r9 290x, getting poor FPS.. cant find my bottleneck! Please help :)

[Roger2525]

Dear Community,

Im getting FPS (20-30)drops in all games i play. (I play mainly Assasins creed 4 and WoW).

My setup =
MOBO- Asrock z68 Extreme4 Gen3
Cpu - i5 2500k @3.3, (currently not overclocked because of this problem, was before 4.5g)
RAM - 8g of ram DDR3 dual (slot 2&4)
GPU - MSI r9 290x
PSU - corsairs GS800
Storage- samsung evo 840 250g

When i run MSI afterburner i see my GPU useage is spiking all the time from 50-100%, sometimes from 0-100%.
I started reading my MOBO manual, and it said MAX shared memory 1759MB (below GPU Sections). Can this be my bottleneck?

Greeds Roger Holland

 

[Bad_Kitty13]

your max shared memory is for igpus your r9 290x has plenty of its own memory, 4gbs. that being said i would update your drivers for the gpu to start see if that fixes it it probably came with the beta drivers.

 

[bgunner]

usually when the GPU drops to 50% usage in game like what your describing there is a bottle neck and usually located at the CPU. But since you were OCed and still had this issue make me wonder if there is a program running in the background sucking up CPU power causing this issue. Try running task manager on the process tab and see what else pops up for CPU usage during gaming when the lag spikes hit.

what speed of ram are you running and what OS do you have?

 

[Roger2525]

your max shared memory is for igpus your r9 290x has plenty of its own memory, 4gbs. that being said i would update your drivers for the gpu to start see if that fixes it it probably came with the beta drivers.

thx for making a reply. I've tryed the most uptodate driver and also the beta one. (currently using the beta one). It dint fix the problem sadly

 

[chris987]

try a stess test like furmark or heaven bench. your gpu usage should be maxed. the max shared memory fefers to the intel hd graphics that are currently dissabled since you use a dedicated gpu. also monitor your temps cause if it reaches 95c, if nessesary 290 will drop its core mhz for better cooling. if temps are below 90c under load and usage keeps going up and down then it also might be a psu fault. anyway make sure you have the latest drivers installed. also try a mem test.

 

[Roger2525]

usually when the GPU drops to 50% usage in game like what your describing there is a bottle neck and usually located at the CPU. But since you were OCed and still had this issue make me wonder if there is a program running in the background sucking up CPU power causing this issue. Try running task manager on the process tab and see what else pops up for CPU usage during gaming when the lag spikes hit.

what speed of ram are you running and what OS do you have?

Thx for making a reply. Im running w7 64bit. Im using corsairs ram, no idea what speed there at. When i use CPU-z to check my PC stats it says ''DRAM frequency 665.1 MHz. Thought they were 1333 mhz speed ones. How can u check to be sure?

 

[Roger2525]

try a stess test like furmark or heaven bench. your gpu usage should be maxed. the max shared memory fefers to the intel hd graphics that are currently dissabled since you use a dedicated gpu. also monitor your temps cause if it reaches 95c, if nessesary 290 will drop its core mhz for better cooling. if temps are below 90c under load and usage keeps going up and down then it also might be a psu fault. anyway make sure you have the latest drivers installed. also try a mem test.

Agian, thx allot for ur reply's.
I've runned furmark stresstest a couple of times. The GPU load is almost always 100%, sometimes shortly drops to 98%. My temps are all time. Checking them always with HWmonitor. GPU doest go above 70 (putted fan speed's for agressive cooling). And CPU stays below 50 degrees.

What prog should i use for a memtest?

 

[chris987]

http://www.memtest.org/

 

[Roger2525]

http://www.memtest.org/

brb 20 mins

 

[Bad_Kitty13]

just curious but when your cpu was overclocked were you still getting the same drops?

 

[bgunner]

usually when the GPU drops to 50% usage in game like what your describing there is a bottle neck and usually located at the CPU. But since you were OCed and still had this issue make me wonder if there is a program running in the background sucking up CPU power causing this issue. Try running task manager on the process tab and see what else pops up for CPU usage during gaming when the lag spikes hit.

what speed of ram are you running and what OS do you have?

Thx for making a reply. Im running w7 64bit. Im using corsairs ram, no idea what speed there at. When i use CPU-z to check my PC stats it says ''DRAM frequency 665.1 MHz. Thought they were 1333 mhz speed ones. How can u check to be sure?

CPU-z shows the rate cut in half because the ram is DDR (double data rate) meaning the speed would be doubled. so your ram is running at 1333 Mhz.

Please check and see if there is something else running/using the CPU during the game sessions.

 

[Roger2525]

just curious but when your cpu was overclocked were you still getting the same drops?

