the utilization on the (3) CPU cores and the (4) GPU? I know you stated an approximation of the CPU utilization in your post, but could you re-check it. That CPU is seven years old. Could the thermal compound be degraded?

(5) What motherboard model do you have, and is it the latest BIOS version? !Caution, as I have no experience with Windows 10 but I've heard it gets locked in to specific hardware.

The GTX 480 actually ran hotter than the 290X if you can believe it lol, 480 would regularly hit around 93C under load while the 290X is around 83-85C.

Here is the requested info based on playing Saints Row 4 for a half hour with MSI Afterburner monitoring in the background (paused monitoring after exiting game):

(1) Max CPU temp - 60C

(2) Max GPU temp - 84C

(3) CPU Utilization varied a lot depending on which core was being used but stayed fairly low throughout, I decided to post a screenshot of the MSI window for easier interpretation. ( 2 screenshots to fit all of the info )

(4) GPU Utilization was interesting, It seems to jump up and down wildly and not sure what to make of that, I tried another game, Batman Arkham Knight, and the GPU Load would jump up and down from 100% to 0% in the same manor even tho the framerate remained at a smooth 60FPS during this time (Batman actually runs better than SR4), I'm starting to wonder if the GPU readout isnt being accurate?

(5) Motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD3R rev 1.6 and my bios is 2 versions behind (currently running version FI), I'll have to update after verifying it wont put up any red flags in Win 10 due to the way it registers hardware for activation (I'm guessing it will be OK tho). Power supply is a Corsair CMPSU-750TX

 

[mathesar]

Looks like it's an issue with AMD GPU's after all, I was looking through the Saints Row IV PCGamingWiki page and towards the button under Issues it states "Issue where a low frame rate is experienced (especially in the open world), even on a high end AMD machine." which is exactly my symptoms, At least I can stop stressing on it, A shame they never addressed it other than a partial performance boost with beta drivers (Still runs worse than the ol' GTX 480),

At least there was some positive results from all this, I ended up tweaking my memory timings in bios (tightened them up) and got a few FPS Avg boost in other games in the process plus I was long overdue for a fresh install of Windows, previous install was Win 7 which hadn't been formatted since day 1 and it was then upgraded to Win 10, the fresh install of 10 fixed some random issues I was having outside of gaming.

Thanks for the replies everyone.