Slow? Radeon7970

Badbonji said:

Edit: whoops wrong card comparison.

The HD7970 will destroy the HD5870 in just about any benchmark. Both cards should handle MW3 easily, over 60FPS. Especially the HD7970. Check if vsync is on though - this can bring about mouse lag which feels very awkward and to me makes it much harder to aim. Measure the actual FPS using FRAPS and you will see. The HD7970 will be quicker than a HD5870 CF setup too, seeing as scaling on the 5XXX series wasn't as spectacular, some games didn't scale very well for my HD5970. The higher the FPS, the higher the chance of seeing the enemy quicker (although this won't occur above the monitor's refresh rate).

3dMark11 is more representative of modern games - MW3 is still based on DX9 and is old, just a console port. Try a modern DX11 game and you will easily see a difference between the two. Games like BF3 are a good comparison - the HD7970 will pretty much handle it on ultra with FPS drops below 50 rare. The HD5870 would only yield about 30FPS on ultra by comparison.

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You made some good points thanks.

Can't recall if I had VSync "on" with the 7970? I didn't mean to, but maybe I did. I think I did experience a little of that mouse lag...now that you mention it..It was difficult for me to aim/shoot opponent when before with the 5870 not an issue.

BF3?/probably so. But I gave up on the PC Battlefield3 and just play it on my PS3. Certainly doesn't look as good, but overall I had all kinds of continuing problems with the BF3 browser. Every couple weeks it wouldn't allow me to join a game? It took a week or two and their tech would "finally" fix something? I don't know what, but it never ended...so I did. And my PC playability was not so great. I thought it was me, but maybe your right and the 7970 would do better in BF3. I don't know/just guessing. Plus those super long big ticket BF3 games are fun but better played from my comfy big overstuffed couch.

Went back to using the 5870...and happy i did..the games I mostly play are multi--and irregardless of frame rates or test scores--I'm looking for playability and I guess there's no "test" for that except experience. And I'm thinking test scores are interesting and a cool kinda competition and all, but a gpu needs to fit the specific games a person plays. And that varies from person to person. The gpu or whatever with the highest test score might not deliver good multi play depending on the specific games involved. Or so it seems to me.

I'm back at MW3 multi and playing well--immediately--no more "death march" on my part with my team hating me. And same with games like L4D2 multi where I mostly play. My 5870 is much quicker at rendering which allows me to respond and either shoot/or side step or such. Without that quick rendering multiplayer games suck!!

I suppose I'll buy a second used 5870 2gb to replace the one I lost..for the moment..and simply save the 7970 for my next total build. I'm hoping that an improved mobo/cpu all etc. will bring up its playability. Maybe it will and maybe not. I don't know.

Goodluck

what if you get 2 7970s.. that would be nice, for me im trying to get 3 gtx 680s but i cant find any, and its not over kill, im running 30'' monitors

manu2b said:

Scoring is not flawed. The displayed freq. in 3dmark are sometimes the idle freq.

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Yes..I came to believe that too.

Rotary said:

what if you get 2 7970s.. that would be nice, for me im trying to get 3 gtx 680s but i cant find any, and its not over kill, im running 30'' monitors

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For sure..but don't have that kinda money. I'll even have to wait a month or so and "hopefully" then can buy a used 5870 2gb "budget days" for me.

Clearly there us something messed up here... os reinstall?

5870 does not remotely render faster.

soldierguy said:

Can't recall if I had VSync "on" with the 7970?

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I ran it with Morphological filtering on, enhance application setting, 16X AF, enable surface format optimization, quality vertical refresh, super sampling 4X AA, Triple buffering Open GL this morning.

With an i7 860 @ stock.....For some reason the 7970 randomly freezes when I increase the BCLK to 160 or above....maybe this card can't handle the pciE lane being overclocked?????

i think you should try to reinstall the OS and put on beta drivers.

EarthDog said:

Clearly there us something messed up here... os reinstall?

5870 does not remotely render faster.

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I guess we'll have to disagree on that..at least it doesn't perform better on the games I like to play. Maybe after I do an upgrade on the cpu/mobo etc....which I will be doing in the future- it will then. But I really don't know that for sure. But would expect it to.

btw I did a clean reinstall only a couple weeks ago..No need to spend more time beating a dead horse.

Thanks

Mmm... If your 7970 is not faster than your ex 5870, there is something wrrong with either your HW, your drivers or your windows install.

soldierguy said:

I guess we'll have to disagree on that..at least it doesn't perform better on the games I like to play.

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What games do you play that you are seeing this in? Old games? New games? Did you confirm Vsync wasnt enabled in MW3? I remember those being frame limited (COD4 anyway), try running the console command to raise the FPS limit and see if that helps.

