Where is my bottleneck?

[Imreallycool]

When playing game's my frame rate hasn't always been the best and I'm trying to figure out what needs to be changed to improve it. Let's just take LoL for example. I get roughly 120fps which I think my machine should get much higher. http://pcpartpicker.com/p/HZb64D is my build and let me give you some more information. On either gpu my load rarely ever goes over 60%. My processor usually sits at around 55%. The temps that I've seen have gotten the cpu up to around 50 degree's, gpu # 1 gets around 60 degree's, and gpu # 2 around 55 degree's Celsius. Shouldn't one of these 2 be capping out my performance and wouldn't it show by it having either high temperatures or a high load?

 

[i7Baby]

Probably the 8350. See http://www.anandtech.com/show/8426/the-intel-haswell-e-cpu-review-core-i7-5960x-i7-5930k-i7-5820k-tested/6

Maybe the power supply. What 12v, 5v and 3.3v readings are you getting in bios or mobo utility software?

But you're also asking a lot of 2 x 7970s (R9 280x) in running 3 x 1080p monitors.

With neither running at 100% usage then there is, by definition, no bottleneck.

 

[Imreallycool]

Probably the 8350. See http://www.anandtech.com/show/8426/the-intel-haswell-e-cpu-review-core-i7-5960x-i7-5930k-i7-5820k-tested/6

Maybe the power supply. What 12v, 5v and 3.3v readings are you getting in bios or mobo utility software?

But you're also asking a lot of 2 x 7970s (R9 280x) in running 3 x 1080p monitors.

With neither running at 100% usage then there is, by definition, no bottleneck.

That's what confuses me is that neither is running at 100% load what limit's the fps then? I'll run a game with my monitor software to see what those voltages are running at. When I play the game though I'm just running it in 1 1920x1080p if I go to 5760x1080 it drops a little bit. I'll test using both it will take me awhile though do you have any idea what would limit fps if neither is at full load?

 

[i7Baby]

As of yet - just ideas. Need more info to home in on it.

 

[Imreallycool]

As of yet - just ideas. Need more info to home in on it.

Alright so I ran a whole game at max settings and AA with uncapped fps at 1920x1080p. I averaged around 145 fps the whole game. gpu 1 stayed around 35% but highest point was 47% and gpu2 was around 32% but capped at 40% on either and my cpu usaged hovered around 35% and at max was at 45%. The temps were 58 degrees on gpu1 max and 54 degrees on gpu2 max and 41 degrees cpu max. Ram usage was at around 31% if you care about that at all lol. The voltage, hereby recorded as min/max, 12V-11.798/11.901, 5V-4.888,4.931, 3.3V-3.132,3.132 my vcore is always at 1.256 for my graphics cards default. Is there any other voltages you need?

 

[i7Baby]

Try a bios or cmos reset. Make sure your graphics card drivers are up to date.

The PSU voltages are marginally OK. 1.256V for a graphics card is a bit high. CPU Vcore?

 

[Imreallycool]

Try a bios or cmos reset. Make sure your graphics card drivers are up to date.

The PSU voltages are marginally OK. 1.256V for a graphics card is a bit high. CPU Vcore?

The 1.256 is the default for 7970Ghz Vapor-X by Sapphire. It won't let me change it trust me I've tried lol. The graphic driver is the newest beta version but the omega driver give's about the same results. VCore is at 1.356V. I've never done a bios or cmos reset so that will take me awhile to research and take notes of the overclock I did to make my cpu up to 4.5ghz and getting the ram timing and voltage right for the 1866 DDR3 speed

 

[i7Baby]

Bios reset - see your mobo manual.

CMOS reset - power off, wait 5 mins, remove mobo battery, wait 5 mins, replace battery, power on.


Are you using MSI Afterburner? You should be able to adjust voltage or power limit.

 

[Imreallycool]

Bios reset - see your mobo manual.

CMOS reset - power off, wait 5 mins, remove mobo battery, wait 5 mins, replace battery, power on.


Are you using MSI Afterburner? You should be able to adjust voltage or power limit.

When I originally built the system I tried both Sapphire Trixx and MSI Afterburner to change it. Apparently there are a large sum of people with these cards that cannot unlock the voltage

 

[i7Baby]

See if the reset helps

 

[bigpinkdragon286]

You could be CPU bound, if it's hovering around 55% and both GPUs are well below 100%. A multi core CPU would have to load all of it's cores to hit 100%. Games rarely can spread their workload enough to fully utilize every core to the same extent, plus different worker threads just aren't going to be doing the same thing.

If LoL has a rendering thread that is bottlenecking, it could very well be bottlenecking on just one of the cores, two, or even four, which could result in your 55% CPU load that you are seeing, along with other background tasks Windows is dealing with. If the CPU is the culprit, under or overclocking it should result in a definite FPS shift. This would be a pretty clear indicator to me that you were CPU bottlenecking.

If the CPU is your bottleneck, you've very few choices, since the 8350 pretty much has the same cores that any other AM3+ CPU available has. You can overclock it to improve performance, reduce in-game settings, or switch to a different CPU architecture.

 

[Imreallycool]

You could be CPU bound, if it's hovering around 55% and both GPUs are well below 100%. A multi core CPU would have to load all of it's cores to hit 100%. Games rarely can spread their workload enough to fully utilize every core to the same extent, plus different worker threads just aren't going to be doing the same thing.

If LoL has a rendering thread that is bottlenecking, it could very well be bottlenecking on just one of the cores, two, or even four, which could result in your 55% CPU load that you are seeing, along with other background tasks Windows is dealing with. If the CPU is the culprit, under or overclocking it should result in a definite FPS shift. This would be a pretty clear indicator to me that you were CPU bottlenecking.

If the CPU is your bottleneck, you've very few choices, since the 8350 pretty much has the same cores that any other AM3+ CPU available has. You can overclock it to improve performance, reduce in-game settings, or switch to a different CPU architecture.

There wasn't much noticeable fps difference between 4.5Ghz overclock and its original 4.0(4.2 turbo). Lowering any graphical setting doesn't change the fps. I hadn't though of a single core bottlenecking, I'll have to run another game while monitoring each core's load to see its performance.