6970 -> 7970: 70% FPS increase in DCS!

Even though Kuky's been having no end of problems with his 7970 in DCS, I decided to at least give it a try based on so many other positive things I was reading about this card. My setup had been a 6990 + 6970 in Crossfire (=Trifire), which of course didn't do anything whatsoever for me in DCS beyond what a single 6970 would do, but certainly helped in EVERY SINGLE OTHER GAME I OWN. :)

But still, DCS performance is what has driven most of my upgrades lately, so I figured it was worth trying out the 7970. I bought two of them to completely replace my 6990 + 6970. I run DCS at 6400x2160, across three 27" monitors for the 'main' view and a single 22" touchscreen for the instrument view, arranged in a T-shape as shown here. I'm not going to get into exactly what graphics settings I have, because it's the difference in framerate that I'm so excited about here.

With my previous setup, which was essentially one-half of a 6990 in DCS (which is clocked at 830/5.0, slightly slower than a single 6970's 880/5.5), I had tweaked my settings to get 24 FPS in a standard simple takeoff mission.

To my surprise, when I dropped the 7970's in, my first test yielded 34 FPS, a 40% increase right off the bat!

Having read about the 7970's great overclocking potential, I then went right for the max clocks allowed within MSI Afterburner: from 925 to 1125 on the core clock, and from 1375 (=5.5 GHz) to 1575 (=6.3 GHz) on the memory clock. Going into DCS, my takeoff mission now started at 40 FPS -- an overall 67% improvement in framerate! I couldn't believe it.

And this on a card that runs cooler and quieter than both a single 6970 and my 6990 ... amazing!

I'm using the 8.921.2 RC11 driver set, and as Kuky has discovered, there is no doubt that this is NOT a complete driver release. It's buggy, and does cause crashes occasionally, and not all the features of the 12.1 or 12.2 Catalyst releases are in there yet (the big one, from my perspective, being the lack of ability to use Crossfire in 3D on the 7970 yet).

Some other test results of interest:

rFactor2, 5916x1080:

6990+6970: 41 FPS

2x7970: 60 FPS (46% increase)

pCARS, 5916x1080:

6990+6970: 36 FPS

2x7970: 46 FPS (28% increase)

Deus Ex: Human Revolution, 5916x1080:

6990+6970: 74 FPS

2x7970: 90 FPS (22% increase)

The Witcher 2, 1920x1080:

6990+6970: 130 FPS

2x7970: 143 FPS (10% increase)

The Witcher 2, 1920x1080, 3D:

6990+6970: 36 FPS

1x7970: 50 FPS (cannot use Crossfire yet)

BF3, 1920x1080:

6990+6970: 114 FPS

2x7970: 118 FPS (3% increase)

Interesting that only BF3 did not see much improvement in FPS. Also, I should note that, in my quick testing, I did start to see some artifacts in some of these games, indicating that I need to scale back the OC a bit. But still, the OC from 925/5.5 up to 1125/6.3 only nets about 10-15% more FPS, so for most of these games there would still be a sizable jump going from the 6990+6970 to 2x7970's at stock speeds.

Lastly, given the increases in DCS FPS that others have seen from the 7970 -- generally anywhere from 30-50% -- it's obvious that the increases we're all seeing are very much system-dependent. At 6400x2160, for sure the VRAM on my 6990+6970 was being maxed out, for one thing, so that additional gigabyte of VRAM on the 7970 probably helps there.

Bottom line though: I am one happy Warthog driver. :)

Your BF3 is on a very small resolution though and hardly pushes that card.

On 2560x1600 I had good gains over the 580.

I even tried it windowed 4960x1600 and it ran smooth at 60fps with a few things turned down.

Running the same setup I am hopeful :) I have a 6970 at the moment but I have been wondering about the 7970 but haven't seen any dcs results yet.

One thing though, I remember that I got better frames from running at ~ 8000x1080 by having the screens set up in windows as side by side. Of course the real set up is a T but my 'virtual' resolution is only 8 megapixels whereas yours is 12 megapixels.

I think if you rearrange how it is setup in windows you will get better framerates again.

I'm of course familiar with moving the monitors around within Windows to try to minimize overall render area but I could have sworn I already tried this with the T-shape and it didn't work ... can't quite remember why though. Worth a try again! Will do tonight. Thanks for the suggestion.

Hopefully it will work for you. I had it the same way because logically it worked with the physical layout and made moving the mouse around more intuitive.

