Major Performance Hit From Afterburner

[Amlwaycooljr]

Forgive me if this is already known .. I did some quick searching for this issue but not as much as I typically do. Alright so the problem .. when I have Afterburner running my performance GPU wise is halved. It seems the benchmarking tools and games are only using a portion of my GPU when Afterburner is running. For example:

OCCT
With Afterburner
AVG FPS: 120
GPU Usage: 30 %

Without Afterburner:
AVG FPS: 400fps
GPU Usage 98%

I have similar results in Furmark, Farcry 2, and Resident Evil 5. I disabled the OSD thinking that might be the issue but it was to no prevail. Am I just being dumb and missing some odd setting?

As for my setup I am currently using the latest Afterburner beta but the issue seems to be happening with previous versions, I'll test that further after I finish installing my new CPU Heatsink and case fans.

My Rig:
Core i5 850 at 3.2ghz
Asus ATI 5850 stock settings (with the recent Afterburner issues I reverted back to stock)
4gb Gskill 1600 mhz DDR3
Windows 7 64bit Professional

If you guys need any more info I'll be on later on today .. now back to installing those fans. Oh and thanks for the help.

[Unwinder]

Answer is: terribly slow and inefective monitoring codepath implemented in nice and "shiny" AMD driver:

http://forums.guru3d.com/showpost.ph...9&postcount=46

[Amlwaycooljr]

Does the AMD Monitoring solution provide the information for both the Afterburner GUI and OSD??

I'm curious because after running some tests with disabling and enabling certain monitoring parts I found the OSD monitoring is what is causing the decrease in performance on my machine. Every time I enable something in the OSD my performance drops a good 5 percent or so but I receive no decrease in performance when the Afterburner GUI is monitoring everything. Is this typical?

[Unwinder]

Originally Posted by Amlwaycooljr

Every time I enable something in the OSD my performance drops a good 5 percent or so but I receive no decrease in performance when the Afterburner GUI is monitoring everything. Is this typical?

Of course it is. OSD is not free and it eats some performance and that is absolutely expected and normal.

[Amlwaycooljr]

Ya I understand it's going to degrade my performance some .. but 5-8 percent decrease per item being displayed is a bit much. When I have everything enabled my fps is half of what it would be without the OSD being displayed. That's quite a performance hit just to monitor a handful of things.

[Unwinder]

Originally Posted by Amlwaycooljr

Ya I understand it's going to degrade my performance some .. but 5-8 percent decrease per item being displayed is a bit much. When I have everything enabled my fps is half of what it would be without the OSD being displayed. That's quite a performance hit just to monitor a handful of things.

5-8 percent is rogugh and WAY TOO INACCURATE estimation. You do understand that different applications are bottlenecked by defferent system components, and if you see such framerate drop in CPU limited application rendering rather simple scene and giving 500+ FPS, it doesn't mean that it will be the same in all games, don't you?
We're wasting the time, sorry. Everything is as it is supposed to be.

[Amlwaycooljr]

First off thanks for treating me like I'm 5 and I'm terribly sorry that I'm wasting your time.

Here's a bench I ran ..

Furmark 1280 x 1024 no aa

N R1 R2 R3 avg FPS % slower than no OSD
0 = 146 150 150 avg 148.7
1 = 143 141 140 avg 141.3 5% slower
2 = 135 135 134 avg 134.7 9.6% slower
3 = 129 129 128 avg 128.7 13.5% slower
4 = 124 125 124 avg 124.3 16.4% slower
5 = 119 118 117 avg 118 20.5 % slower
6 = 110 110 110 avg 110 26.1 % slower
7 = 103 103 103 avg 103 31% slower

N = Number of monitors running (ie. gpu temp, gpu fan speed etc)
* Looks like the forum doesn't want to keep the formating of my chart ..

I guess I'm curious as to why for the exact same bench with the exact same settings I see such a large decrease in framerate than when I run the bench with fewer monitors in the OSD. I never thought adding additional monitors to the OSD would decrease the performance that much, I'm sorry for being ignorant in this subject.

[Unwinder]

Originally Posted by Amlwaycooljr

First off thanks for treating me like I'm 5

Thanks for typical sarcasm of user misunderstanding something but giving ambitious replies about the thing he don't understand. Sad.

Originally Posted by Amlwaycooljr

I guess I'm curious as to why for the exact same bench with the exact same settings I see such a large decrease in framerate than when I run the bench with fewer monitors in the OSD.

1) Slowly reread my previous reply.
2) Use search and read RivaTuner/ATITrayTools forums. A lot of info and notes can be found, which telling that OSD is NOT FREE an EACH ADDITIONAL symbol displayed there is a performance hit. It was so for years, and it will be so.

Closed.