Getting low framerates from cpu or gpu's?

[EquaLiZr]

Let's use Serious sam 3 as an example. currently running a 1440p monitor and have everything maxed out in the game. For the most part i get a constant 60fps but at times it dips down to 30 ish. Im also using afterburner and its saying its only using 55-70% of the GPU. So does that mean that my cpu is not fast enough to keep up with the cards? System specs in sig.

 

[Dangman]

In what other games have you noticed slowdowns?

Have you cleaned out your drivers and reinstalled them?

 

[Bluesun311]

I'd guess it's a CPU bottleneck but it kinda seems unfair because that's a relatively new processor. Suspect at 1080p the proc would be feeding the cards better. See how the GPU usage is with the res set lower. 1440p seems like a minor bump but it's a much more demanding upgrade than that.

 

[Deleted member 88227]

Serious Sam 3 on what difficulty? lol.... Towards the end of the game it gets rather hectic.

 

[cyclone3d]

What bclk are you running on that i7-920?

What uncore and QPI clocks are you running?

The LGA1366 platform gets to be pretty nice once you get past about 180bclk. and get the uncore and QPI clocks up.

Drop the CPU multipler down and see how far you can go. Even the really crappy overclocking boards will usually be able to do 180-190 bclk without too much trouble.

Also, have you tried disabling thread locking in Windows. That should help some as well.

Getting the RAM up to around 2000 helps a decent amount on the x58 platform as well.

One last thing. Enable triple buffering since it seems you are running vsync which is probably why it is dropping down to 30fps. If it can't hold 60 fps, it will drop down to 30, then 15, etc. With triple buffering, it will not drop down like that.

 

[EquaLiZr]

Actual core speed is 3448
19x multi
bus speed 181
QPI link 3267

My ram is 1600mhz 8-8-8-24 patriot.



Tripple buffering was off but now on.
Dram freq 726
fsb:dram 2:8

voltage is auto right now reporting 1.21V

 

[EquaLiZr]

Bump.

Trading in my 7970's for 2x evga dual classified's. I just oc'd my cpu another 200mhz and raised the bclk to 200. Still notice in a few games i get slowdowns with gpu usage around 45% (with the 7970's)

 

[Nenu]

Let's use Serious sam 3 as an example. currently running a 1440p monitor and have everything maxed out in the game. For the most part i get a constant 60fps but at times it dips down to 30 ish. Im also using afterburner and its saying its only using 55-70% of the GPU. So does that mean that my cpu is not fast enough to keep up with the cards? System specs in sig.

Use the latest version of Afterburner and add CPU use to the graphs.
Check if any core gets near max use, it doesnt have to be maxed fully.
The graphs are updated once per second so the CPU use is an average over a second.
I've seen 80% use on a core start to limit my GPU before, but normally its "around" 90% use on any core the game uses where GPU use starts to drop a little.

For completeness, this looks different on dual core vs quad core machines.
On dual cores, its much easier to completely max a core as more of a game and Windows processes are running on each core.
You can often see a core reach 100%.
Whereas on a quad core or higher, sometimes its impossible to get a single core to reach much higher than 90% use while playing a game, yet it can still limit the GPU.