HD6870 > R7870: No FPS Boost?

[VTJS17_Fire]

Hi,

 

a upgraded my graphicscard today.

 

my old one: XFX HD6870 DD (1GB)

my new one: XFX R7870 BE (2GB)

 

I did a test with the old and the new card, but there is no relevant FPS boost. I record a track and took the FPS on some times (see below), but get no more than 5 FPS at all.

 

FPS Test:

Time: 20 sec.

6870: 24 FPS

7870: 27 FPS

 

Time: 30 sec.

6870: 21 FPS

7870: 24 FPS

 

Time: 45 sec.

6870: 19 FPS

7870: 22 FPS

 

Time: 53 sec.

6870: 19 FPS

7870: 23 FPS

 

Time: 61 sec.

6870: 20 FPS

7870: 25 FPS

 

Time: 70 sec.

6870: 29 FPS

7870: 30 FPS

 

 

And the R7870 BE should be a 2GB card, my catalyst control center shows me more (see picture).

 

 

any ideas to improve my FPS/ unlock FPS with my new card?

 

 

regards,

Fire

[Brisse]

DCS is very CPU intensive so it's not the graphics card that is limiting your FPS. You are likely to see an improvement in other, less CPU intensive titles.

[BIGNEWY]

Most of us feel your pain, we are all waiting for EDGE and the new ingame graphics engine to be released.

 

I am waiting until then to decide if I upgrade or not.

[joey45]

Add another 8gigs of RAM Bignewy...

 

VJS161 FIRE - what's your CPU and RAM

Edited November 9, 2013 by joey45

[VanjaB]

Could you please post your other system specs? Also did you do upgrade to the latest ATI drivers for your card???

 

With that said the 7870 is not exactly a major upgrade from the 6870, except for the texel rate which is about 50% higher, the improvement you will see in FPS should be about 15-20%.

 

I recently went from an XFX 6870 to an Nvidia GTX760 and the difference is almost night and day, I hate to say it but the current DCS engine simply prefers NVIDIA cards to ATI. I have no idea how EDGE will play out though.

[BIGNEWY]

Add another 8gigs of RAM Bignewy...

 

I thought that Joey and I have been looking for some RAM at a decent price, the thing that baffles me is DCS never uses more than the 8 gb I have already.

[VTJS17_Fire]

Hi and thanks for the answers. At frist, I improved my card for EDGE, preventive - not for the acutal engine. :D

 

So, my 5 FPS improvement is already 20% more, for this old engine it's ok. Waiting for EDGE and testing BF3 tonight. Yep, the 7870 is only one generation to the 6870.

 

my specs:

MB: AsRock 870 Extreme 3

CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 965BE

RAM: 8GB

HDD: windows is on a 120GB SSD, DCS on a 250GB SSD (both Samsung 830)

 

 

regards,

Fire

 

 

PS: CCC version is 13.9.

[HiJack]

CPU and memory is the problem there VJS161_Fire. Upgrade to Hasswell, check my sig :)

[Mustang]

PS: CCC version is 13.9.

 

Hey Fire, try using the very latest 13.11 beta 9.2

 

http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/latest-catalyst-windows-beta.aspx

 

P.S driver includes an interesting item in release notes "Resolves intermittent crashes seen in legacy DirectX®​ 9 applications"

 

seeing as DCS is a DX9 title i guess this might be useful for some? who knows :)

Edited November 9, 2013 by Mustang

[VanjaB]

Hi Jack you are only half-right. 8 Gigs of Ram is more than enough for DCS.

 

The real problem lies in his CPU. Unfortunately the Phenom range of AMD processors is only barely adequate in single-threaded performance, and the current engine basically only uses one core. If its at stock speed which is 3.4 GHZ he might try to overclock it some, it will definitely bring his minimum FPS up, which is what really counts in this game. Once again, if EDGE incorporates proper multi-threaded support that might change, but we have no guarantees that this will be the case.

[VTJS17_Fire]

@HiJack: RAM I think about, but a new CPU next year at the earliest - but I'm a AMD fan *oops*, so only a new AMD cpu ... otherwise I have to buy a new MB, too. :(

 

@Mustang: Thanks for the link, is the beta driver stable?

