anyone familiar with afterburner?

[Al.Neri]

I'd really appreciate some assistance with this

to get to the bottom of my GPU performance issues, someone on guru3d advised me to download and use afterburner. I have never used it before so I don't know what to do. they just gave some vague instructions to enable OSD and to show clock speed. I enabled it in the settings section, but nothing appears on screen.

how am I supposed to get the desired info from this?

 

[Al.Neri]

I'd really appreciate some assistance with this

I'm having some problems with frame rates on certain games, as explained in this thread.

http://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/forum...rame-rates-since-updating-AMD-drivers-to-12-8

after asking on numerous forums for help, I haven't managed to uncover the problem. I was advised to post about it at guru3d, and different people are suggesting different things, ranging from faulty hardware, to clock speeds being frozen at 100mhz.

I know I'm going to get the stock "give pcspecialist a call" replies, and I intent to, but I want to get as much information together as possible before calling. I don't want to be on the phone any longer than I have to. if I can get all the info together before calling, it will cut out any unnecessary time being wasted.

it has been suggested to me that I use afterburner to check certain things out, which I downloaded but couldn't figure out. I was also told to try gpu-z while running the game that was giving me problems, which gave me the follwing:

these numbers mean nothing to me to be honest, so I don't know if they are good or bad.

 

[Corfate]

Is it a problem with the clock speeds being too low? You could always download MSI Afterburner and manually bump the clock speeds up to their intended levels?

The other parts look fine though.

 

[Al.Neri]

that's what I'm trying to figure out, I don't know. I already downloaded afterburner, but I'm unsure of using it and I don't want to do anything that could potentially damage anything.

 

[Corfate]

You should have something that looks like this:

Slide the core clock and memory clock to your desired amount, click save, click profile 1, then apply.

You can also change the fan speed if you want, but i leave it to do it's own thing.

 

[tom_gr7]

Dont change anything using afterburner,

wht gpu do you have?

 

[tom_gr7]

Have you tried rolling back your gpu drivers?

Dont jump in and change gpu clock speeds or nothing, will likely make it worse mate. OR even blow ya gpu if ya dont know wht ya doing, I'd be very cautious using it in that way.

let me just get this straight, ya updated ya drivers and the frame rates dropped?

also can ya post up ya spec?

 

[Al.Neri]

Dont change anything using afterburner,

wht gpu do you have?

radeon hd 5970

Have you tried rolling back your gpu drivers?

Dont jump in and change gpu clock speeds or nothing, will likely make it worse mate. OR even blow ya gpu if ya dont know wht ya doing, I'd be very cautious using it in that way.

let me just get this straight, ya updated ya drivers and the frame rates dropped?

also can ya post up ya spec?

yeah, I have. I have gone back and forth between 12.8 & 12.6 more times than I care to remember, and I can't be bothered doing it again anytime soon. the frame rate dropped after updating to 12.8 for the first time.

Case
COOLERMASTER HAF-X FULL TOWER GAMING CASE
Processor (CPU)
Intel® Core™i7 Six Core Processor i7-970 (3.20GHz) 6.4GTs/12MB Cache
Motherboard
ASUS® RAMPAGE III EXTREME: 3-Way SLI & CrossFireX, SATA 6.0GB/s, USB 3.0
Memory (RAM)
12GB KINGSTON HYPER-X TRI-DDR3 1600MHz, X.M.P (6 x 2GB KIT)
Graphics Card
2GB ATI RADEON™ HD 5970 PCI EXPRESS - DirectX® 11
Memory - 1st Hard Disk
120GB OCZ VERTEX 2 SATA II 2.5" SSD (upto 285MB/sR | 275MB/sW)
2nd Hard Disk
1TB WD CAVIAR BLACK WD1002FAEX, SATA 6 Gb/s, 64MB CACHE (7200rpm)
1st DVD/BLU-RAY Drive
24x DUAL LAYER DVD WRITER ±R/±RW/RAM
2nd DVD/BLU-RAY Drive
10x BLU-RAY RE-WRITER DRIVE, 16x DVD ±R/±RW (£88)
Power Supply
CORSAIR 1200W MODULAR PSU (AX1200) PRO SERIES 80+ GOLD (£206)
Processor Cooling
COOLIT ECO C240 A.L.C (ADVANCED LIQUID COOLER) (£102)
Sound Card
Sound Blaster® X-Fi™ Titanium PCI Express (£59)
Network Facilities
ONBOARD 10/100/1000 GIGABIT LAN PORT
USB Options
6 x USB 2.0 PORTS @ BACK PANEL (MIN 2 FRONT PORTS) AS STANDARD
Firewire
1 x IEEE 1394a FIREWIRE PORT ONBOARD
Operating System
Genuine Windows 7 Professional 64 Bit - inc DVD & Licence (£109)

 

[tom_gr7]

I'd uninstall the whole gpu, then clean download/install of the latest drivers.

If you still have the problem, i'd call pcs, it may be faulty and require replacing.

 

[Al.Neri]

already unistalled/reinstalled drivers numerous times. I will call them, but like I said, I want to explore all possibilities before I do.

 

[Al.Neri]

posted this on guru3d. no one has replied yet.

