Monitoring GPU usage on 290x

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qbanb8582

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Sep 15, 2006
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I just recently got a 290x. When I monitor GPU usage and clock speeds it bounces all over the places. One second it 100% then its 0% then 30%. This seems to be normal for the 290x from what I've read, performance doesn't seem to degraded at all. I'm also playing games with vsync on.

I use this as metric to help find bottlenecks wether it CPU or GPU. My nvidia cards as well as my 270x don't show this behavior. The gpu usage stay consistent and only fluctuates based on whats going on at that particular time.

Anyone know of a way to effectively monitor GPU usage on the 290x?
 
I had a 290x and it would do the same thing. I was playing at 1080p, not sure if going to 1440p or not would have changed anything.
I think it's a bug in the monitoring software because my performance wasn't an issue either.
I was using Afterburner.
 
I just watch mine in MSI Afterburner. The most important reason that the bouncing speeds come into play is when the card hits 94c and starts to throttle. Throttling is when the speed will drop to 800 until the temperatures drop below 94c. When it does that I know it's time to clean my computer case. I live in a rural farming community and it's literally impossible to keep dust out when there are hundreds of tractors breaking soil around you. :) A good cleaning fixes this 100% of the time for me.

The only annoyance with the bouncing speeds is in Firefox when watching multiple videos at once. Firefox video playback will suffer if the card speeds drop to 300Mhz or less. At 500Mhz I can make it stutter by opening many videos at once. This doesn't happen in Google Chrome. I can pop open all I want without a hiccup.

There is a rare bug where if you start watching video, then open a game, the speed of the card will be locked to 500Mhz, which is the typical speed the card runs at to watch video. Closing the video and reopening it after the game launches will fix it. I haven't seen this bug after the 15.3 release, but it's pretty rare so that maybe the reason why.

Just some observations I've made with my Sapphire R9 290. I can completely fix the throttling by updating my video card bios to the newer one that sets the fan speed to 40%. But I am damn lazy and I like the reminder to clean my case.
 
I'm actually playing 1600p. I'm aware of the clock speeds bouncing around for temps but the GPU usage bouncing I'm concerned about.

It shows the same behavior on on afterburner, CCC, and GPU-Z.
 
The bouncing is a product of a bug in the sensor polling system within the hardware..

If its polled too often, it returns junk, hense the bouncing.

AB has a speical drvier that can be enabled in settings that should be more accurate
 
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