Thing is, you dont have to agree, but you need to understand that there is a problem somewhere that is causing this behavior. The 5870, while a great card a couple years ago, is less than half the card a 7970 is. A stock Ferrari (7970) doesnt beat a stock Civic (5870) on any track (game) on any day and the same should go for this setup.

Something is amiss. I'll keep it in my head and bounce back if I have any more ideas outside of a complete reformat though.

EarthDog said:

What games do you play that you are seeing this in? Old games? New games? Did you confirm Vsync wasnt enabled in MW3? I remember those being frame limited (COD4 anyway), try running the console command to raise the FPS limit and see if that helps.

Thing is, you dont have to agree, but you need to understand that there is a problem somewhere that is causing this behavior. The 5870, while a great card a couple years ago, is less than half the card a 7970 is. A stock Ferrari (7970) doesnt beat a stock Civic (5870) on any track (game) on any day and the same should go for this setup.

Something is amiss. I'll keep it in my head and bounce back if I have any more ideas outside of a complete reformat though.

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I'm not suggesting that a stock 64VW beats a Corvette. Or at least it wasn't my intention to, but rather that under existing circumstances the 5870 was performing better.

My comments are about how this 7970 has been working on my system in specific apps. As I said earlier my mobo and cpu have been around the bend a few times and they could both be a little compromised..That doesn't mean the gpu's broken, but it may compromise its performance. I just wouldn't know. Its an unknown.

I've done some experimenting this morning and carefully went through three different games: BlackOps, MW3, and L4D2. And btw I don't think any of these are "old games" or not "modern" games. Unless one means a "modern" game like Crysis or BF3 and those games that are designed to be "hard to run". And I'm not sure those games are better for it. I play BF3 on a console and its a great game. The video setting choices vary in each of these games, and I just widely experimented with various combos. Sometimes its hard to know how each specific setting will effect a specific system.

But the good news is that all three games seem to be running pretty good in multiplayer. And of course multiplayer is wierd..some are on servers/some is P to P with a player host and sometimes the mix of Hi and Low ping players can bring on problems. I'm saying all that to point out that it's difficult to "always" know whether its the internet connection/the other player pings/ or specific game settings etc. Lots of variables..

And strangely I'm still getting an bunch of WIN7 updates..that look kinda old..from time to time as a result of my recent clean reinstall. And surprisingly Service Pack 1 stuff? Seems odd after two or three weeks?

Anyway so there's lots of variables involved but with this mornings changes it seems to be working much better. And I've bumped it up to play these games at 5760x1080 with Widescreen Fixer and they're working good.

your 7970 should decimate your 5870 card vs card is what earthdog is saying and thats not speculation thats just how it works.

more cores - more speed - more ram - faster ram .. beter over all card end to end if something is holding it back its either faulty or the os is not cooperating.

EarthDog said:

What games do you play that you are seeing this in? Old games? New games? Did you confirm Vsync wasnt enabled in MW3? I remember those being frame limited (COD4 anyway), try running the console command to raise the FPS limit and see if that helps.

Thing is, you dont have to agree, but you need to understand that there is a problem somewhere that is causing this behavior. The 5870, while a great card a couple years ago, is less than half the card a 7970 is. A stock Ferrari (7970) doesnt beat a stock Civic (5870) on any track (game) on any day and the same should go for this setup.

Something is amiss. I'll keep it in my head and bounce back if I have any more ideas outside of a complete reformat though.

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A 5870 is not like a stock civic, what a bad way of telling him how speed works. so 2 years ago it was a ferrari and now it turns to a normal car lol

well it kind of is like a civic compared to a ferrari the 7970 is twice as fast at least over a 5870 .. so maybe comparing it to a civic is a little to much since most ferrari's top out like 200ish mph.. lets compare it too a ford ranger i have one of those and it will do about 100mph ish.

The whole car thing is not a way to compare to hardware speed, it will take a ford rager about a year to get to 100mph, it will take a ferrari less then 30 sec to get to 200mph

5870 speed ------------------->2 cards--------------->3cards------------------------>
old cards with older drivers
7970 speed --------------------------------->2 cards---------------------->3 cards------->
because of drivers


thats about right

im going to give you a example here with the most graphics based benchmark i can find.

http://hwbot.org/submission/2128745...t_(dx11)_3x_radeon_hd_5870_3028.48_dx11_marks

vs

http://hwbot.org/submission/2280260_

i used my own submission as a reference point here because i know i did mine on a stock cooler ect.

single card outperforming the #1 tri xfire 5870 benchmark your graph there isn't relevant

thats weird because this is my score

you just posted a basic at 1280x1024 no less

ok what res would i have to test with

you run a test at that settings and tell me what you get