I have crossfire set to disabled when running F1 2011, but in this screenshot, it's showing as enabled. is this how it is supposed to be?

 

[Buzz]

Have you tried the 12.7 Beta drivers? They few months old now at this stage but as you have tried the others it might be worth a bash.

Start your comp in safemode, and uninstall everything for your GPU. Restart and install the beta and see if it helps at all.

12.7 Beta drivers -> catalyst_12-7_beta_windows7_20120629.exe

 

[Noble]

I've heard rumours of the 5000 series having a few issues with the latest drivers concerning games like Diablo 3, that might be something that you could look into and see if it correlates with your problem. Take a look at the fan speed as well, it could be a case that your fan isn't being utilized enough resulting in your GPU overheating which isn't an unusual case for many GPU's. From what I can see, your fan speed is only 30%; you may want to find a way of increasing that.

 

[NilSatis]

The problem looks like the clocks are not ramping up to the corect speeds they should be for 3d applications. Fan speed is fine according to the temps above. It will get higher as temperatures increase. This definitely suggests something that has been done by the driver; although I have to say if you have uninstalled etc and used earlier drivers with the same effect then it may actually be a problem with the card. I would suggest that it is a problem of compatibility between the latest 12.8 drivers and your card, and something has been left on the pc from those drivers that has caused problems. What driver did you update from?

The reason I say this is that there have been a few problems concerning these drivers I have read about where the clocks on AMD cards have been going into their generic idle/powersaving state at the wrong times, and in certain games where the gpu is not being utilised enough. One trick is to create a profile for the game in ccc and "trick" the card into using the full clocks, by ramping up all the settings in CCC, which avoids it dropping to the idle state. Of course this shouldnt need to be done and quite honestly have had no problems like this on my card. I have a 7970 Ghz edition and the latest 12.8 official drivers and have not had one problem. The only time I may have had something like this is in the latest dark souls game. Which uses approximately 5% of my gpu power in its standard form. Sticking the mod in that allows you to use multisampling and downsampling and aa and effectively running a resolution in the game of 3840*2160 actually makes the gpu work a little (Although not much!) and I have had no problems, people that dont use the mod or dont increase settings enough have found that with newer cards on the latest drivers the card is not detecting the right activity and is slowing the clock speeds down to the idle and power saving state.

As I was installing a new card this time I scoured my pc before the change for anything AMD. I would not rely on programs like driver sweeper etc for this and would actually never use them. Instead look through your pc yourself and you will see that anything to do with catalyst is usually put in so named directories, either "AMD" or "ATI". Check everywhere and do a search for the names, and delete everything that you can (after uninstalling the current driver.) If you are happy to, go into the registry and do a search for strings with ATI and AMD in, and delete these after looking at what they are (Im assuming you have an intel processor. You dont really want to do this if you have an AMD, for obvious reasons).

I have never had to do this; and if driver installations, and uninstalls have gone ok, with no crashes there is no reason for anything nasty to be left, but it cant hurt to delete the old stuff. You should at the very least have folders with AMD/ATI documentation from old drivers in it. This folder will probably take up 1 gig of hd space and can be deleted with no issues. Im interested as to whether you find this; or whether a driver sweeper program has deleted it for you.

As much as it is a useful program, Afterburner is not the answer to solve this. You may be able to bump clock rates up but without enabling unofficial overclocking in Afterburner, you can just do the same thing in CCC. You can try to reinstall 12.8 and then do the following.

Have you enabled overdrive in your CCC? You can try enabling this and manually bumping the clock rates up to the maximum on the sliders, and see if this works. Alternatively just enable the overdrive section; see if this has any effect. Notice that ccc says that the settings will only work when the card is in high performance mode. This is what I think is not being detected, although for what reason, Im not sure.
Check your windows Power management profiles aswell and make sure nothing has changed there. Make a new power performance plan and make sure it has all the highest performance settings involved, and there is no power saving going on there. Lastly, you could check the power control in ccc aswell and try adjusting the slider here to allow for more power to get to the card. A few things you can try here. Good luck!

About the crossfire thing on GPU-Z-- think this may be a bug; or it not reporting it correctly.

 

[Al.Neri]

after uninstalling 12.8 and before reinstalling 12.6, I ran driver fusion, ccleaner and manually searched for all files and folder left over from the uninstall process. there was nothing left at all.

I have also already tried enabling overdrive, again, it did nothing positive. I don't want to mess around with the settings in there in case I do some damage. I have checked the power management settings, and can't see anything untoward in thrre. what exactly would I be looking for?

 

[tom_gr7]

I'd give a fresh install of win 7 with a fresh download of gpu drivers, looks like its the only solution other than faulty hardware.

 

[Al.Neri]

yeah, I've been giving some serious consideration to reinstalling W7. just a pain in the arse to have to back everything up and then go through the post installation routine. I still want that to be my last option though. on the plus side, it's been some time since I last reinstalled, so it's due one anyway.

 

[tom_gr7]

yeah it sucks mate, I've had to do a few on my rig, atleast 4 or 5 i think, three times due to failed OCZ ssd's and a fourth when i got my corsair drive.

 

[Al.Neri]

so what settings would I need to check in power options to see if it's crippling my graphics performance?

 

[Al.Neri]

anyone?