Nvidia gtx 970 SLI and poor performance

[harrym20]

I purchased an additional gtx 970 to SLI mainly for the purpose of playing this game at a consistent 60 fps at 1440p using Nvidia's DSR feature.  Before I get too far ahead of myself I would like to list my general specs:

EVGA SSC 970 x 2 one of the two is actually overclocked slightly further than what they already come overclocked.  I have it at +100 on the memory and +100 on the core clock.  The other is just factory coreclocked.  BTW I tested this setup on the Heaven benchmark with ultra/extreme everything just at 1080p and got 110 fps with a Score north of 2700.  These numbers are right on point and an encouraging sign that the two cards were working harmoniously together.  I thought.

I-5 3570K Ivy bridge processor overclocked to 4.2 Ghz utilizing the Cooler Master 212 Evo for heatsink- This processor should not have issues, right??

Corsair Vengeance 1600 ddr3 Ram 8 gb.  Again, should be sufficient..kind of the gold standard of memory recommendations.

Asus Z77 extreme 4 motherboard

Corsair Cx750 watt powersupply (now I've researched this and the majority of people say that this is more than enough wattage for the sli 970 so I dont see how this would reduce performance exclusive in game but not in a Heaven benchmark where it does quite well)

SSD 250 GB Samsung Evo (only for system and applications)

1TB HDD Seasonic 7200 rpm (for games including Dragon Age)

latest Nvidia drivers (used for the GTA 5 best performance immediately before the one released today for Witcher 3)

So I attempted to play the game at 1440p using DSR mind you with most settings at ultra and a few at high.  My friend said his sli 970s give him a consistent 60fps which is precisely what I was expecting.  Instead, my fps are bouncing  from 40 to 60 constantly and the stuttery nightmare persists.  It literally gave no performance boost over the single 970 I was already using to play the game.  I decided to try it at 1080p which is my native setting that requires no dsr and the same poor performance.  I put all the settings at low in the graphic settings and it was a little bit better but still like 50 to 60 fps fluctuations. I don't get it and am deeply disappointed in my last purchase of an additional 970.    Any help or feedback would be greatly appreciated.  I would be your friend forever.

[Fred_vdp]

The Frostbite 3 engine has some serious issues with certain hardware configurations. This game in particular is especially bad in dealing with:

- SLI configurations

- Overclocked hardware

- Nvidia Geforce GPUs

I hoped they would have addressed these issues by now, but alas. No patch has fixed it, and BioWare hasn't acknowledged the issues as far as I'm aware.

If you don't mind going through the trouble, you could try running on a single card and set both the GPU and CPU to standard clock. If you launched the game for the first time less than 24 hours ago, you can still request a refund. http://help.ea.com/en/article/what-s-the-great-games-guarantee/

[harrym20]

yeah unfortunately getting a refund is no longer an option.  I do enjoy the game but the performance is distracting.  I guess I can try reducing my overclocks.  Another person suggested reducing the cpu overclock too.  Just seems wild that less would be more.  But thanks for the feedback.

[JupixFIN]

So first off, the game gets buffed by SLI and overclocking just fine.

Your CPU and RAM seem mostly fine. I completed the game in 2014 with 4 gigs of DDR2.

Your low RAM will cause stuttering because you're swapping on your SSD (hopefully you have your pagefile on the SSD and not the HDD).

If you have the thing installed on a spinning platter then I don't doubt the performance fluctuates when the engine streams content. Think about how big the game assets are and how slow an HDD is.

I hope you are aware that DSR means you're rendering the game in 4K and downscaling to your native resolution. Even SLI 980's have trouble maintaining a constant 60fps across all environments in DA:I at 4K.

Your GPU overclocks are not very significant, your cards are almost stock (for comparison, I didn't get incredibly lucky in the silicon lottery and even so, my 980's are running about +300MHz above stock).

I hope you know this, but in overclocking modern GPUs with stock cooling, you are likely to run into temperature-based throttling first and then the TDP limiter. You need to adjust your fan curve to dodge the first problem and raise your TDP limiter to dodge the second. Otherwise you will benchmark well in synthetic tests but your performance will tank in actual heavy gaming (which DA:I is). You can verify that this is the case by keeping an eye on your GPU core frequencies while gaming. If the freq is oscillating then you're most likely being throttled. If it's pegged at your core turbo frequency, then you're golden.

Observe your GPU analytics anyway while gaming in order to verify that you are in fact

1. using both cards while gaming (by looking at GPU core usage)

2. overclocking both cards (by looking at core frequencies)

3. not running out of VRAM when the framerate tanks (by looking at VRAM usage)

If you get roughly the same framerate across all the different quality settings then it's obvious you're being capped by your setup. See that you're not running with framerate targets through your overclocking suite, GPU driver, etc. Check power settings, disable frame syncing, etc. The usual suspects.