Sadly, yes. I started by normalizing my CPU agian to be sure of a stable system. Thats why its running at the 3.3g speed agian. It the i5 2500k a bottleneck for the r9 290x?. ATM memtesting, doing 4x2000mb test (got 8gig ram). But somehow the last 200mb ram test is going significantly slower :S

 

[Bad_Kitty13]

i wouldnt give up yet bgunner suggestion of seeing if you have cpu intensive background applications while your gaming is a wonderful suggestion. it could be causing your drops and creating a bottleneck

 

[bgunner]

Memtest86+ should be run at Boot so I'm assuming you are on another PC? If not then you really should run memtest from a disk at boot.

 

[Roger2525]

usually when the GPU drops to 50% usage in game like what your describing there is a bottle neck and usually located at the CPU. But since you were OCed and still had this issue make me wonder if there is a program running in the background sucking up CPU power causing this issue. Try running task manager on the process tab and see what else pops up for CPU usage during gaming when the lag spikes hit.

what speed of ram are you running and what OS do you have?

Thx for making a reply. Im running w7 64bit. Im using corsairs ram, no idea what speed there at. When i use CPU-z to check my PC stats it says ''DRAM frequency 665.1 MHz. Thought they were 1333 mhz speed ones. How can u check to be sure?

CPU-z shows the rate cut in half because the ram is DDR (double data rate) meaning the speed would be doubled. so your ram is running at 1333 Mhz.

Please check and see if there is something else running/using the CPU during the game sessions.

Wel allot of stuff is running when i check via CTRL-ALT-TAB --> procceses. Its the game u run that tops it by far. Below that is mostly my firefox with arround 60.000 kb, below that my virus programs with 10.000 kb. below that are allot of things seom 1.000 kb to 24kb. I counted them. Its arround 50 procceses. And it takes arround 280.000kb to run those.

 

[bgunner]

what you are reading off is the mega bytes of ram the programs are using. you need to watch the CPU usage. It is done in a percentage. when the lag spikes hit look at it and see what else is using the CPU at the time.

EDIT: unless you use multiple monitors then you will need to do this in windowed mode.

 

[Roger2525]

what you are reading off is the mega bytes of ram the programs are using. you need to watch the CPU usage. It is done in a percentage. when the lag spikes hit look at it and see what else is using the CPU at the time.

EDIT: unless you use multiple monitors then you will need to do this in windowed mode.

Im using 2 monitors. Im always running my games windowed so alt-tab works nicely
Im checking the CPU usage now. Indeed in a percentage soz about that. Were can i check what program is being used when a spike hits?

 

[bgunner]

on your second monitor put up resource monitor under the CPU tab. the resource monitor will move what ever is using the most CPU to the top. If you use task manager on the processes tab then open up the window as big ads you can and when the lag hit watch for what is using the CPU. Both ways will take a few times of it happening to get exactly what is going on but with time you will get it.

 

[Roger2525]

on your second monitor put up resource monitor under the CPU tab. the resource monitor will move what ever is using the most CPU to the top. If you use task manager on the processes tab then open up the window as big ads you can and when the lag hit watch for what is using the CPU. Both ways will take a few times of it happening to get exactly what is going on but with time you will get it.

http://nl.tinypic.com/r/2d7hi53/8

This way? Running World of Warcraft atm. Getting fps arround 30 sometimes. From 60 - to 30 is terrible for my pc specs imo.

 

[bgunner]

are you trying to record your game? since you have fraps running. Change your task manager over to processes tab and not performance tab.

 

[chris987]

well from the picture i can see gpu flactuating as you mentioned. the cpu usage while playing wow is normal as the memory usage.

 

[Roger2525]

are you trying to record your game? since you have fraps running. Change your task manager over to processes tab and not performance tab.

no was just checking if the FPS was right or not.

http://nl.tinypic.com/r/jimc84/8

 

[Roger2525]

Is t here a possibility that my RAM is to slow? 2x 1300 mhz?
The FPS drops occyr on buzy moments were allot of stuff has to be loaded/ proccesed.

 

[chris987]

from your pictures i cant see anything suspicius.cpu-ram utilazation is normal. close all internet tabs to kill flash player plug-in but i dont thing its a drawback.you should try 13.12 catalyst which was the latest non beta. when on gpu stess test the gpu usage is maxed but when on games that also cpu kicks in the problem occurs. corsair gs 800 is an overkill for you setup and should run just fine but there is a chance there is a voltage problem of the 12v rail.can you check through hardware monitor or bios the psu voltages to see if they are within range?

 

[bgunner]

what settings are you running in wow? also WoW is a CPU based game and not as much GPU based. It is normal to have FPS drops when tons of things happen in MMO's.