 

@VanjaB: Thanks for the tip, but I don't have a clue about overclocking.

 

 

... waiting for EDGE. :music_whistling::D

[Mustang]

@Mustang: Thanks for the link, is the beta driver stable?

 

Seems perfectly fine so far, played several hours of DCS and Arma 3 with no problems (HD 6850 card)

[VTJS17_Fire]

Thanks.

 

BTW: Please look at the pic, I had uploaded. My CCC shows me, that my card have 5,8GB memory, altough the 7870 is a 2GB card ... :huh: any ideas?

 

At least: Do you have tips, how I can tune my DCS with some configs or something else ... I read one a few weeks ago, but never find it again. :(

 

 

regards,

Fire

[SkateZilla]

 

FPS Test:

Time: 20 sec.

6870: 24 FPS

7870: 27 FPS

 

Time: 30 sec.

6870: 21 FPS

7870: 24 FPS

 

Time: 45 sec.

6870: 19 FPS

7870: 22 FPS

 

Time: 53 sec.

6870: 19 FPS

7870: 23 FPS

 

Time: 61 sec.

6870: 20 FPS

7870: 25 FPS

 

Time: 70 sec.

6870: 29 FPS

7870: 30 FPS

 

First Off an HD7870 is Considered the Same Performance Level as a HD6870, just a Generation newer; So it Should Have Comparable Performance,

However; Given that the 7870 has 14.28% More Raw GPU Power Available than the 6870.

 

Time1: Increase of 12.5%

Time2: Increase of 14.2%

Time3: Increase of 15.7%

Time4: Increase of 21.0%

Time5: Increase of 25.0%

Time6: Increase of 3.4%

 

Total Frames Rendered 132 vs 151 for an Average Increase of 14.3% Overall. which is pretty much where it's supposed to be.

 

The Extra GB of RAM will Help w/ Higher Resolution textures and Rendering Resolution.

 

 

 

 

Hi Jack you are only half-right. 8 Gigs of Ram is more than enough for DCS.

 

The real problem lies in his CPU. Unfortunately the Phenom range of AMD processors is only barely adequate in single-threaded performance, and the current engine basically only uses one core. If its at stock speed which is 3.4 GHZ he might try to overclock it some, it will definitely bring his minimum FPS up, which is what really counts in this game. Once again, if EDGE incorporates proper multi-threaded support that might change, but we have no guarantees that this will be the case.

 

The Phenom IIs are Fine for Gaming, they have better Single Thread IPC than the FX Does. :)

 

 

 

As for the 5.8 GB reading, that's weird, it's either a driver issue or a GPU Bios Issue.

[Alireza.kh]

VJS161_Fire , there is a good thread here see page 4, same problem. i had 7870 like you and fps never goes higher 45. for a new card and new generation that should give me at least gtx570 performance .i disappointed then switched to my old 560ti and it gives me sometimes 100 fps on full hd display .no related to HD6000 or HD7000 (DCS is not optimized with AMD cards right now).

 

there are some other things that amd lacks on them. cluster bombs make huge fps drop on both cards but in amd screen freezes for 2-3 secounds.

 

and etc...

 

my opinion: we shouldn't support AMD for DCS , fps per dollar that it doesn't give us.

Edited November 10, 2013 by Alireza.kh

[TangoIndiaMike]

Hi Fire,

maybe the memory issue has something to do with the HyperMemory?

HyperMemory is an ATI technology which uses parts of your RAM as graphics memory.

[trooph]

I used to run 965BE @ 4.0 with my old game rig with 7850 2gb edition OCed a bit... But...

I noticed that 965 slowed down my card quite a lot. And im not talking only about DCS..after switching to 4670k @4.2 my GPU is used at its full potential and i run DCS at 50-60 fps never less than 35...

[SkateZilla]

VJS161_Fire , there is a good thread here see page 4, same problem. i had 7870 like you and fps never goes higher 45. for a new card and new generation that should give me at least gtx570 performance .i disappointed then switched to my old 560ti and it gives me sometimes 100 fps on full hd display .no related to HD6000 or HD7000 (DCS is not optimized with AMD cards right now).

