GTX 970's in SLI not reaching ~100% GPU Load

[PlowMe]

Hey Guys!

My Problem: I recently bought a second GTX 970 in preparation for the Witcher 3 and GTA V. I've installed it and was running benchmarks and I'm getting significantly better FPS in all of my games, however, MSI afterburner is telling me that my cards are only ever hitting about 70% GPU usage in my most demanding games (less usage for less demanding games). My temperatures never exceed 70 degrees celsius and my CPU usage hasn't maxed out yet. I've turned on SLI and it's set to maximum performance. I've changed multi-display rendering to single display performance mode. I've tried OC'ing the cards to see if that changes anything but all that did was give me more frames but the GPU usage hardly changed. I'm pretty sure I've tried everything the internet has to offer and that's why I'm now here.

My Specs:
I5-4690k @ stock
MSI Gaming 7 Mobo
8GB Corsair Vengeance
2x MSI 4G Gaming GTX 970's in SLI
Corsair CX750M PSU
Samsung 840 Evo SSD
WD 1TB Blue HDD
and a hell of a lot of fans.

Any Ideas or suggestions or basically any information would be helpful!!!! 😀 😀 😀

 

[bishopi5]

they will rarely ever run at full load, 70-90% usually, depending on how well the game is optimized, download a benchmark like valley if u wanna see real world results with 100% load, but they are running fine, even 70% + 70% is a 40% increase over 1 card, battlefield 4 barely scales better then that, all depends on the game

 

[iUnderclock]

How much are you maxing out on your CPU usage?

 

[PlowMe]

So when they say SLI doesnt scale 100% does that literally mean that two cards will never run at load? Even though one card will? and my CPU usage hit mid 90's while playing BF4 online (which is pretty normal). Other games don't use nearly that much of my CPU.

 

[bishopi5]

yeah, sorta, not never, just depends on what support the game has for it, but you will rarely see them under full load unless in a benchmark, and your CPU will be fine it won't bottleneck them

 

[17seconds]

You're just experiencing some minor bottlenecking. That's better than never hitting a CPU bottleneck. It only means that you have a pair of very powerful video cards putting out so much performance, your CPU is having a hard time keeping up. I'm guessing you're also playing at a standard resolution like 1080 or 1440. Overclocking your GPUs will just make it worse.

Your solutions:
1) Overclock your CPU.
2) Use DSR to enable higher in-game resolutions, which will shift more graphics load onto your GPUs. You can go as high as 4K resolution in some games. Let me know if you don't know how it works.

 

[Mousemonkey]

So when they say SLI doesnt scale 100% does that literally mean that two cards will never run at load? Even though one card will? and my CPU usage hit mid 90's while playing BF4 online (which is pretty normal). Other games don't use nearly that much of my CPU.

No, that's when people reckon that the framerates don't double (which they do at times).

 

[PlowMe]

You're just experiencing some minor bottlenecking. That's better than never hitting a CPU bottleneck. It only means that you have a pair of very powerful video cards putting out so much performance, your CPU is having a hard time keeping up. I'm guessing you're also playing at a standard resolution like 1080 or 1440. Overclocking your GPUs will just make it worse.

Your solutions:
1) Overclock your CPU.
2) Use DSR to enable higher in-game resolutions, which will shift more graphics load onto your GPUs. You can go as high as 4K resolution in some games. Let me know if you don't know how it works.

So how far would I have to OC to eliminate the bottleneck? Thinking around 4.5Ghz? And I'm very aware of DSR and I plan to use it but I was just seeing what numbers I could achieve on 1080p.

 

[PlowMe]

OKAY soooooo about to have a good laugh...but as it turns out while i'll was scrolling through all the readings of MSI afterburner i discovered that My 2 970's ARE running at max usage. I made a silly mistake and was reading the GPU Power % and interpreting it as my Usage % (HAHAHA, everyone laugh). Both GPU's hit 99% usage during a benchmark and so i guess I'm not bottlenecking after all...I'm just dumb lol Sorry everyone! Can't believe i did that...

 

[17seconds]

So I'm not the only one who suffers from brain farts.