Gtx 980 ti not going full load on every game

[olmura]

Lets start with my specs:
cpu: I7 4790k, no oc
gpu: Msi GTX 980 ti
ram: 8gb ddr3 1333mhz (was sure it was faster but guess not)
mobo: Maximus hero vii
psu: Corsair AX 760

Okay so i just got my brand new Msi gtx 980 ti gpu and started running some games to see how it works. Currently i got 1080p 60hz monitor (hoping to get 1440p 144hz in near future), but i disabled vsync and fps limits to get to max.

So in cs go i get about 200 - 300 fps and 40% gpu load (60% when bomb went off). Even tried going 720p reso and fps stayed the same (i got max fps set to 999 in console yes). Now if you look at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sL10LA9MMac you can see that he has same setup as me, but gpu running at constant 70-90% load and has 400 - 600fps.

In world of warcraft i also get steady 40% gpu load, sometimes jumping to 60% max, but fps in main city, crowded area is about 40-50 and when im alone it gets to about 120. I find it wierd considering im running 1080p resolution. If i remember correctly i tried with different sampling options and they didnt affect fps at all.

Then i tried witcher 2 and shadow of mordor as my demanding single player games.
In witcher 2 i got 90-99% gpu load finally. Got about 70 fps on ultra with ubersampling on, this seemed more normal compared to other benchmarks, then took ubersampling off and got to about 120 - 200fps.

In shadow of mordor i got 80 - 95% gpu load and put all settings to ultra and got steady 100fps (seems like its limited to 100 since it never went over or under, just stood there).

All fps was tested with something going on in screen (alot of ppl or fighting), temps stay cool enough i assume (witcher 99% load gpu got to about 70c if i recall right) and cpu maxes load on 60-70% with about 65c temps.

So im asking if anyone has any idea that if theres some setting limiting my gpu usage in less demanding games such as cs go or wow (wow fps is quite worrying me, even tho i dont really play it atm). Since the single player games seemed to work well for me, right? I took newest drivers from nvidias site and used display driver uninstaller to remove old ones before setting up new card.

Sorry for wall of text and thanks for everyone in advance!

 

[photonboy]

You are probably losing some performance due to your slower system memory.

Is that 2x4GB or 1x8GB?

Even at 2x4GB of "1333MHz" memory you're losing a bit of performance in some games. If it's a single stick you're losing a lot (at times) as the CPU is waiting for data, and in turn the GPU is waiting on the CPU.

*The fact you get close to 100% GPU load in some games means your basic hardware/driver setup is perfectly fine for the GPU and CPU.

In CS GO it's possible you're using a different map as well.

Anyway,
*If you don't want to lose performance you should be running at least 1866MHz CAS9 in Dual-Channel (two or four sticks setup as motherboard manual suggests). I'd suggest 2133MHz CAS9.

 

[olmura]

its 2x4gb, but how can it be that more demanding games work fine but the older and less demanding games would struggle to keep the gpu load up? It seems like im not reaching that high fps only because of gpu not working even half the speed on less demanding games.

Also yeah was earlier thinking of getting new memory, probably 16gb total but im not sure if i want to upgrade to 1080p 144hz+16gb of memory or 1440p+144hz monitor. Just got very little knowledge of what memory to get so thanks for the suggestion i will see!

 

[photonboy]

http://www.corsair.com/en-ca/blog/2014/march/haswellrealworld

To be clear, when they say "1600MHz" that means a kit that's labelled as such. In reality it's 2x800MHz split across two sticks in dual-channel mode so it's an effective frequency.

If you take a single "1600MHz" stick and that's all you run you actually have an 800MHz setup. Since 1600MHz can be a bottleneck with Haswell, obviously 800MHz is much more so.

It's going to VARY quite a bit, but do note that Starcraft 2 went from about 90FPS to 100FPS by jumping from 1600MHz to 2400MHz (note the CAS value is important as well. lower is better)

Note:
"With Haswell I continue to be convinced that DDR3-1866 is the new entry level, and that DDR3-2133 is really the sweet spot. Performance improvements from DDR3-2133 to expensive DDR3-2400 are less consistent, and Haswell’s IMC itself starts to get a little shaky there. "

I'll repeat again that a "2133Mhz CAS9" seems to be ideal and that you must be operating two or four sticks in Dual-Channel configuration or else you're operating at a 1067Mhz and thus severely starving the CPU at times.

