I swear it should be better than this.

Hi,

so recently i shelled out quite a decent amount of money on a gaming rig for my needs.

FX 8350

8gb 1333mhz ram

R9 290

2tb hdd

700w psu

Asus M5A99FX PRO R 2.0

For the most part i am happy with my system but i feel like im not getting the performance i should.

Bf4 hits 40-110 fps in mp which im fine with.

Skyrim goes in and around 30

AC4 Freedom Cry can go between 30 and 14

my firestrike score is always around 7700-8000

However i find that many sites show much higher performance rates than this. AC4 is completely unplayable (this should not be the case on even much lower end systems)

However, i am gaming on a 1600x900 monitor, not permanent, im getting a 1080p monitor in a couple of months. Is the lower resolution bottlenecking my graphics performance?

Thanks for any help.

Sorry i f this is in the wrong forum, feel free to move it.

@wehateyouooo: Going to move this to the PC forum!

FWIW, I found AC4 to be a poorly optimized PC game, especially when it came to its vsync settings. But you absolutely should be getting more than 30 FPS in Skyrim, at least. The issue shouldn't have anything to do with your resolution, either; the lower the better in terms of framerate. I assume this was a completely fresh install of Windows?

Skyrim has V-Sync enabled by default (with no option to turn it off except in an .ini file) but it should be limiting your FPS to 60, not 30. Has Skyrim EVER gone above 30 since you've played it on that computer? Or is 30 just the average?

I trust you've updated your graphics drivers?

Kind of an obvious question but are all of your drivers up to date? After getting a new video card my performance wasn't too hot but once I updated the drivers everything was perfect.

Definitely worth making sure you have all up-to-date drivers.

I'm not really familiar with your GPU so I can't say exactly but I'd think you should be getting better performance than that.

Also I'm presuming this is 30FPS on Skyrim with no mods installed? Because they can easily drop your performance drastically.

@y2ken: That 290 gets 100+ on Ultra in benchmarks, and the CPU gets around 80 to 90. So he should be getting 60fps (since it's locked to 60 by default). Since it affects other games as well, I would guess it's the drivers that need updating.

@lunnington: Yeah, sounds that way then. Thanks for the info, I didn't want to speak to that card specifically as I wasn't sure on its specs.

Temperatures?
Is the harddrive busy with other stuff?
how many sticks of ram do you have? 1, 2 or 4? are they in the correct slots so that you are not accidentally running single channel?

AC4 is an unoptimized piece of shit. Look online for what settings to lower so it'll be marginally better. But it will probably never run especially well.

The other games are very environment dependent and has a lot of stuff in them. It's not too surprising if you have issues keeping up. I wouldn't bet much on anything being broken.

Still, I suppose it's never a bad idea to do some maintenance. Check for dust, check temperatures, do benchmarks for games that have benchmarked stats online. Knowing that your hardware is working as intended can be very relieving.

Drivers Drivers Drivers. But after that you'll learn how to play with certain settings, such as turning off AA, or shadows, etc. certain graphical upgrades that look great but hinder your performance.

I hate to write this but: Its an ATI card. Update your drivers and pray it gets better.

Drivers are up to date. I have 2 sticks in dual Channel, Just checked. Just tried borderlands 2 which ran at a steady 60 (vsync)metro last night Is running at 30fps with physx and tesselation disabled (i think This should be higher)

Tried uninstalling/ reinstalling drivers a few times and it comes up with an unspecified error at the end but acts like normal. I'm considering a full, clean install of windows as I was using an Intel/nvidia build before now on the same hdd, did uninstall nvidia drivers though. I have nothing to lose really, I only have games on my gaming PC really and have a fairly fast dl speed.

One noob mistake that I can think of, if you are a noob I don't know, is that you don't have a fresh install of windows.

My only other rig was my previous one so I guess I'm a noob when it come to upgrading to a new system.

