6870 Performs Poorly While Playing WoW/Watching a Vid

[Unknown-One]

Hmm... mine doesn't do that. I have WOW up on one screen, and I'm playing a vid on Media Player Classic just fine. I'm doing this with a single XFX 6870 and 3 monitors on 11.1a.

It only effects video using hardware acceleration, such as a codec that takes advantage of DXVA, or hardware accelerated Flash video. If you're not seeing the glitch, then you're not using hardware acceleration.

Try turning on DXVA in MPC, or turning on hardware acceleration for Flash and playing some YouTube videos. You will see the clockspeed drop to incorrect values.

 

[JL6speed]

Oh I had that so I disabled the acceleration in flash on youtube. What's the acceleration for anyways?

 

[Unknown-One]

Oh I had that so I disabled the acceleration in flash on youtube. What's the acceleration for anyways?

It allows your video card to handle decoding rather than offloading it onto your CPU. This leaves your CPU free to do other tasks, and your GPU will likely use less power decoding the same video.

 

[Ocellaris]

Just ran into this today playing EVE and watching videos on Hulu. I banged my head on the wall for a bit trying to figure it out. First I thought EVE was just being laggy, finally realized my GPU was only running at 300. Totally blows my mind that this is a driver bug AMD has not fixed it. Would it really be that hard for the driver to just select the highest applicable clock speed profile if multiple things are going on (UVD and 3D)? Ugh...

 

[Ocellaris]

This is why I manually control all of my 2D/3D clock settings and have audio alerts for all of them.
I do not understand why anyone (ATI or Nvidia) would not want to know, at all times, what mode their card is operating in.

Why the heck would people want to know? This is one of those thing where the user should never have to concern themselves with thinking about it

 

[Unknown-One]

Totally blows my mind that this is a driver bug AMD has not fixed it. Would it really be that hard for the driver to just select the highest applicable clock speed profile if multiple things are going on (UVD and 3D)? Ugh...

I'm beginning to get the sneaking suspicion that it's a hardware issue that AMD can't fix without a full-blown recall of the cards. Even MSI Afterburner gets ignored when the bugged UVD clock kicks in, which hints that there might not be a way for AMD to fix this in software.

I can't think of any other reason why they would leave something like this for so long....

 

[UtopiA]

Why the heck would people want to know? This is one of those thing where the user should never have to concern themselves with thinking about it

The same people who stare at their temps for hours on end?
The same people flashing firmware bioses, unlocking shaders, setting up custom fan profiles...

Yes, let's do all of that.
Oh but clock profile settings? Ignore that. Let's let AMD's terrible track record with PowerPlay do all the work. If there's one area you should never trust AMD with, it's controlling your clocks/volts in different modes.

I thought we were all aware of this already after the 48xx series were idling at 85C+ at launch...
Disabling video acceleration fixes the problem, I don't even know what the point of it is, anyway. Unless you're using an HTPC?

 

[Unknown-One]

He's agreeing with you man. He's saying the user shouldn't have to concern themselves with these things because clockspeed scaling SHOULD just work.

And disabling video acceleration does not "fix" the problem. It's a work-around, and a poor one at that. We should not have to disable standard functionality of our graphics cards in order to keep them from glitching.

I've been encoding and reviewing a lot of video lately. I'd much rather have my GPU handle decoding so my CPU can be used entirely for encoding. If I disable hardware acceleration (shifting decoding from my GPU to my CPU), encoding takes a 20% performance hit while I watch 1080p video.

 

[DivineDark]

So, just to verify. This downclocking issue only happens if you're trying to play a video and run a game at the same time? I only ask, because I was going to set my 2D clocks up, but I absolutely never run video in the background when I'm playing something. If I do want to watch a youtube vid or something like that, I just play it on my ipad.

 

[Ocellaris]

So, just to verify. This downclocking issue only happens if you're trying to play a video and run a game at the same time? I only ask, because I was going to set my 2D clocks up, but I absolutely never run video in the background when I'm playing something. If I do want to watch a youtube vid or something like that, I just play it on my ipad.

Basically anytime you have a hardware accelerated video playing, the cards will run at a fixed low speed. If you open a game, the card keeps running slow. If you close the video, the driver knows you are playing a game and runs the card at 100% speed

 

[Ocellaris]

The same people who stare at their temps for hours on end?
The same people flashing firmware bioses, unlocking shaders, setting up custom fan profiles...

Yes, let's do all of that.
Oh but clock profile settings? Ignore that. Let's let AMD's terrible track record with PowerPlay do all the work. If there's one area you should never trust AMD with, it's controlling your clocks/volts in different modes.

