FX 8350 and 290X Tri-X and poor performance.

Hi all,

I've been a long time lurker on Guru3D (For at least 8 years) and always found the help and advice on PC hardware to be the best. However, after many years of lurking I've now found it necessary to call on all your expertise to try and get to the bottom of a problem I'm having.

I seem to be struggling to get decent performance out of my rig which is as follows.

AMD FX 8350 at 4 Ghz
Sapphire 290X Tri-X 4GB
Asrock 990FX Extreme 3
16 GB Ballistix DDR3 1600 ram
1 x Kingston 250 GB SSD (Boot)
1 x OCZ 128 GB SSD (Commonly used programs)
2 x 2TB Samsung HDD's
Windows 8.1 64

I play all sorts of games but my favourites are sim racing games. On assetto corsa I am struggling to reach the performance others are enjoying which is starting to drive me crazy (excuse the pun). As an example another fellow sim racer posted a video on youtube running a modded track and car set with 20 AI cars. He was also running the game on max settings and was still able to record his video at 60 FPS. His system uses the same processor, an Nvidia 660 2GB with 8GB of system ram.

When I run the same track and car set with 20 AI I get approx 25 FPS and am unable to record a video as it drops me another 10 FPS.

I've installed all the latest drivers (As per the advice on these forums and used DDU in safe mode etc) but have not seem any improvements. Whats even more strange is that my system is perfectly stable with no other issues apart from poor 3D performance.

Out of curiosity I ran a quick 3D Mark test last night and got the following results.

I then did a comparison with a system which was running the same hardware which confirmed that I have a definite problem.

I have an image on photobucket of the results page but as I've not been posting I'm unable to post it up. However the test was ran on just the skydive test and my result was a score of 8506 vs 23739 for another person running exactly the same system specs. Just to highlight the difference they were getting an average of 143 FPS vs my 50.

Any advice would be truly welcome and thanks for any help in advance.

 

Firstly, Monitor your CPU and GPU usage and temps when you are gaming. Make sure your core clock on your GPU is actually hitting what it should when gaming. Use MSI Afterburner. Report back with your findings. After this we can take the next steps on figuring out what the problem is.

 

as assetto corsa realesd lately i think you have to w8 for newer version of catalyst

 

Many thanks for your replies.

My GPU temps are around 65 and but I'm not sure of my CPU temps at the moment. Oh I forgot to mention I'm running a Corsair H100 water cooling system on my CPU.

I will do a test with afterburner running and report back with my CPU temps.

 

Oh, I forgot to mention that Assetto Corsa looks like it's limiting the core clock (according to afterburner) to around 500 rather than the tri-x's 1040.

 

Which drivers are you using? I would recommend uninstalling your current drivers and using the latest 14.12 Catalyst Omega drivers either from the AMD website or from Guru3D.

 

@OP - Open GPUz - Hit the ? Render test on the right

Check that the PCI-E Lanes are jumping up to PCIE 2.0x16 @ X16 2.0

If not, try resetting and setting back up your BIOS / Make sure your GPU is in a x16 slot / Reseat the GPU

 

Will do that next, thanks. I think Assetto Corsa is CPU Bottlenecking though for some reason.



However, I'm still getting a third of the 3DMark score of identical systems.

Will post back in a bit.

Thanks for the help all.

 

Looks like its okay.

 

Hi Matt, I'm already running the 14.12 Omega drivers.

My 3DMark comparison. My score is on the right. As you can see my performance is way down.

 

Tried manually setting everything in the BIOS?

Remove or disable all GPU monitoring / OCing software as a test

OC the CPU to 4.8GHz or something, it should hit that no problem if you have enough cooling

Make sure your RAM is running @ 1600 with correct timings, maybe even OC that

Only other thing I can think is the PSU, try another PSU

Re

 

Thanks mate. Will report back if I get any results.

 

Check you're running the latest motherboard BIOS too

 

Yer, running the lastest for this board but it's a bit long in the tooth nowadays. Just out of interest I just ran the same 3DMark test with GPUZ open and the bus interface randomly switches from PCI-E 3.0 16 @ 16 2 to 1 1.1 while the test in in progress. Is this normal?

 

Not while it's running 3D it shouldn't drop

Try using MSI Afterburner to disable ULPS in the settings, then reboot

 

Yeah something is throttling your gpu, e.g. that Assetto Corsa, maybe try disabling that ULPS thingy Extraordinary mentioned.

 

nvidia cards (the driver) handling the directx cpu limit better than ati does

http://www.computerbase.de/2014-12/early-access-spiele-benchmarks-test/2/

so you either switch to nvidia,
or to intel,
or do both.

you can also hope for DX12 fixing the cpu overhead,
or mantle implementation, but im pretty sure they wont add mantle support.

 

As Tj said your GPU is being throttled to ~800mhz.

A CPU overclock prob wouldn't hurt either, but main problem seems to be GPU.

Btw Afterburner shows max GPU load 56% but on the left it says 100%.

 

From your screenshots it seems like your 8th core is getting all of the work where the other cores aren't.

Check to see if the game has a multi-core rendering option in its settings.

If not or if the problem persists try this: Start up the game, minimize and bring up Task Manager, disable all but the first core using Processor Affinity. Go back into the game and wait like 5 seconds and minimize it again. Re-enable all the CPU cores and check to see if performance has increased.

Disabling ULPS using MSI Afterburner is also worth trying as others have said.

Edit: I realize this won't explain why you are getting such low scores in 3DMark. I'll continue trying to figure it out, till then try what I said.

Edit: Try to increase your power limit to +50 on MSI Afterburner, see if that helps to get your core clock to its max setting. if it doesn't it is your PSU bottlenecking your components.