City of Heroes: Live Forum Archive

AMD 6900 Series Issues in Preatoria

je_saist

By je_saist,
Posted on: 2011-01-06 19:57 in ALL ACCESS Gameplay Technical Issues Bugs

 

Posted

Got a new AMD HD6900 series (was a 6950, been flashed to a 6970, unlikely to be the problem but oops for AMD anyway) and while I expected to be CPU capped as I'm running it with an Intel Core 2 Duo E6700, I wasn't expecting to see this:

All graphical settings are maxed except for particle physics which is set to medium.

GPU numbers are pulled from GPU-Z ver 5.0.0 (comes with techpowerup.com's kit for flashing a 6950 to get the extra pipes and clock speeds)

In old CoH zones, I see about 30 FPS, 95% CPU utilization, and 70% GPU.
In preatoria on the same character I see about 10 FPS, 95% CPU, and 40% GPU.

Not exactly sure what Preatoria is doing graphics wise that a new top of the line GPU is tossing off to the CPU instead. Any thought on how I could resolve this would be appreciated. I actually saw better performance from my 4870 with similar Graphics settings, so this is disconcerting.

I can provide a DXDiag if people are interested.

Edit:
Of note: just popped into the same zone with a villain (and left her toggles off) and I was only using 75-85% of my CPU but was still only getting 10-15 FPS and only 30-40% GPU utilization. Something buggy is going on here.

I do not have the Catalyst Control Center installed, you don't need it unless you want to override game settings.

_WAter_

***Liberty***
Panther's Grace:50 Claws/SR
Hena Muri:39 Claws/Regen
Child of Grace:32 WS
Shankilahre:32 DM/WP
Panther's Fury:33 Claws/SR
Anubia:50 DB/WP
***Guardian***
Panther's Ghost:50 Night Widow

 

Posted

a 6950 is not a 6970.

reflash back to the 6950 bios and see if the errors continue.

If they don't, then your answer is going to be that your card was binned to a 6950 because those extra shaders and pipes are broken.

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by je_saist View Post
a 6950 is not a 6970.

reflash back to the 6950 bios and see if the errors continue.

If they don't, then your answer is going to be that your card was binned to a 6950 because those extra shaders and pipes are broken.
The behavior I described is not consistent with problems that activating the extra shaders would cause. There's a really good article on Techpowerup.com that explains what AMD did wrong with these cards that allows me to do what I did safely.

So you don't have to read the entire article I'll sumarize: if it was an issue from the bios flash I would more likely see lockups, tearing, and other graphical artifacts. As I'm not, this is more likely a driver issue, or something in the CoH code preventing preatoria from using the GPU properly.

To humor you -since it's easy as AMD includes dual bios in their cards now - I'll flick the switch and report the difference.

So, with the 6950 bios, as I've turned off 10% of the shaders and reduced the core clocks, I'm seeing:
25 FPS at 70% GPU with 95% CPU in normal zones
10 FPS at 40% GPU with 95% CPU in preatoria

Pretty much the exact same situation whether I have all 1536 shader units from a HD6970 turned on, or just the 1408 of an HD6950.

So, there is something else going on in Preatoria that's preventing my GPU from doing the work instead of my CPU.

_WAter_

***Liberty***
Panther's Grace:50 Claws/SR
Hena Muri:39 Claws/Regen
Child of Grace:32 WS
Shankilahre:32 DM/WP
Panther's Fury:33 Claws/SR
Anubia:50 DB/WP
***Guardian***
Panther's Ghost:50 Night Widow

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by WAterTriAd View Post
The behavior I described is not consistent with problems that activating the extra shaders would cause. There's a really good article on Techpowerup.com that explains what AMD did wrong with these cards that allows me to do what I did safely.

So you don't have to read the entire article I'll sumarize: if it was an issue from the bios flash I would more likely see lockups, tearing, and other graphical artifacts. As I'm not, this is more likely a driver issue, or something in the CoH code preventing preatoria from using the GPU properly.

To humor you -since it's easy as AMD includes dual bios in their cards now - I'll flick the switch and report the difference.

So, with the 6950 bios, as I've turned off 10% of the shaders and reduced the core clocks, I'm seeing:
25 FPS at 70% GPU with 95% CPU in normal zones
10 FPS at 40% GPU with 95% CPU in preatoria

Pretty much the exact same situation whether I have all 1536 shader units from a HD6970 turned on, or just the 1408 of an HD6950.

So, there is something else going on in Preatoria that's preventing my GPU from doing the work instead of my CPU.

_WAter_
Yes, well, an E6700 will go full load no matter what the speed is unless it's like 4 or more GHz. I had an E8400 OCed to 3.8GHz and went full load all the time in CoH. With the i7 950 at 3.6GHz, barely 20%.

As for GPU, depends what settings, with either the E8400 or i7 950. If it's near max, with all the shadows and Ambient Occlusion, it would go to 90-95% GPU Load. If those were lowered or off, it would drop significantly.

Since you are running at near full graphics anyways, I wouldn't know. Note that I was using a GTX 275 for this, and not an ATI card. Last time I used an ATI card was an X1900XTX and back then ATI ran horrid on CoH. I am only noting my experience as reference and just to give you an idea.

You are also likely CPU bottlenecked, which is no surprise. CoH is more of a CPU dependent game, especially pre-ultra mode. Now with Ultra mode it's utilizing more of the GPU. Back before Ultra Mode, my GPU would barely reach 40% GPU Load with an E8400 @ 3.6 or 3.8 GHz.

 

Posted

There are several threads that deal with low FPS and crash problems with any driver after 10.9. You are in the same boat as I am. I have a 6970, and since no drivers before the 10.11 drivers can even see the card, we just have to live with the issues until it gets fixed.

Recap from the other threads:

delete the checksum file in your CoH directory.
go to your cmd and type ipconfig /flushdns
start game

This works only once in awhile for me with the FPS drop. I have learned to play with all the settings low or off except AA/AF. Another thing I personally noticed was that when I turn off shadows, half the time I get my FPS back.

 

Posted

Thanks, I'll try the checksum tonight, though I'm not sure how flushing my DNS cache will affect my FPS. I'll try it anyway but I would imagine that's for non-card specific FPS drops.

Thanks;
_WAter_

***Liberty***
Panther's Grace:50 Claws/SR
Hena Muri:39 Claws/Regen
Child of Grace:32 WS
Shankilahre:32 DM/WP
Panther's Fury:33 Claws/SR
Anubia:50 DB/WP
***Guardian***
Panther's Ghost:50 Night Widow