Sapphire HD 7870 OC is only used for 63%

^I posted a link for the 12.11 drivers.....

 

No problem, I guarantee, you will be impressed with your reborn 7870. I was blown away, every game went up in fps. The best drivers AMD rolled out since Mjolnir.

 

I can't say I'm so impressed by the new driver...

 

another theory...

50-60 fps might be explanation to game max fps limit. Some games have 60fps limit, to stabilize frames.

Could be that some data that needed for smoke particle, models etc. is not on memory, so it being fetch from HDD, which cause fps drop. However if you have your games installed on SSD, it shouldn't be the cause.

Also make sure its not another software running on background and eating CPU + accessing data on Hard Drive.

Comparing log of HDD access, CPU/GPU usage should give you better picture.

 

To those 7870 users in this thread, I'm currently doing a research regarding the issues on 7870.

may I know your 7870 BIOS? pls. also inform me any problems you are having on your 7870 together with that BIOS.
015.017.000.000.000000 (113-217XTHE-O02)
015.017.000.000.000000 (113-217XTHYE-S01)
015.015.000.002.000000 (113-E217XTHY-S01)

If you have any other 7870 BIOS pls. indicate.

and BTW...does MSI Afterburner completely safe with other brands? do you have to tweak it in order to use it with another brand?

 

The gpu usage and downclocking problems were driver related, and are fixed in 12.11 betas, the blackscreen is hardware related and should be fixed in new batches. So I dont think any more research is necessary but anyway, here's my bios:

015.015.000.002.000000 (113-E217XTHY-S01) - No problems with my 7870

And you can use Aftreburner with any brand (I actually prefer it over Sapphire's Trixx)

 

more reason why I wanted to know which batch are defective...so all future 7870 owners can avoid with this problem.

the only way to detemine this is through BIOS, because same BIOS means the same batch.
buying a new card won't necessarily mean you got a the new batch of 7870 because the shop might have stocked a defective batch.

Thanks for the info and sharing your BIOS. Gonna try the afterburner, I was hesitating to try it because it says MSI...

 

I dont think they dont have to change the BIOS to change the defective components. I think a serial number on the PCB would be more telling.

 

Where can I see what BIOS my graphics card has?

 

Ah, pleased I found this thread I thought my 3DMark11 score was a bit low !

And was getting the 63% issues in other things like Heaven


EDIT - Getting 2D artifacting with the latest beta drivers

 

Just updated to the 12.11 beta driver and i still get a max of 63% usage when im playing WoW, very disappointing.

 

I'm pretty sure you didn't do a clean reinstall. Use Atiman Uninstaller. Works perfectly.

 

Dxdiag is showing the driver date as 12/2/12, and in CCC, its showing the driver as 12.11, how could it not be working?

Also ive used DriverSweeper before and gave me troubles, why doesnt AMD just include a uninstaller with the drivers?

 

DriverSweeper no longer works properly, it used to in the past, but now, for a thorough cleaning use Atiman Uninstaller. It will clean up everything 100% and nothing will be left over to mess up a new installation.

 

Sorry I'm in a hurry so excuse me if this has already been solved.
It could be an unstable CPU overclock which is bottle necking the GPU.
Or vsync, but that shouldn't be happening in demanding games.

 

I'm getting the same issue with crossfire enabled on my 7970's but with one card
I get 100% gpu usage! it's so frustraiting.

 

occasionally having same issue with my HIS 7870 (oc @ 1188/1444 stable with fan curb maximized to keep below 50 degrees celsus), getting 100% GPU usage when dirt3 game is loading but falls back to 80 or 60% ! found that rebooting win 7 ult 74 or sometimes or just relaunching the game unlocks it ?!

HAd same issue with 2 x 6970 2GB Oc 955/1455 where I was getting low frame rate ( around 70 FPS with 60% GPU use during game play but 100% GPU use when game loading) but was getting 100% all the way GPU use is one Card is used.

Almost sold my 7870 to keep only one 6970, but fresh system install showed 7870 performing better, 6970 Crossfire scaling found to be lower than previously owned 6870 in crossfire.