Learn the ingame settings. For example stay away from ingame MSAA. With a single 980 one can get pretty good framerates at 1080p at maxed settings, with AA off. I get your framerates on my laptop with a 980M at 1080p with maxed settings and 2x MSAA. There are countless threads on this forum about the ingame graphics settings.

[harrym20]

Thank you for your feedback...have some questions and comments.

"Your low RAM will cause stuttering because you're swapping on your SSD (hopefully you have your pagefile on the SSD and not the HDD). "

8 GB is considered low? Also, my games are installed to my HDD by default while Origin and the operating system are installed on the ssd. This is a very common practice as far as I know. But I will monitor my Ram in game to see if it's maxed out.

"If you have the thing installed on a spinning platter then I don't doubt the performance fluctuates when the engine streams content. Think about how big the game assets are and how slow an HDD is."

Frame rates are not influenced by the HDD. An SSD would influence load times though.

"I hope you are aware that DSR means you're rendering the game in 4K and downscaling to your native resolution. Even SLI 980's have trouble maintaining a constant 60fps across all environments in DA:I at 4K."

I'm only doing 1440p not 4k with DSR. I use it on other games and the performance is much better and I see that the GPU usage is maxed out meaning I'm getting the most out of them. Not 20 to 30% usage such in the case of DAI.

Throttling would occur at 80 degrees on my cards which isn't occurring often on DAI seeing that the framerates stay so low.

I'm not thinking it's my setup that needs upgrading but something needs to be tweaked. I can run crysis 3 at 1440p just fine and Tomb Raider. The cards actually get fully used on other titles and aren't being only 30-50% utilized. I get steady high fps with those demanding titles. Even witcher 3 that just came out is already better optimized for my setup. Disabling msaa entirely doesn't help.

Thank you for your time.

[Fred_vdp]

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@mersukuski wrote:

So first off, the game gets buffed by SLI and overclocking just fine.

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Thanks for clarifying. I haven't used an OC or crossfire/SLI setup myself, but I read about issues with SLI and OC setups in this thread.

[JupixFIN]

> 8 GB is considered low? Also, my games are installed to my HDD by default while Origin and the operating system are installed on the ssd. This is a very common practice as far as I know. But I will monitor my Ram in game to see if it's maxed out.

Yes, 8 gigs of RAM is low. The minimum for this game is 4GB and I know from first-hand experience that the experience is not smooth at all. Therefore I hold the next increment the "low" increment. 16GB is standard. 32GB is high end.

> Frame rates are not influenced by the HDD. An SSD would influence load times though.

Frame rates are influenced by the game engine's content streaming which is the mechanism that runs large-scale open world games like DA:I. Content streaming is influenced by the read speed to the game assets, which is the read speed of your spinning platter.

The influence on framerate is not a consistent lowering of the average framerate or the high framerate value. The influence is added inconsistency in the framerate, in other words lower low framerate value, in other words choppiness / hitching / whatever you want to call it.

> I'm not thinking it's my setup that needs upgrading but something needs to be tweaked. 

Obviously.

If you're capped at 20-30 % of rendering capacity while playing, then there's your problem. I can't tell you what's bottlenecking it, sorry.

[Fred_vdp]

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@mersukuski wrote:

 16GB is standard. 32GB is high end.

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For Photoshop and After Effect maybe, but for gaming, 8GB is still the current standard.

[harrym20]

yeah I cant tell what is bottlenecking it either but other games aren't bottlenecking with 20-40% gpu usage so its something not playing right with the game engine.  I still have never heard that a standard hard drive with platters makes any difference in the in game experience as far as framerates.  I don't know if you have any sources to back that up but the main thing by far that influences fps is the gpu followed distantly by the cpu and then ram and then not much of anything else that I can think of as far as hardware influencing frames in any way.

[JupixFIN]

> For Photoshop and After Effect maybe, but for gaming, 8GB is still the current standard.

In gaming it may be the lowest common denominator but it's definitely not "the standard". You can saturate 8 gigs with almost any current game and a real world desktop situation in the background.

For example, with ONLY Firefox, Dragon Age Inquisition (and Steam and Origin and Battle.net and other background apps) running on my gaming machine, I'm already committed to almost 10GB of memory use. With my 32 gigs of RAM I will be using RAM when that commitment turns to usage. With 8 gigs you will be using the pagefile for 2 gigs, not necessarily the same 2 gigs of data, therefore you will be swapping and therefore you will be dropping frames.

> I still have never heard that a standard hard drive with platters makes any difference in the in game experience as far as framerates.  I don't know if you have any sources to back that up

http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/performance-briefs/delivering-hitch-free...

> the main thing by far that influences fps is the gpu followed distantly by the cpu and then ram and then not much of anything else that I can think of as far as hardware influencing frames in any way.

Consistent framerate is not the same thing as the fps number. Bottlenecks in content streaming cause dropped frames which is hard to measure but easy to experience.