Edit: Oh no, did I post in the wrong section?
Hello.
I have recently upgraded my hardware, GPU wise, from a gtx 650 to an rx 460. I have an FX-6300 CPU with turbo to 3700 MHz active, so before the upgrade I was obviously GPU bottlenecked. Now after the upgrade I'm observing something veeery strange. My observations are mostly in a specific game, World of Warcraft. There are some specific locations/moments, where my fps drops to around 30-40 fps for no apparent reason. I have osd hw monitoring, and my gpu is not fully utilized, neither is my cpu. But this is a more complex subject. Here is what I see: CPU: When around 30-40 fps, cpu is overall at around 30%, but one of the cores is varying between 60-90%(never 100%). This is mostly due to the games' poor multi-core programming, but still, it never reaches 100%.
GPU: While at 30-40 fps, gpu usage is at at about 60-80%.
So WTF. What is lowering my FPS. It's certainly not the GPU, it's... maaaybe the CPU, but I overclocked it to 4 GHZ and there was no change. Should I try 4.5? If yes, I'll need a lot of help from you guys because even at 4GHZ it was unstable. Screen was going black every few minutes. I had probably not tuned my bios setting properly for it to work at 4GHZ (bus speed, voltages, multiplier, etc).
Ok so now on the overclocking note. This video card has no additional power plug, it takes everything from the PCIx. So for that I need to make sure I have proper power on the motherboard, which I'm not sure of. Near the CPU there is an 8 pin power slot, but my PSU only had a 4-pin cord available. It worked well with my last video card but that one had additional 6-pin power socket. In the manual it says that a 4-pin should be sufficient for optimal operation, what do you think about this? Also, isn't that plug only related to CPU?
So in conclusion, I have no idea where the bottleneck is, I was thinking maybe the GDDR5 MHz, but I upped that by 300 MHz and still no change. And the CPU overclock didn't seem to have any effect either. Is it actully the GPU to blame but my readings are not correct? Or is the game just very bad and not able to take full advantage of my hardware?
So a few more things:
1st: When the fps goes low the video memory is almost maxed 1.8-1.9 GB of 2GB. But there is no disk activity so it's not caching anything to disk. But this leads me to my 2nd point. 2nd: My motherboard has a PCIx x16 slot 2.0 . The video card supports PCIx x8 V3.0 . Here's my video card: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-radeon-rx-460,4707.html Look down in the article, it specifies that it's on x8. And this would be fine if I was running a 3.0 x8. But I'm running in 2.0 x8. Could this be the issue? Could 2.0 x8 not handle the 2GB of memory the game actually fully uses? Would an overclock to my PCIx slot do anything?
Help me out guys, I'm stuck.
Hello.
I have recently upgraded my hardware, GPU wise, from a gtx 650 to an rx 460. I have an FX-6300 CPU with turbo to 3700 MHz active, so before the upgrade I was obviously GPU bottlenecked. Now after the upgrade I'm observing something veeery strange. My observations are mostly in a specific game, World of Warcraft. There are some specific locations/moments, where my fps drops to around 30-40 fps for no apparent reason. I have osd hw monitoring, and my gpu is not fully utilized, neither is my cpu. But this is a more complex subject. Here is what I see: CPU: When around 30-40 fps, cpu is overall at around 30%, but one of the cores is varying between 60-90%(never 100%). This is mostly due to the games' poor multi-core programming, but still, it never reaches 100%.
GPU: While at 30-40 fps, gpu usage is at at about 60-80%.
So WTF. What is lowering my FPS. It's certainly not the GPU, it's... maaaybe the CPU, but I overclocked it to 4 GHZ and there was no change. Should I try 4.5? If yes, I'll need a lot of help from you guys because even at 4GHZ it was unstable. Screen was going black every few minutes. I had probably not tuned my bios setting properly for it to work at 4GHZ (bus speed, voltages, multiplier, etc).
Ok so now on the overclocking note. This video card has no additional power plug, it takes everything from the PCIx. So for that I need to make sure I have proper power on the motherboard, which I'm not sure of. Near the CPU there is an 8 pin power slot, but my PSU only had a 4-pin cord available. It worked well with my last video card but that one had additional 6-pin power socket. In the manual it says that a 4-pin should be sufficient for optimal operation, what do you think about this? Also, isn't that plug only related to CPU?
So in conclusion, I have no idea where the bottleneck is, I was thinking maybe the GDDR5 MHz, but I upped that by 300 MHz and still no change. And the CPU overclock didn't seem to have any effect either. Is it actully the GPU to blame but my readings are not correct? Or is the game just very bad and not able to take full advantage of my hardware?
So a few more things:
1st: When the fps goes low the video memory is almost maxed 1.8-1.9 GB of 2GB. But there is no disk activity so it's not caching anything to disk. But this leads me to my 2nd point. 2nd: My motherboard has a PCIx x16 slot 2.0 . The video card supports PCIx x8 V3.0 . Here's my video card: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-radeon-rx-460,4707.html Look down in the article, it specifies that it's on x8. And this would be fine if I was running a 3.0 x8. But I'm running in 2.0 x8. Could this be the issue? Could 2.0 x8 not handle the 2GB of memory the game actually fully uses? Would an overclock to my PCIx slot do anything?
Help me out guys, I'm stuck.