Games ran good speed prior to gfx card update. Slower since (in .hack GU 3)

[icemann]

Double post.

Well I jinxed myself. On a new play test even with the MSI Afterburner in effect, the framerate in .hack GU 3 got so bad (19 fps) that it was completely unplayable. And that was with the core clock at 1001 and the memory clock at 1307.

With the old card, frame rates no matter where I was in the game NEVER reduced below 45 fps and that was only in combat in brief moments. More often than not I had a nice stable 58-60 fps frame rate.

So to go from mostly stable speeds in most games with the older card to what I've been experiencing now I'm not prepared to continue with so I'll be returning the card and going with an nvidia as emulation is one of my main past times, being a player of snes, ps1, ps2 etc games via emulation. Which I'm not prepared to sacrifice just so my PC games play better solely. I just hope that they allow me to do the switch since they have a "only entitled to a refund if the product is faulty" policy. And with a ps2 emulator being my only issue I'll have to think of something.

Luckily the card was giving me blue screens when I first got it (resource conflict with my sound card which I had to switch to a different PCI slot) and a couple more even after I fixed that. Though none since I updated the catalyst drivers. I just hope that the more recent nvidia cards work fine straight out of the box and don't require any overclocking to get normal speeds with, otherwise I'll be back to square one again.

[AcidRains]

There was this another similar case at dolphin forum，exactly same issue but on the contrary , he was upgrade to GTX 670 form HD 6950.
http://forums.dolphin-emulator.com/showt...?tid=23582
procedure of trouble shooting was kinda same, thought the card running at 2d mode first,switching driver, no improvement,
installed Afterburner bump up clock to rather high and ended up problem unsolved.
bad luck maybe, guess some new product always come with new problem

[Rezard]

... I just hope that they allow me to do the switch since they have a "only entitled to a refund if the product is faulty" policy. And with a ps2 emulator being my only issue I'll have to think of something. ...

Sooooo--
Something like this should work...

"I purchased this new GPU as an upgrade,
but it's somehow giving me worse performance than my older, weaker card.

After trying several methods to correctly set up, optimize, and fix this--
through the help of the [insert manufacturer] forum--
the conclusion given to me is that the unit is faulty.

Other units of the same model all perform much better.
I am very disatisfied with this whole experience,
and would like a refund, or exchange,
to pursue another route."

Sincerly,
a paying customer.

[icemann]

"I purchased this new GPU as an upgrade,
but it's somehow giving me worse performance than my older, weaker card.

After trying several methods to correctly set up, optimize, and fix this--
through the help of the [insert manufacturer] forum--
the conclusion given to me is that the unit is faulty.

Other units of the same model all perform much better.
I am very disatisfied with this whole experience,
and would like a refund, or exchange,
to pursue another route."

Sincerly,
a paying customer.

I like it . Though its more me taking it back to the PC shop I got it from, but something like that should work.

AcidRains: Interesting. It's quite likely that there will be someone else like me with this same issue on these forums soon-ish in the near future. Be just my luck if it gets fixed that time . Well I'm happy to try higher clock speeds. I'm just worried about overheating the thing. Though Afterburner allows for quick viewing of card temperatures. I'll see if I can bump it up alittle higher.

The thing for me though is that I would understand if it from the get go (as in the moment the emulator starts up with the game) ran in bad speeds, but when running around in-game in the same location slowly over time results in worser and worser frame rates, it just makes no sense at all to me.

[edit]
Tried upping the core clock to 1050 which resulted after 2 mins in the display driver for the card failing but not needing a restart of the computer to recover from. So 1000 is about as good as that value is going to get without issues. Now to try the memory clock.

[edit 2]
Upped memory clock to 1352. No change.

[icemann]

Double post.

I may have found a solution. I was looking up HD 7950 frame issue forum posts for non emulation related things and one user who has one stated that when applying clock speed increases he also had to increase the power usage by 20% and fan speeds by 65-75%.

Tested .hack GU 3 with it and it seems to run ok. Not great but consistent for the most part. Tested Gran Turismo 3 for 15 minutes and that seemed fine mostly. Tested Extermination and then Wrath of Cortex again which seemed to run alright. Kept a close eye on temperatures throughout.

[edit]
Even with the improvement though it's still not AS good as with the other card. So still be returning it. Be best I think.

[icemann]

Triple update

Well an update to my situation. I took my PC back to the computer shop and they were blaming my PC (amount of dust, the fact that I use the 32 bit version of Windows 7 and not 64 etc). Flick forward to today (2 days later) and the problem appears to have been resolved and I still get to keep the graphics card. Yay.

The guy did the following things:

* Completely removed all dust from my tower
* Moved all the icons off my desktop (I had a ***** on there)
* Did a complete defrag of the PC + scan for bad sectors (came up nil)
* Updated my bios
* Fixed an issue the people who had put my PC together 2 and a bit years ago had stuffed up on, which was underclocking my memory to 1000 rather its 1600 maximum.
* Made sure the gfx card drivers were up to date (which they were).
* Disabled some programs I don't use often which were being loaded up on startup of Windows.

All of that combined resolved the issue and I now get perfect speeds in native res on all of the games that I have tested no matter how long I leave them running for. Hell, I can set my native res to x6 and it still runs at a stable 60 fps for the most part (some slow downs when there's alot going on).

Odd thing is that now in AMD OverDrive it looks like:



When I play games in PCSX2 and the temperature is a bit higher. And Nope I'm not overclocking it there either.

So problem fixed hopefully. If the issue returns I'll report back, and if not even better.

[miseru99]

Glad it's resolved, not sure what caused problem, maybe you had some problematic software in the startup or some issues with the mobo;3, but at least hd7xxx and it's drivers doesn't make any problems for gsdx.

The temperature is completely normal gpu's are made to work at higher temperatures, it's completely safe and no reason to worry about it, if it's higher than it was before it's only couse before your gpu was constantly underclocking and nothing really was heating it before. The clocks are at default, dunno what's odd there for you everything looks normal there now, seeing lazy fan you could even easily oc such gpu quite a bit safely, but you really have no reason to do that especially when lazy fan = quiet fan and thats way more important than few fps more in benchmarks with no difference in gaming;P.

[Alexander]

What is memory clock for anyway?

I notice that I can't go much higher than 720mhz in the core speed (1440mhz shader) at my current voltage without starting to see graphical problems. My GPU still never reaches over 80C

But memory, I think I can overclock that to the maximum 1800mhz without a problem (though I kept it a 100 below the max just in case). I actually don't see much of a difference in PC games when overclocking the memory speed though.

If it turns out to be really helpful I guess I'll set it up to 1800. That'll mean my GPU is EVGA overclocked from stock of 620 / 1500 to 720 / 1800.

[miseru99]

Pretty much same as memory clock on your RAM. The faster is your memory clock the faster it can transfer data through(it depends also on bus width and memory type through), that's often huge deal for GSdx which is often limited much sooner by low memory bandwidth than gpu core speed(but then it can often be changed by using "allow 8 bit textures" option in GSdx config soo it's not such a big deal either;P). PC games obviously have other needs, actually I think for most pc games you could even underclock your memory for a nice temp decrease and still don't loose much if anything;].