 

[17seconds]

Less demanding on-line games are not taxing your system to the max. This is normal. Otherwise everything else is perfect.

I recommend you enable the XMS memory setting for your RAM in the BIOS.

 

[photonboy]

its 2x4gb, but how can it be that more demanding games work fine but the older and less demanding games would struggle to keep the gpu load up? It seems like im not reaching that high fps only because of gpu not working even half the speed on less demanding games.

Also yeah was earlier thinking of getting new memory, probably 16gb total but im not sure if i want to upgrade to 1080p 144hz+16gb of memory or 1440p+144hz monitor. Just got very little knowledge of what memory to get so thanks for the suggestion i will see!

Every game varies on the proportion of CPU to GPU load. Some like Tomb Raider aren't very demanding on the CPU but conversely Battlefield 4 in largely populated maps is incredibly hard on the CPU.

Newer games probably on average use the GPU more.

If the CPU becomes a bottleneck, then the GPU is left waiting for data. If the system memory is the bottleneck, then the CPU is left waiting, which in turn makes the GPU wait...

Again, not saying that's necessarily your only issue but read the article and see if it makes sense. Unfortunately, it's hard to find solid info on how much bandwidth for system memory is needed for a particular game.

(I don't get why you'd need 400FPS in CS GO but each to his own)

 

[photonboy]

Less demanding on-line games are not taxing your system to the max. This is normal. Otherwise everything else is perfect.

I recommend you enable the XMS memory setting for your RAM in the BIOS.

He should still be getting similar results to other people with the same hardware under the same conditions though, whether it's "less demanding" or not.

As for "XMP" if that's possible sure, but he said he has 1333MHz memory so I'm not sure he'd see any benefit.

 

[olmura]

Okay, thanks for the answers ill be looking into new memory and do some more testing with different games. I dont really need 400fps in cs go but it was troubling me that my gpu usage is so low compared to someone else with basicly same set up. Ill be trying that XMS setting in bios also.

What comes to taxing my system to max, in wow i get that about 40% gpu usage and got ~30fps in place with alot of ppl around me, ofc i think thats more demanding from cpu and it might be bottlenecked by the memory.. 😀

 

[17seconds]

On-line games require normalization between all players on the server, whether you have a GTX 980 Ti or a laptop on a dial up connection. Never use on-line gaming results as a true measure of your system's balance, since it's also dependent upon all the other players on that server.

Since he was surprised to only have 1333 MHz RAM, it's clear, to me at least, that he needs to enable XMP (sorry mistyped earlier) in order to get the speed that was advertised on the RAM packaging.

 

[olmura]

Yeah you both were right and great help.. hard to choose best comment, i was right to be surprised of the 1333mhz, since it was 1600mhz that i bought years ago and enabling xmp got my gpu running to 70% in cs go and hitting 300-500 fps, sometimes even 600. Its time to buy some high speed 16gb ram and maybe try to overclock current one a bit until i get the faster ones! Oh btw i ran all my tests vs bots to not have to worry of other players

Thank you both <3

 

[photonboy]

Update:
In another post someone said he's getting higher frame rates by unlocking his CPU cores (it was CS GO so not sure if you're the same guy).

(I'm normally a bit skeptical of core parking issues in general but I have no way to test)

I don't know what version of Windows he has but I do know in Battlefield 4 there was major performance to be gained by either unparking Intel CPU cores or just NOT using Windows 7. Windows 8, or better yet Windows 10 does a much better job of CPU management.

I think but am not certain that setting CPU to 100% in "Power Options" does the same thing. There's also a similar setting in the NVidia Control Panel (you can apply per game) if you think the GPU is being throttled below what it should be.

Summary:
- try above CPU and GPU settings (set back if it doesn't help... GPU can be set per-game)
- recommend Windows 10 64-bit regardless of current OS

 

[olmura]

I got windows 10 and tried playing around with cores before this whole thing and didnt get any improvement from that. I report here what happens when i get my new ram, quite sure it will help alot.