 

there are some other things that amd lacks on them. cluster bombs make huge fps drop on both cards but in amd screen freezes for 2-3 secounds.

 

and etc...

 

my opinion: we shouldn't support AMD for DCS , fps per dollar that it doesn't give us.

 

I Have no issues with my HD7950 Across 3 Screens,

My Brother's old System Ran DCS on a XFX HD6850,

and his new system Runs DCS on a HD7930 (7870XT) GPU Fine.

[EtherealN]

Guys, do not rely on arbitrary measures like a "percentage" of GPU utilization. It tells you nothing. Just like CPU's, GPU's have many different components that do different jobs. Easiest way to illustrate is the example of integer vs float operation in CPU's: they're done on different computational units.

 

So, if your program relies heavily on floating point computation (hello simulators!), and your CPU has a lot of integer computation power (hello AMD!) but very little float (hello again AMD!), most of the actual hardware will have nothing to do because you're waiting for the few float resources to get their thing done before the integer cores get the indata they need to do their thing.

 

The same thing happens in GPU's; there's all sorts of memory buses, different types of computational units (the fixed pipeline is long gone, but there's still different types of computational clusters in that silicon), and not to forget the simple fact that the CPU first has to tell the GPU what to do - and under Dx9, it also has to mirror the vRAM data in system RAM.

 

Basically, I urge you to ignore percentage marks on hardware utilization as a measure of performance margins compared to other hardware. Having free integer units on a CPU means that if you simultaneously run an integer-intensive program, you might not notice a performance impact, but running two float-intensive programs at the same time will - and in the latter case, the performance degradation will happen while your monitor is telling you there's lots of free "percentage" left... To figure out what your bottleneck is you need to look at the hardware more closely - indeed it might be as simple that relevant parts of drivers are more mature on X hardware than Y hardware, causing Y hardware to perform worse (or to no benefit compared to X) even though Y is nominally more powerful. AMD FX-series processors had this problem initially; they're not actually bad processors, but they have a weird design (where there's only one float unit per two processor cores), which caused a lot of issues when the operating system scheduled threads. I believe Microsoft has fixed it in up-do-date versions of 7 and 8, but not entirely certain.

Edited November 11, 2013 by EtherealN

[SkateZilla]

AMD FX-series processors had this problem initially; they're not actually bad processors, but they have a weird design (where there's only one float unit per two processor cores), which caused a lot of issues when the operating system scheduled threads. I believe Microsoft has fixed it in up-do-date versions of 7 and 8, but not entirely certain.

 

It's been Patched, and Patched again a few times in Windows 7,

Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 adjusted the Windows Thread Scheduling further.

 

AMD's New SteamRoller Architecture will no longer have shared resources, (Except a Re-designed FPU)

 

They will have Dedicated Instruction and Pre-fetch decoders for each core.

FPU will have Dual 128-Bit FMAC Units and the MMX Instructions will be Moved from the Core Pipeline to the FPU.

 

Steam Roller's main goal was to feed the cores faster, and eliminate bottlenecks.

 

Take Bulldozer/Piledriver,

-Add 4 More Instruction and Pre-fetch Decoders, So 2 cores no longer share resources.

 

-Add more Cache, and Faster Cache (finally, the Cache was a bottleneck on BD and PD).

Memory and Cache latencies will remain the same.

 

-New Scheduler Adjustments

 

-New FPU Adjustments

 

-Estimated 30% increase in overall Performance, and 15% Single Core over PileDriver.

 

Then Add in Performance Gains from Sub System Changes to the Architecture:

Improved Cache to Reduce Cache Misses by 30%

Improved Instruction Pre-Fetch to reduce Branch Miss-Predictions by 20%.

 

Then Add in the fact that the desktop version is likely to launch at a freq. over 4GHz.

 

If IPC is greatly improved, and Clock Rates are higher, then We may have a Winner.

 

A 16-Core Desktop Version will be released for the Home User.