@wehateyouooo: Yep a clean install of Windows should fix it then. When you switch from Intel/Nvidia to AMD/ATI you should always do that. Even uninstalling the drivers leaves remnants behind that can screw with things.

Also are you insalling drivers from the included DVD or are you making sure to download the latest ones from ATI? It's important that you update to the latest release.

Really? I can't recall ever seeing anyone recommend a full format & reinstall just for changing video cards. I mean, we aren't using Win 98 ME anymore and there are good, free products like Driver Sweeper that work wonders when needed. It's not going to hurt to have a fresh install of Windows every once in awhile, but I think doing a full wipe as a first step just when changing video cards is overkill.

Just had a clean reinstall. Skyrim still hits 30-40 fps. Unigine valley gets 61.1 average. Still not sure about this. Also tried metro last light and it seems I get HUGE frame drops when looking at smoke/fog-like effects effects, same thing in skyrim when looking at particles of snow moving and the smoke from torches.

@lunnington:

30 is the average, it can hit 55 and drop to 21.

Im running on the 13.12 driver. should I try 14.4?

Nah, you shouldn't have to reinstall Windows when you replace your graphics card. Driver Sweeper is a good idea, though.

@wehateyouooo: This might sound like a dumb question, but what version of Windows are you using? A less dumb question: Are you using a legitimate version of Windows or one you torrented?

Installing new drivers still sounds like the best idea if you haven't done that yet.

Lower resolutions should make your game run faster, not slower.

Are Assassin's Creed 4 and Skyrim the only games with low framerates? And on the topic of Skyrim, do you have any mods whatsoever?

How is your cooling?

Do you hear any funny noises?

Make sure you have everything in the background that may be running turned off. Especially notifications for MS, Adobe, etc. That crap will slog any good machine down.

@believer258:

I have a hyper 212 evo on my fx 8350 stock. im running a stock reference 290.

Running windows 8.1 64bit that I picked up from a local pc store.

My r9 290 goes crazy loud when particle effects ike dust smoke and fog are on screen but seems fairly quiet most of the other times in comparison.

AC4 , Skyrim, Metro Last Light are the only games I have noticed real performance issues but other games are also well below expected fps.

Assassins Creed 4 was poorly optimized for the pc system I haven't played it since maybe December but I remember there were a lof of issues running that game on the PC.

@wehateyouooo: So how do your temps look on the CPU and GPU side? That your card gets loud like that is concerning and the card might be bad.

temps on cpu hit around 59 constant. r9 290 is hitting 75+ which is much further below the 95c temps that reviews say. I live in Kenya temporarily at the moment and its always relatively warm here. Also it seems like the R9 290 really does become loud under load anyway. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpD_r53qxJc

@wehateyouooo: Lower resolution should be helping your frame rates. I'm running a 7950 overclocked to just under 7970 levels. The 290 is much faster than a 7970.

At 1920x1200, I'm getting 45-60FPS in Skyrim on ultra with a fairly heavy hitting ENB setting. Stock Skyrim with VSync off, it's constantly in the 100+ FPS area.

I'd uninstall your drivers, run cclean, reinstall your drivers. I turn forced AA/AF off in the Catalyst Control Panel and change that stuff on a per-game basis.

still having issues with the card. Crysis 2 hits 45-20 fps average with significant frame drops when looking at particle effects

Gpu does seem to be hitting 100% so it doesn't seem like a bottleneck. Drivers are installed and im running at stock settings. Is this just a faulty card?

@wehateyouooo: Which PCI-X slot do you have your card plugged in to? Looking at the board specs, it seems that two four sets of PCI-X slots. Which slot is your GPU in? The blue ones are x16, the black ones are x4 - while the x16 slots have a ton more bandwidth, I'm not sure if it's enough to hit your frame rate so hard. But, it's something to look at.

@zelyre: it's in a PCI x16 slot, second one from the CPU socket.

Downloading the 14.4 drivers as an experiment.