I thought we were all aware of this already after the 48xx series were idling at 85C+ at launch...
Disabling video acceleration fixes the problem, I don't even know what the point of it is, anyway. Unless you're using an HTPC?

I've done more than my share of temp staring, BIOS flashing, stress testing, and trying to unlock GPUs and CPUs. I'll be honest though and say I never ever considered something like this would happen and a card would just down clock while playing games. I haven't paid attention to what speed my GPUs were running at for years.

I was out of the ATI/AMD game for a few years due to rampant driver problems with various cards. Now I am right back in it

Also this new version CCC blows. I can't even get it to launch half the time.

 

[Unknown-One]

So, just to verify. This downclocking issue only happens if you're trying to play a video and run a game at the same time? I only ask, because I was going to set my 2D clocks up, but I absolutely never run video in the background when I'm playing something. If I do want to watch a youtube vid or something like that, I just play it on my ipad.

The downclocking issue kicks in as soon as any hardware accelerated video starts playing. Your card will downclock (below normal 2D clocks) and stay there until the video is completely closed.

So even leaving a YouTube video paused in your web browser would prevent the card from clocking up.

 

[LordLeeCH]

Like I said earlier though, making a profile and activating it is easier than modding the bios and still gives you the flexibility of turning Power Play back on when you're done for power saving. I usually have more issues with Power Play while I have a browser open than I do when I have Media Player running.

Btw, This happened to me several times on my 260GTX as well. So I can't really hop on the wagon and says its just an ATI thing. SImply put, WoW really doesn't tax the newest video cards as much as one would hope.

 

[Hostile]

How do you know if you're watching a hardware accelerated video?

I use VLC to watch TV shows and movies while I play WoW. The TV shows are generally "720p" AVIs and the movies are generally true 720p blu-ray rips in mkv containers.

I know on my old system (Core2Duo w/ 8800GT) I couldn't not watch 1080p blue ray rips and play WoW because the system would bog down but I haven't tried it yet with my new system (2600k w/ 6870).

 

[octoberasian]

Like I said earlier though, making a profile and activating it is easier than modding the bios and still gives you the flexibility of turning Power Play back on when you're done for power saving. I usually have more issues with Power Play while I have a browser open than I do when I have Media Player running.

Btw, This happened to me several times on my 260GTX as well. So I can't really hop on the wagon and says its just an ATI thing. SImply put, WoW really doesn't tax the newest video cards as much as one would hope.

I can confirm that this issue also affects Nvidia cards though I can't say for certain other models as well. My friend with a GTX 285 has this issue as well as another with a GTX 260. As I did with previous 5770 and my 6950, I had to do the same to both Nvidia cards to adjust the clock speeds for both memory and GPU in the BIOS to fix it.

 

[UtopiA]

How do you know if you're watching a hardware accelerated video?

I use VLC to watch TV shows and movies while I play WoW. The TV shows are generally "720p" AVIs and the movies are generally true 720p blu-ray rips in mkv containers.

I know on my old system (Core2Duo w/ 8800GT) I couldn't not watch 1080p blue ray rips and play WoW because the system would bog down but I haven't tried it yet with my new system (2600k w/ 6870).

In MPC, the hardware accelerated video are actual codecs which can be manually enabled/disabled.
My VLC isn't toggling video acceleration right now, and I didn't change any settings.

The easiest way to check if you're having the problem is to just look at your clocks while watching a video.
The video acceleration clocks are 400/900 if I remember right (might be different on other cards?).

 

[LordLeeCH]

I can confirm that this issue also affects Nvidia cards though I can't say for certain other models as well. My friend with a GTX 285 has this issue as well as another with a GTX 260. As I did with previous 5770 and my 6950, I had to do the same to both Nvidia cards to adjust the clock speeds for both memory and GPU in the BIOS to fix it.

My friend said something similar about his GTX 260 - he was convinced it was only happening in certain driver revisions though. He also claimed that his card would downclock in Source engine games (namely CounterStrike Source) but it ran smoothly even at lower clocks.

Also - I Crossfired a pair of 6870's today and updated to the latest CCC and driver. When I tried to modify the profiles, I noticed they had been completely redesigned. The clocks are no longer available in the profile, rather just one line -

<Feature name="ForceHigh3DClocks">
<Property name="ForceHigh3DClocks" value="Disable" />
</Feature>

I assume you can just enable this and resolve the problem. I also heard about some issues previously with disabling Catalyst AI for older games - there's an option in the profile for that now too.

<Feature name="CatalystAI">
<Property name="CatalystAI" value="Enable" />
</Feature>

Step in the right direction or a bandaid?