Strange problem with my HD 7770.

[Charlie_J]

Hello, tomshardware.
In December of 2013 I purchased a AMD Radeon HD 7700 Series graphics card. Ever-since I got the card I noticed a slight frame increase but nothing dramatic. What I seemed to notice when playing my games such as WoW and Arma2 is that I would get much higher frames if I was running another game in the background, or a stream on twitch.tv. It seemed asthough the card performs better when there are multiple graphic demand of it? with only 1 game open i can go as low as 20-30 frames on a game like WoW with max graphics but with a video or stream running in the background I can get upto 100 etc. Does anyone know the cause of this, or even heard of this problem before? Faulty card? I'm thinking of taking it back to maplins if it keeps happening.

ill also post my computer specs
Operating System: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
Processor: AMD FX(tm)-4100 Quad-Core Processor
Memory: 16384MB RAM
Card name: AMD Radeon HD 7700 Series
XFX ATX 550 Power Supply
Motherboard: m5a78L

 

[HiTechObsessed]

What are you using to measure FPS? It may be picking up the FPS on the background app instead. Are you noticing the FPS increase visually, or just by going off of the FPS number showing?

 

[Charlie_J]

What are you using to measure FPS? It may be picking up the FPS on the background app instead. Are you noticing the FPS increase visually, or just by going off of the FPS number showing?

Hi, yes I can notice the FPS difference visually.. I have also used fraps and the ingame FPS indicator in games such as WoW and LoL.

 

[HiTechObsessed]

When you have one game open, can you pull up something like MSI Afterburner and see what your GPU usage is?

 

[Charlie_J]

When you have one game open, can you pull up something like MSI Afterburner and see what your GPU usage is?

Pulled up MSI burner like you reccomended, loaded WoW and seems to be sitting at around 30% GPU usage

 

[HiTechObsessed]

Huh, very strange. Have you tried uninstalling the driver (just uninstall everything AMD Catalyst related) and reinstall the newest drivers directly from AMD's website?

 

[Charlie_J]

Huh, very strange. Have you tried uninstalling the driver (just uninstall everything AMD Catalyst related) and reinstall the newest drivers directly from AMD's website?

Yes before posting my problem I did a clean uninstall of all AMD drivers, using their removal tool. I thendownloaded the latest Beta driver and still no difference. I agree it is a very strange issue that I cant seem to get my head around. My graphics card performs better when their is more strain on it which just seems backwards. I didnt expect to get such low fps and thought I would get the 7770 as it had good reviews. I think I might just have to end up taking it back, might be a faulty one. however I don't believe that to be the case, surely if it was faulty the problems would include crashing and not the problem I have

 

[HiTechObsessed]

Yeah, I'm just trying to figure out why it won't ramp up to 99% usage when playing. Are you playing windowed or full screen?

 

[Charlie_J]

Yeah, I'm just trying to figure out why it won't ramp up to 99% usage when playing. Are you playing windowed or full screen?

Windowed

 

[HiTechObsessed]

Have you tried putting it into full screen and seeing what that does?

 

[Charlie_J]

Have you tried putting it into full screen and seeing what that does?

yup ive tried fullscreen and multiple resolutions, ive even tried lowering the settings in my game but the fps doesnt even change. strange graphics card all round

 

[4745454b]

Windowed

That should be the problem. The card stays in 2D clock mode when gaming in windowed mode. I know you said you've tried fullscreen, but I don't mean windowed with the window as big as it can get.

 

[Charlie_J]

Windowed

That should be the problem. The card stays in 2D clock mode when gaming in windowed mode. I know you said you've tried fullscreen, but I don't mean windowed with the window as big as it can get.

This is my game in full screen mode. as you can see it displays 20fps

this is the game with a stream video running in the background