Does your mobo have onboard video? It sounds dumb, but make sure your monitor is plugged into the DVI for the video card and not the motherboard. I have made that mistake more than once.

@lunnington: nope, its an amd mobo, no onboard video.

At this point it sounds like you need to RMA the card.

@wehateyouooo: ill ask again, how many sticks of ram do you have.

@devildoll: 2.

Why in the world did you only buy 1333mhz memory, is this 2007? Also the 8350 isn't exactly the fastest CPU in the world, it's IPC per thread isn't anywhere near what Intel are pushing out of their Haswell/Ivy-E line up. Skyrim is very heavy on one or two threads and benefits greatly from high IPC per thread over number of threads.

Really what's happening here is CPU/Memory subsystem bottle necks. At 1600x900 an R9 290 isn't even closed to being challenged by any modern title, the deep dips in frame rate you are seeing is when the CPU can't feed the GPU effectively. I'd start by swapping out the 1333 memory for something a little more modern (1866, 2133).

@korwin: would upping the resolution to 1920x1080 help?

It wouldn't help with the frame drops on the bottom end no, but you would be making more effective use of the card. The same goes for AC4. AC has always been a CPU heavy series and AC4 took it to another level on both the CPU and GPU front (crowds coupled with massively dense environment assets = grotesque amounts of draw calls under DX11 and bellow).

@korwin: how would higher MHz ram help

And would an intel i5 haswell CPU see improvements, and If so , how much.

Am I really going to see improvements from ram?

Thanks for the help by the way

You would have to buy a new mobo as well if you get an intell cpu, but that Cpu you have should work fine. I have a similar setup to you, but a 7950 card and was having less than expected results at one point,(a year or so ago) was going to try new ram but never got around to it. Most games work fine now though

The upper end of the current JEDEC spec for DDR3 is 1600mhz (of course there is plenty of stuff that runs faster) which is the amount of bandwidth I would expect a modern engine to be tuned to. Over all however it wouldn't effect things too much normally, but it's just something I would look at changing out (it is after all a cheap swap).

Really though I suspect you're just looking at CPU bottlenecks on the 8350, at least with BF4 you can use Mantle instead of Direct3D to bump up the performance.

@korwin: I sincerely doubt the problem is his 8350. One of my machines has an 8130p in it and there is no perceptible difference between that and another one of my PC's that I built around an i5.

His CPU is fine.

Could it be his PSU that simply isn't drawing enough power into the system? At 700w it doesn't sound like it, but an R9 290 is beefy-ass card. I had very similar issues about a couple of years ago, and when I upgraded my PSU (from 900W to 850W but with better amperage), it fixed errythin'.

What's your PSU model?

@korwin: i have heard people have had problems with ram 1866mhz and above with fx cpus

@snail: a cooler master b700

Don't take this as a definite answer, but, based on my personal experience with a power-hungry AMD card (a Radeon HD6990), that might be your problem. From Cooler Master B700's official product page:

The reliable, efficient and premium line of B power supplies is ideal for mainstream and basic computing systems.

And that's definitely not the kind of machine you've built. So even if this isn't what's causing you these issues, you might want to consider upgrading to something like a Corsair HX850. Your whole case is extremely similar to what was happening to me a few years ago. I had built a new PC, and though Battlefield: Bad Company 2 and Mass Effect 2 ran just fine, it would underperform ridiculously with most other modern games - I remember that whenever I looked at a big boulder on Borderlands it would stutter like crazy, down to ~12 FPS. Replacing my old PSU for the one I linked above entirely fixed it.

If I'm giving this person useless advice though, someone stop me.

Is it possible that the GPU is being throttled by the drivers for some reason? It's been a while since I looked, but the Catalyst Control Center should have a setting for adjusting the desired power or max temperature of the video card (under performance, AMD Overdrive, I think). I would check there and make sure those settings are where they're supposed to be.