7970 having FPS issues in BF3, help please

[rageofthepeon]

I am having some issues with FPS in BF3 with my new 7970 and was hoping for some help. Here some quick benchmarks from a 64 player Metro with all settings ultra except for motion blur:

Frames, Time (ms), Min, Max, Avg
1580, 30000, 39, 88, 52.667

Frames, Time (ms), Min, Max, Avg
1577, 30000, 36, 74, 52.567

Frames, Time (ms), Min, Max, Avg
1721, 30000, 36, 94, 57.367

After reading around it seems like other people are getting much better FPS out of their 7970s then what I am getting. I tried following the advice in this thread and it helped to a small degree but I'm not getting the amazing increase it seems like that other person did.

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/117923-13-battlefield-framerate-issues-r7970

I uninstalled all of my AMD drivers/CCC and ran driver sweeper to make sure. After that I reinstalled just the display/audio drivers and am currently running 8.950.5.0. Since I couldn't use CCC to set my clocks I installed MSI afterburner and have it set to 1125/1575 along with a custom fan profile. My card temps never go above 60c.

Here are my system specs:
Windows 7 x64
8GB DDR3 RAM
AMD Phenom II x4 965 @ 3.4GHz
Sapphire Radeon 7970
600GB WD Black / 2TB SeaGate Barracuda
HAF-X

Is it my CPU that is holding me back? It was my understanding that BF3 was GPU bound whereas in Skyrim I know that it's my CPU holding me back. Thanks for any help!

 

[casualcolors]

When you say that you have all settings on ultra except motion blur, I'm curious how much do you have deferred anti-aliasing turned up?

 

[rageofthepeon]

Oops, should have included a screenshot in the OP. Anyways these are the settings. Also I checked my CPU usage and it runs 80-90% usually, never full load.

 

[casualcolors]

Have you OC'd the card at all? The thing that really gets me is that 64 player Metro* was where you tested it. In Metro with full ultra and 4x MSAA I can do better than 60 fps on my 570 in the majority of the map because a lot of the draws are very short. I'm curious what your frames look like on 64 player Caspian for instance.

 

[rageofthepeon]

Yep, card is overclocked to 1125/1575 currently when I took the benchmarks. When I get into a 64 Caspian I'll try to post some benchmarks as well.

 

[rageofthepeon]

Here are some 58 player Caspian Border benches.

Frames, Time (ms), Min, Max, Avg
1590, 30000, 37, 76, 53.000

Frames, Time (ms), Min, Max, Avg
1613, 30000, 38, 73, 53.767

Frames, Time (ms), Min, Max, Avg
1963, 30000, 44, 93, 65.433

Frames, Time (ms), Min, Max, Avg
1548, 30000, 35, 82, 51.600

 

[casualcolors]

This sounds like the other thread all over again. Unfortunately you read that thread and went through its steps already. Make sure any power saving features are disabled. Personally for AMD cards I like ATI Tray Tools better than MSI Afterburner as well. You're on the 12.2 drivers or whatever the newest are correct?

 

[rageofthepeon]

This sounds like the other thread all over again. Unfortunately you read that thread and went through its steps already. Make sure any power saving features are disabled. Personally for AMD cards I like ATI Tray Tools better than MSI Afterburner as well. You're on the 12.2 drivers or whatever the newest are correct?

Checked 'force constant voltage' for Afterburner and windows power saving is on high performance. I don't think ATI Tray Tools has been updated yet for 7000 series? As for the drivers I am on the newest driver AMD has released.

 

[casualcolors]

I don't know enough about the 7970 to know if that amd quad core could possibly bottleneck it, but I find it highly highly unlikely in BF3 especially, as well as almost any other title.

 

[HEXiT]

your not wrong there the amd cpu is the issue... the 7970 isnt supported on the 12.2 beta performance drivers.
the amd 965 has enough grunt to cope with 2 gtx 260's or a 4850 x2 crossfire the 7970 puts out about 3x the gfx power of a gtx 260 and more than x2 4870. so you will be bottlenecking about 30 percent which is just to much. up to 10 percent you can normally get away with but when its 30 percent you will have constant fps droop. where your running at 60 then all of a sudden your down to 35 and back to 60 again half a second latter... this makes the game feel less smooth and jerky even though your over the 30 fps minimum. you could try and increase your settings to increase the workload on the gpu reducing the amount of frames it can produce. this may help the cpu as overall less frames means less work per cycle... yes the cpu is still likely to be maxed out at 100 percent. but it should be for much less time. and the fps droop shouldn't be as severe...