Stunted Performance on GTX1080

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freerangeninja

n00b
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Mar 15, 2017
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Parts list

Core i7 3770k

12GB Corsair Dominator RAM

2x 256gb Samgsung EVO 840 SSD's

MSI GeForce GTX1080 Founders Ed

Asus Maximum V GENE

Description of problem

Bought a second hand GTX1080 the other day. Ran a few benchmarks and got less performance than I expected out of the card. For example Anandtech got 132fps at 1080p out of Rise of the Tombraider and I'm getting 94fps with the same settings which is less than the 1070 was benched at.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/10325/the-nvidia-geforce-gtx-1080-and-1070-founders-edition-review/19

Have I been dicked over here?

Attempt to diagnose or fix the problem.

Complete reinstall of Windows and Graphics Drivers
 
Take a screenshot of the first tab in GPU-Z and post it here.
 
It's pretty rare to get a bad GPU that just performs poorly. Usually a bad GPU will crash, show artifacts, or overheat. So the GPU likely works fine.
The Anandtexh benchmarks are running a more expensive CPU. What other games and benchmarks have you tried?
 
wf2.png


I also tried Far Cry Primal and never broke 100fps as is referenced here by GURU3d it sat more around 60-70fps regualrly dipping into the 50's.

http://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/nvidia-geforce-gtx-1080-review,17.html

The CPU doesn't seem to be maxing out at any point.

Also, I just tried running the Tombraider benchmark with the MSI Afterburner overlay to check loads etc and it intermittently said "LIM1: TEMPERATURE" and I'm not sure what that means.
 
freerangeninja said:
wf2.png


I also tried Far Cry Primal and never broke 100fps as is referenced here by GURU3d it sat more around 60-70fps regualrly dipping into the 50's.

http://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/nvidia-geforce-gtx-1080-review,17.html

The CPU doesn't seem to be maxing out at any point.

Also, I just tried running the Tombraider benchmark with the MSI Afterburner overlay to check loads etc and it intermittently said "LIM1: TEMPERATURE" and I'm not sure what that means.
Click to expand...

What is the actual temp and clockspeed the card is running at? Don't worry about the Limits being hit, the Pascal cards are almost always being limited in one way or another because they are trying to Boost.
 
What is your CPU running at Mhz wise, and what is your ram set to? (Speed and timings). Those make a fairly big difference in some games.
 
Those temps look decent. My 1070 under heavy gaming tops out @ 60c. Running games @ 1440 with eye candy on ultra, depending on the map, my FPS range from 70-90. There are a few maps my FPS drop to around 40-50.
 
In that review, they are using a Intel Core i7-4960X 6c12t CPU @ 4.2GHz.
Also, looks like your RAM is running very slow.
 
Yeah and I'd be more open to the CPU bottlenecking if it was maxing out when playing but its not. I think that RAM figure is at an idle state, I'll overlay those and re-run the benchmark with some screenies.
 
freerangeninja said:
Yeah and I'd be more open to the CPU bottlenecking if it was maxing out when playing but its not. I think that RAM figure is at an idle state, I'll overlay those and re-run the benchmark with some screenies.
Click to expand...

Thats not how it works. If you had a 6700 or 7700k it would be higher FPS but show the same for CPU, people really need to stop thinking this line of thought. If you threw your processor up to 4400Mhz, and the ram to 1866Mhz or so, you would get some very solid improvements on frame rates.
 
You're right, I don't understand that. How is it that when the CPU is only running at 50% on all cores that you can't get any more power out of it?
 
No you didn't get screwed. You just need a faster processor & higher RAM frequencies, this is a case of the videocard out performing the CPU. Digital Foundry touches on this point in the video below, using different hardware of course but the science stays the same.

 
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OP, you're running 1333MHz RAM, which to be honest is slow as fuck. Seriously super slow, and especially for trying to keep that 1080 fed at a healthy pace. Assuming your RAM isn't some bargain bin garbage, it should be able to overclock to at least 1866 if not more. If it can't, I absolutely recommend you upgrade to something that can, and if anything, you should be aiming for 2133MHz, which is perfectly doable without excessive voltage on Ivy Bridge. I have an ITX system here running a 3770, and saw big performance improvements in several games (particularly in min. FPS) when I overclocked the stock 1600MHz memory to 2133. Try it and hope for the best, you should hopefully not have to use more than ~1.55v to reach those frequencies (maybe up to 1.6 if your RAM isn't the best).

