i have the AX7870 2GBD5-2DHPPV graphics card running solo in a 16x pcie slot on my MSI 990FXA-GD80V2 mobo.

cpu: fx6300 FD6300WMHKBOX

ram: 2x4gb ripjaw 1600 pce 12800  F3-12800CL9D-8GBXL

hdd: 1tb 3gb/sec sata i believe 64mb cache

 

So, with these specs inside a coolermaster haf 932 case, i have these drivers and bios which i believe to be the latest: radeon hd 7800 series driver: 9.14.10.0945 with catalyst 13.1, and msi mobo bios 11.9.

 

i currently have my cpu overclocked to 4.00ghz with 200x20 stock voltage. it passed occtpt (cpu stress test) with a burn in test lasting 20minutes.

my gpu is not self overclocked but preoverclocked via powercolor to 1150mhz, i havent tweaked it succesfully past that so it stays stock.

my ram is running at 1600 to keep up with the cpu (auto setting in bios determined that)

 

so, onto my problem.  i have an arsenal of games including farcry3, crysis3, starcraft2, the witcher2, skyrim (with several expansions), and like 40 others you get the point. for this problem im focusing on crysis3, the witcher2, farcry3, and skyrim.

They all have low fps when comparing to the avg fps a comparable rig to mine gets online. by like 20 fps!

crysis 3 gets 30fps MAX with ultra settings, no motion blur, mxaa turned off, anti aliasing 16x, post proccessing off/low.  online the 7870 is said to get 50-60fps.

 

witcher 2, with everything on high settings except the ubersampling which is off, i get around 25fps.

 

skyrim, this one could be more my fault as i've loaded alot of modded texture packs into it, but im getting about 30-40fps, and i dont have any crazy texture mods activated to achieve that (no super dense grass, or hi res weather, etc.)

 

farcry3 i get about 45-50fps in max settings, this is totally playable and i would have no qualms if all my games were able to reach that amount, but from what ive seen online with the system i've built i should be getting more.

 

for all these games i keep v-sync on so 60fps would be the max i would see as that's what my 5ms 60hz monitor will allow.

 

also, i dual screen one 1920x1080 23" monitor, one 1920x1650 20"monitor. ive tried these games with both enabled and just the 23" enabled and only gained on average 3fps with the second one off.

(both 5ms if that matters)

 

for my cpu overclocking i use my bios.

for my would be gpu overclocking i have installed msi afterburner2.3.1

 

 

Anyone have any ideas?

I would really appreciate any help!

Thanks!

 

EDIT: i also am running windows 7 x64 ultimate (updates up to date), forgot to mention that mb.

Edited: 02/28/2013 at 04:07 AM by Imondeck

FarCry 3 looks about right with a single 7870, I've seen benchmarks with lower FPS. The Witcher 2 looks a little bit low but it depends on the level of AA you are using, and Skyrim looks about right but we don't know which of "a lot of texture packs" you use. Don't trust what other people say a card is supposed to get unless it comes from a known trusted review site such as TomsHardware, Andantech, Techpowerup, etc... Not from YouTube or IhaveasmallpenissoIlieaboutmyCrysisFPS.com. FarCry 3, for example



Lower because of older drivers and a bad game studio who doesn't know how to release a well performing game but instead patches it afterwards.

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Crosshair IV Formula, Phenom II x4 965 w/ Corsair H60, 8 GiB OCZ Platinum DDR3 1600, XFX HD 7970 Ghz, 512GB Vertex 4, 256GB Vector, 240GB Agility 3, Creative X-Fi Titanium w/ Creative Gigaworks S750, SeaSonic X750, HP ZR2440w, Win 7 Ultimate x64

Huh, i thought IhaveasmallpenissoIlieaboutmyCrysisFPS.com  was one of the top tech review sites out there

Thanks for quick response!

I've taken a few screenshots of both crysis3 and farcry3 to show fps with fraps.

It seems i was wrong about the framerate with farcry 3 its only 30 max avg 25 fps.

Anyways, here they are (second screen shows gpu info and basic cpu load)

 

Crysis 3:

http://imgur.com/a/4HKKn/#0

 

Farcry 3:

http://imgur.com/a/Whybw/#0

 

My friend recently bought a 7870 also, his is the gigabyte version (with the 3 fans) but other than that its the same card.

i've witnessed firsthand him getting 40-50fps on campaign crysis 3, and 60-70fps in multiplayer crysis 3.

he has a quad core fx cpu running oc'd at 4.2g, ram 8 gb 1600 2x4gb, and one 1080x1920 32"tv he runs his computer on.

on Tomshardware our cards are identical benchmarkwise, and in several cases mine out performs his (on a very minor scale) since mine is stock oc'd to 1150mhz where his is only 1100mhz.

Edited: 02/28/2013 at 07:26 PM by Imondeck

You'll want to check your GPU and CPU usage, to determine if you're hitting a CPU bottleneck.  That's entirely possible with many modern games.  It's not on your list, but Assassin's Creed III actually has such a bad CPU bottleneck that it would take a roughly 7GHz i7 to reach 60fps at all times. 

Every professional GPU review you read will be using a much faster CPU than you have, so you shouldn't expect your numbers to match up.

Beyond that, as you've discovered, a second monitor does reduce performance, by as much as 5% in the measurements I made a while ago.

Overall, I'd say don't push the settings too much, especially AA.  You really don't need more than 4xMSAA, and if the game has FXAA, it will do almost as good a job with much less of a performance impact.

 

 

Seems pretty reasonable to me, the 7870 has a bit of power, but the Crysis series isn't known for being well programmed or easy on the hardware.

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Crosshair IV Formula, Phenom II x4 965 w/ Corsair H60, 8 GiB OCZ Platinum DDR3 1600, XFX HD 7970 Ghz, 512GB Vertex 4, 256GB Vector, 240GB Agility 3, Creative X-Fi Titanium w/ Creative Gigaworks S750, SeaSonic X750, HP ZR2440w, Win 7 Ultimate x64

Thanks for responding!

i do use the fxaa instead of the msaa as i've read previously what you've stated about it being much less intensive for not alot of visual loss.

i'm not getting a cpu bottleneck though, i had the performance tab of task manager open for my gaming trials and the only thing that would eventually bottleneck as far as i saw was the gpu.

That sucks about assasin's creed 3, i was considering getting it but if i need some crazy cpu like that to get 60fps i may consider a different game.

 

i would agree with you black_zion about the crysis series's programming.

i bought cysis warhead previously and never did get it to run, it would force close out after the loading screen.  That's an issue ive stopped trying to solve though.

 

seperately from this discussion i came across a forum post that said how if you've had previous nvidia cards on your system there might be lingering drivers even after uninstalling them

i found a "driver sweeper" off of guru3d's site:

http://www.guru3d.com/content_page/guru3d_driver_sweeper.html

and it indeed found nvidia drivers that weren't properly removed in my registry.

after removing them in safe mode and rebooting i found my gaming experience to be more stable, maybe 5fps more than before in crysis3, no fps change in farcry3, but stable in that it wouldn't freeze occasionally the game program for crysis3 would freeze and i would need to kill the task and go back into it.

no more.

 

one issue solved, one issue accepted.

Thanks for your help!