Poor game performance with GTX 260 SLI

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roachmotel

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Mar 6, 2010
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I recently upgraded my gpu from an 8800 GTS 512(BFG) to GTX 260's(PNY) core 216 in SLI. And also upgraded from XP to W7 64bit. I ran the heaven benchmark on 4x AA, 1680X1050, DX10, and scored over 1500. During the test I monitored the cards using EVGA Precision and saw they were both getting crushed (as they should). I also monitored my cpu using cpuz and it didn't seem to be taking much of a hit in that benchmark. In 3dmark06, I scored 15700, and saw the cpu take heavy load - as it should and the gpu's individually take good loads as well...BUT, I get into Call of Duty MW2 or Battlefield BC2, and I am absolutely not getting the appropriate frames for those cards. And the GPUs are not taking a significant load...in fact - neither of them will get over 40 - 45% usage. And the CPU is not maxed either...both cores will hit the 90's, but mostly stay in the 70's and 80's. The bottom line is the cards appear to be functioning correctly, but these games are not seeming to utilize them as I would expect. I have the most recent drivers...196.75 (even though there is a fan control issue). I used driver sweeper and whiped everything for NVidia display away - and reloaded. My brother is running an AMD setup with 2 3870s in crossfire and breaking 100 FPS in BFBC2 - and I can barely break 40 with a superior set of cards.

Someone please tell me if there is something I should be worried about with this rig - or if all this sounds normal...Here are my specs...

W7 Home Premium 64bit
C2D E6850 (conroe)- Overclocked to 3.6 with no overvoltage. running in the 60 degree range
Corsair TXW 750 PSU
2 X PNY GTX260 (216) in SLI - Overclocked to 633Mhz on the core and 1364 on the shader.
10000 rpm Raptor HD
Striker Extreme Mobo
4x1gb Crucial Ballistix DDR2 PC6400
Viewsonic VX2240W 22" LCD
All air cooled in thermaltake Armor tower
 
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here is a link to 2 screenshots from my brother's rig in-game...I haven't used this before, so let me know if it doesn;t work.

http://www.4shared.com/account/flashUploader.jsp?sId=RFzgoPTJqa9zDajT

also...here is his set up...

system is a custom LC system

MB Asus M3A32MVP
AMD Phenom 965
OCZ Flex PC 9600 4GB
WD VelociRaptor 300 GB
Visiontek 5870 [Just one, not crossfire]

The system is running at stock cpu and video card settings nothing is
overclocked.
 
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I'm plaing MW2 mxed out at 1680x1050, with 16AF abd 24AA, on a 4870, with a E6600 at stcok, smooth as butter.
 
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yeah Bob. My MW2 is completely smooth as well, but the gpu cores are not getting used in there either. I average 80+ frames in there.
 
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Yeh, that's a good decision. Qx6x00 are older quads and not worth the price. Have you overclocked your Q9400s?

How much of an improvement was the Q9400 at stock an improvement over your old Core2Duos?

What game is this?
 
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Well at stock I would say the Q9400 is slightly better than the E6850 was when I OC'd it to 3.6. but it is supposed to provide a significant improvement in games like this one...Battlefield Bad Company 2 btw. The downside of the Q9400 versus the QX6850 is the L2 Cache. The 9400 only has 6MB, so it isn't going to kick the pants off of anything until I start to tweek it up a bit. But I can't do that until I get a hold on this SLI GPU problem.

specifically answering your question about the difference...in 3dmark06, I believe I was scoring mid to high 2000's on the cpu score with the E6850 @stock. mid to high 2000's when OC'd (may have even been low 3000's. The Q9400 in the 2 runs I have given it was high 3000's almost 4000 on the cpu score.
 
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I did a 2 Core 3DMark06 run just to see what happens. This is what i got.

32ghz2cores.jpg


And here is one with all cores i did a while back, pay close attention to the gpu scores. 2 cores, or 4 cores made no difference in gpu performance. Even at such a low resolution.

3DMark0614710.jpg


I'm not convinced we can blame the dual core for this, at least not entirely. For BFBC2 i think there is probably a bit of a bottleneck, but not enough to do this. You should be destroying BC2 >< It's like your cards are running in pcie 1x or agp..
 
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After taking some time reading other forums and threads, it seems that SLI for BFBC2 is very poorly optimized.

http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/430583.page

http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=161896

Other people, notably GTX 295 owners, have reported that their cards, much like yours, are running at about 50%. They're also stuck at around 30-40fps even when compared to much weaker video cards.
I believe the new drivers (197.xx) fixed the problem but was removed from nVidia's website after people reported that their cards were melting after installing them. I think you should wait for the new drivers to come out before making any other moves or buying new parts.
 
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Turning off SLI or removing one card should fix his problem then. But he's already tried that without success.

He says he's already tried the 197.13 drivers that replaced the borked drivers from before.

@OP One thing you can try that could shed some light. Try my settings i listed earlier, but with your resolution. But try with one card, and report your FPS. With those settings you should be capped at 60FPS with vsync on, with it off you should beat my ave. If this turns out to be true, then we can blame it on drivers for sure.

Try that and we can go from there.

I wish i had a gtx260 to test with.
 
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He said that he gets better FPS on a single card. That should indicate something is wrong with SLI. He should wait for some stable drivers even though he's tried the latest ones. If there are so many people suffering the same issue, it makes sense that this is more of a software issue than a bottleneck.
 
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I pulled one GPU out to test if the frames would vary and they pretty much stayed flat.
Click to expand...

So at his settings one card gets as one card should. It seems SLI isn't working, thus a driver issue. But he wasn't getting better FPS with one card, at least he didn't say so that i can see.

My suggestion is so that i have a more solid comparison to my system, and to see if one card is performing where it should.
 
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You can use a comparison with his system, but you're not running SLI.
 
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Oop, my bad. I missed that post.

I want him to test one card with my settings to see what he gets. That way we know if his non-sli is working correctly or not. If his frame rate beats mine by a decent amount, then there's no worries, and all he has to do is wait for a driver update.

If we see a small improvement over my frame rate then we might assume he is bottle necked at 1680x1050 by his processor. I would still wait for a driver update.
 
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regardless of the settings I choose in game and in the settings.ini file, and whether I run with one card or two, the gpu's are not getting over 40-50% usage and I do not get more than 40 frames consistently. The BIG point now is that I went and swapped out BOTH the GTX 260s yesterday for brand new ones and I am getting the exact same result. So in my mind, I have ruled out the possibility of this being a hardware issue. The ENTIRE computer now has been upgraded/replaced in the last 2 weeks, with the exception of the hard drive and the disk drive.
 
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Sorry to hear you've gone through so much trouble for trying to solve your problem. I think the best thing to do now is to just wait for nVidia to release some new drivers. You can always return those GTX 260s and try an ATi 58xx card just to see if it really is an nVidia driver issue. At this point, I don't see them releasing any new drivers until a week or so after Fermi drops so they can tweak some performances for Fermi.
 
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Since I exchanged the cards for new ones yesterday, I figured I would retry the test with one card versus two. I benchmarked in the single player for 60 seconds using fraps. With 2 cards in SLI, I averaged 44.78 frames. With one card alone, I averaged 61.71 frames. This is a driver issue. Now I am mad. simple as that.
 
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Just in case anyone is interested - and to test this file sharing service - here is a link to a screenshot from left 4 dead 2 with 2 cards in sli...
url]


and here is a link to one with one card running...
url]
 
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I think you might have to sign up in file factory to see these...anyone have another service that is a bit more stright forward? or another way to post screenshots in here?

If you go to the links, there is a download button at the bottom I think...
 
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