-edit-
Just saw you have Corsair Dominator, you should almost definitely be able to hit those higher clock speeds.
 
freerangeninja said:
Also getting 70fps less on DOOM than Guru3d got:

http://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/nvidia-geforce-gtx-1080-review,16.html
eVTDphq.jpg
Click to expand...

Doom doesn't have a built-in benchmark, and the framerate can vary by that much from one level to the next. I had a solid 70fps in the early levels, but then dropped to 40 in later levels!

I wouldn't worry about something, unless it's using a BUILT-IN-BENCHMARK that is REPEATABLE. Otherwise, you have no fucking clue how fast things should be.

Do yourself a favor, and stop reading so much into things :D

Tools like Afterburner give people like you WAY TOO MUCH INFORMATION, while sites like Guru3D never supply you with enough information to recreate the run, unless they record video. If you want something useful to figure out if your system has a problem, just use a repeatable tool like 3Dmark, or Valley.

https://unigine.com/products/benchmarks/valley/

https://www.futuremark.com/support/downloads

3dmark has an online database of results you can compare against, or you can find them on most video card reviews. Valley is also on most reviews now, so you can use those numbers too. Here's one result, for your convince:

https://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/graphics/2016/06/15/evga-geforce-gtx-1080-ftw-review/17
 
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Great reading: Is it finally time to upgrade your Core i5 2500K?


Personally, I'm on 3770k @ 4.4 & DDR3-2400 with a 1080Ti. I'm feeling the hurt in the latest games.

The RotTR geo-valley shot, is probably in-line with what I would see.

Doom on my system is a lot faster on the other hand.

I'll prob upgrade platform next year, for now I gotta reel-in shadows distance / obj. distance, etc.


If you're pushing for 75Hz+ the CPU bottlenecks people said didn't exist since sandy bridge get real, quick.
 
Okay so I overclocked to 4.6GHz (up from 3.9GHz) and still got 95fps on the Tombraider benchmark... And nearly overheated the system whilst I was at it.

I think we can agree its not a CPU bottleneck now. Does anyone else have any ideas?
 
Oh also, skiddierow could you do me a solid favour and run the RotT benchmark tool (in the menu) and let me know what FPS you end up with at the end? If it is a CPU bottleneck then we should theoretically have the same FPS.
 
Also just monitored my temps whilst running the benchmarks, the core temps are reaching 90-100c... Is it possible its throttling the CPU clock when these get too high?
 
The CPU should start dropping clock at 98+ I think.

What's stock load temp?

Maybe the CPU cooler is unseated.
 
You've got piss poor cooling if you are hitting 100C on your cores when OC'ed. With the TCase value of the 3770K set by Intel @ 67.4°C, you'll reach throttle land pretty quickly with core temps like that.

Might be time to consider upgrading your CPU cooler...
 
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So I reapplied thermal paste (which I should have done ages ago admittedly) and gained 10fps. So I'm at 105fps which is better but not where I want to be yet. Gonna OC again now that I've managed to stabilise my temps a bit and see what happens. The CPU throttling due to overheating would have nixed any OC attempt before so lets see if I can get a bit more juice outta this.
 
And doubletake I looked at overclocking RAM, jesus that looks like a minefield. I will do if I cant get any more performance increase from altering the CPU but I'd rather not touch it with a barge pole.
 
Well then you're never going to get more performance out of your CPU, plain and simple. One thing you may not realize is that you can actually be hitting a performance bottleneck by not being able to feed data to the CPU fast enough, so your system is basically idling in the time between data received -> data processed.

Memory overclocking is not at all complicated (I'd say it's even easier than CPU), but I guess that's up to you.
 
Maybe a silly question but do you have "Prefer Maximum performance" 3D settings option enabled in Nvidia control panel?
 
doubletake Yeah Overclocking to 4.6GHz hit the throttling limiter so I only got about 2fps increase. I've upped my RAM clock to 1800Mhz from 1600MHz and I'm gonna try that.
 
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