CrossFire scaling seems to improve when running 2 monitors of 1920 x 1200 in eyefinity mode. = 3840x1200
Not much framerate drop in for a single card (6970) going from 1920x1200 to 3840x1200 !

All strange stuff with AMD: giving up for good on the crossfire: lot of headache, noise and heat for poor scaling for regular 1 monitor resolution, not worth it : something is wrong somewhere in the drivers.

Moreover when 2 cards are installed, and crossfire is not enabled (since each card is connected to a separate monitor) : there is NO POSSIBILITY FOR AMD GPUs to spread the GPU load among both cards: all the stress FALLS ON the graphic card assigned for the MAIN MONITOR : very sad !: EVEN IF YOU TRY TO SPREAD GRAPHIC INTENSIVE APPS AMONG BOTH MONITORS (dragging apps from monitor to the other in extended desktop) issue that doesn't seem to be present with NVIDIA CARDS that also does not require all monitors to be connected through MAIN card for SLI to be active.

Strange and sad frustrating stuff with AMD high end cards.:bang:

Forgotten to mention that 6970 still beats and actually knocks out the newer 7870 when anti aliasing X8 mode is selected (dirt3) and runs games smoother @X4 in dual monitor: they have comparable performance @ x4, 7870 is much powerful in computing ops (benchmarks better) and runs 10 to 15 degrees cooler and have more power managing features.

It's just so sad the AMD cross fire scaling is so hectic.

 

The "problem" and solution...

(I know this is OLD, but for future reference...)

What I believe everyone is seeing is a side-effect from the "Power control settings" in CCC ("Power Limit" in Afterburner).

If I'm not mistaken, the AMD GPU is laid out into a few power zones - with the ability to turn power off to groups of compute units or stream processors depending on whether you have VLIW or GCN GPU. If you want to save power, you can shut down one or more of the zones and rely on the remainder to perform calculations.


What seems to happen is that the driver 'weighs' the power-need of the GPU task load (as sent from DirectX) and then determines how much of the GPU needs to be employed to execute the load. A frame will always have some highly concurrent operations and some linear operations, the linear code is often the bottleneck - determining how long before the frame is ready. The driver can figure out quite easily how long the linear pathway is as it packets the information to send to the GPU. If the concurrent operations will be completed within 60% of the time needed to complete the linear operations, then you can shut down 1/3 of the GPU.

What this does is give an effective GPU load of 63% or so when this situation occurs WITHOUT affecting performance more than a fraction of a frame or so. When the load is too high, it re-enables that other portion and you see a spike of near 100% - usually for a few frames. Then it returns to 63%...

This can be verified merely by increasing the power limit by a few %. There will be a point where keeping that other portion of the GPU in action doesn't cause the GPU to pull too much power, so it stays alive. It is often quite low - like 5%... AMD knows what their GPUs need... so the drivers are usually tuned for the sweet spot of maximum performance AND power savings

In any event, it is a good power saving feature and usually doesn't cause any actual performance issues since the anticipated frame time is used to determine whether or not to employ the entire GPU.

Hope this helps :nerd: Or someone corrects me if I'm wrong :banana:

 

It's so old that it's not an issue anymore, the problem was in the drivers and it has been fixed since 12.11 beta something (a whole year now) if my memory serves me right. In any case anything newer than 12.11 and you're ok.

 

Still happens w/ 14.9

I can replicate it with the current driver on Windows 7 x64 and driver 14.9, fresh install (today) and no utilities installed while running Tessmark at its most insane for just a few minutes.

Jumps up from 63% at times when framerate drops just a little. I am maxing at 76fps, averaging 74, and minimum is 68 - so performance is hardly affected.

Raising the power limit settings in CCC reduces the time at 63% for each bump. At just 10% it doesn't seem to happen at all.

In fact, all that happens is that power usage goes up and things get a bit warmer. Interestingly, it also seems that the framerate dropped slightly (1fps) - maybe because the card is trying power limit in a less efficient manner?