Graphics Much Slower than They Should Be?

[randomguy9900]

Hello,
First off, my system:
MB: ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. M5A97 (AM3r2) (2200MHz NB)
CPU: AMD FX-8350 (OCed to 4.5GHz atm)
RAM: 8.00 GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 1033MHz
GPUs: Crossfire: ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series (ATI AIB)
ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series (ASUStek Computer Inc)
Disks: 120GB and 90GB Kingston HyperX SSD
OS: Windows 8 Pro 64-bit

So my problem is that when I'm in games, my processor is using about 30%-40%, my RAM is used 25%, and my GPUs will use between 30% and 70% except in a few circumstances.
At first I tried to look for some other kind of bottleneck, but couldn't come up with anything

Then I thought that it must just be crappy drivers for games or whatever, even though I had the latest drivers.

But then I noticed that even in Furmark, I was only using 47% of both of my GPUs and getting only 16 fps.
There's something wrong there. Benchmarks like that are only using part of my GPU and I'm getting lower scores constantly compared to systems just like mine.

So what could be the problem? I'd love to figure it out, because even with this pretty impressive rig, I'm not getting much better framerate than those with rigs half as good as mine.

Thanks so much,
Ryan Shumaker

 

[sam_p_lay]

Don't worry about Furmark or synthetic benchmarks. Gaming performance is what counts surely? If that's not sufficient then you either need to lower graphics settings or upgrade the card. Radeon 5750 and 5770 actually aren't that powerful anyway. They're certainly not terrible, but they're at the top of the low end now.

EDIT: Didn't notice you're Crossfiring there. If that's 2x 5770s then you're looking at a little below a 7850 purely interms of average framerates, so not bad - should be sufficient to max most (but not all) games at 1080p with 4x MSAA. 2x 5750s would be closer to GTX650 Ti performance, so enough to max a lot of a games, but not the most demanding.

 

[randomguy9900]

The thing is though that I'm not using all of my GPU as I should be (beyond what I would expect faulty drivers to cause) and therefore I'm always getting lower scores than those with a similar setup.
And not just lower benchmark scores, lower framerates and performance in all games as well compared to similar setups. Across the board.

 

[sam_p_lay]

You have Catalyst 12.11 installed? What exactly is your graphics setup?

 

[randomguy9900]

12.10. 12.11 is beta.
For graphics I have the two crossfire 5770 (dont worry, I have CAP)
All knobs on my 3D application settings are on "Use application settings" or to the left (performance) except for mipmap.
Tessellation is AMD Optimized and triple buffering is on.

 

[sam_p_lay]

What's CAP? I'd disable tessellation personally. I'm not gonna start using that until I have a properly powerful GPU. I don't think there's much benefit with it in most games anyway.

 

[wanderer11]

You don't have vsync on do you? Either your cpu or gpus should be at ~99% if vsync is off. What's your psu?

 

[06yfz450ridr]

v sync wont matter if its on hes not reaching anywhere near his refresh rate. personally vsync with sli is way better, you will not get any microsuttter.


but i know for a fact in that program it doesnt utilize my sli even though its enabled. my one gpu is at idle and the other is max.

 

[randomguy9900]

Well, both of the cards are being used in the examples that I'm talking about.
Whether I have vsync on or off, I actually get pretty much the exact same framerate.

My PSU is: Xion PowerReal 700W (XON-700P12N)

 

[iam2thecrowe]

2 problems i can see, one is 5770 crossfire is crap, any mid-range cards in crossfire will give you bad performance, if the game even works properly with crossfire. Another thing is vram limitation. Use msi afterburner, load up a game you believe is a problem. If the vram useage is like 998mb, your running out of vram, which slows things right down. To get back vram, turn off AA, and lower texture detail until msi afterburner shows less than 900mb vram useage in game. Depending where you are in the game will also affect vram useage so it will fluctuate.

 

[randomguy9900]

Well, I have been looking through MSI and trying to find an answer there too.
Sadly, most of the time it will hover around 1400MB/2048MB though sometimes will reach up to 1800MB.
It very rarely goes above this, though the framerate still seems to suffer, and the %usage still seems to be a bit low.