It wasn't until I started to export mfd's etc to the touchscreen that I though the fps dropped too much and that they went back up when I had moved them to the side.

I have it frame limited to 30 on mine and I get that all the time in flight. It would be nice to be able to bumo up all the options and keep 30+ and 30 on the ground though.

I am watching with interest )

I agree with the FPS gains with the 7970. It is a great card, but you will have trouble when you use Windowed mode multi monitor and export output from DCS.

I agree with the FPS gains with the 7970. It is a great card, but you will have trouble when you use Windowed mode multi monitor and export output from DCS.

Thanks for that, I will have to do some reading up as thats the only way I would use it..

Running the same setup I am hopeful :) I have a 6970 at the moment but I have been wondering about the 7970 but haven't seen any dcs results yet.

 

One thing though, I remember that I got better frames from running at ~ 8000x1080 by having the screens set up in windows as side by side. Of course the real set up is a T but my 'virtual' resolution is only 8 megapixels whereas yours is 12 megapixels.

 

I think if you rearrange how it is setup in windows you will get better framerates again.

How exactly did you manage to get a T-shape working with 4 monitors placed side-by-side? PeterP suggested here that a second viewport be created in the monitorsetup file, which I tried back in December but found that it killed framerate. I can't quite figure out how else to do it. Are you using SoftTH?

I might not have explained myself very well.

My layout it probably like yours as such. http://homepage.mac.com/jason.jane/temp/pitpic.jpg

In windows my touchscreen is set up as being to the right of my eyefinity group hence the 8000x1080. In a10 I set that resolution and in my monitor lua I have my viewport at 6000x1080 starting at 0,0 and then export my mfds etc to the other area of the screen > 6000.

Hope that makes some sense.

I agree with the FPS gains with the 7970. It is a great card, but you will have trouble when you use Windowed mode multi monitor and export output from DCS.

What trouble do you have Smil?

Mine is working exporting MFDs. Fps could be better though. Windowed mode seems to have more impact than Nvidia.

I might not have explained myself very well.

 

My layout it probably like yours as such. http://homepage.mac.com/jason.jane/temp/pitpic.jpg

 

In windows my touchscreen is set up as being to the right of my eyefinity group hence the 8000x1080. In a10 I set that resolution and in my monitor lua I have my viewport at 6000x1080 starting at 0,0 and then export my mfds etc to the other area of the screen > 6000.

 

Hope that makes some sense.

Ah, OK, that explains it (sweet pit, by the way). Exporting stuff to a 4th monitor, and being smart about how you arrange the monitors within Windows, is different from what I'm trying to do (although it is what I used to be doing).

My setup (pic here) is more like taking a giant canvas of the normal view in the cockpit and just dropping the lower left and right corners of it; this was the only way that I could use the touchscreen to interact directly with the cockpit instruments without having to use Helios. Although I tried and really liked Helios, ultimately what I wanted was something that felt more natural, and didn't give me two cockpit views.

I think I've achieved that ... but at the cost, of course, of rendering this ridiculous 6400x2160 resolution. :)

Yup, the higher your resolution is the better (percentage wise) performance increase you will see. Since I run "only" 1920x1800 my previous 5870 could still handle alright... but now with 7970 the CPU is the limiting factor.

by the way Mustang let me know there are new BETA drivers out yesterday, might be worth trying

few guys are saying it works on the 7970

Gotcha, yep no way to do what you are doing any differently. Hopefully the 8970 will be around the corner for you :)

How well does it perform with MS FSX?

Sorry, I don't own FSX so I really couldn't say.

Also, you say you're running crossfire with DCS, really? How does crossfire on vs off compare?

I wish! No, I'm not running Crossfire in DCS. Believe me I've tried every single combination of CCC and Radeon Pro profile parameters that I could think of, and I'm convinced there's no way to do it.

I'm running Crossfired 7970's in every other game, and even technically in DCS (because I'm not manually disabling Crossfire) but the second card doesn't get used at all.

Greg, maybe you should start "yelling" at AMD forums/web/support for them to include DCS in CF profile list?

Greg, maybe you should start "yelling" at AMD forums/web/support for them to include DCS in CF profile list?

Yup, I've already tried that route, like so many others. But I think I'm now going to try to get some of the guys who run the hardware sites I frequent to ask on my (our) behalf, as they seem to have regular contact with AMD. Worth a try at least.

Official ED answer here:

http://forums.eagle.ru/showpost.php?p=1395308&postcount=24