Very low framerate on Sleeping Dogs and CS:GO Beta

Evelon277

Why is it that I can run BF3 on high settings with a very playable framerate (45+), but when I try and run Sleeping Dogs on anything higher than very low, I get like 20 FPS whenever I get in a car? Same thing with the CS:GO Beta, I get 16 frames max when I try and play.
Specs: 7950HD 3GB
AMD 8120FX eight-core
8GB DDR3 1600 RAM

halp me Icrontic, i r confus.

Tushon

Totally different game engines. Sleeping Dogs is going to crush PCs, but I bet there is a way to "optimally" set it up for good looks without that sense of inadequacy. I don't have it, so I can't help much, but is there an "auto" settings in game? Also, drivers getting optimized will help, look for beta drivers here (latest is a release driver at this time)

@Thrax, is there an AMD equivalent to this page?

Thrax

It's in progress, but I can explain why. Allow me to just excerpt my recent blog:

Gamers like you know that a game run without anti-aliasing introduces aliasing, or “jaggies,” onto the edges of objects in the game world. These jaggies are ugly and we all know it, so we went ballistic on them with an advanced form of anti-aliasing that combines supersampling and compute-accelerated post-processed AA.

First, supersampling is a technique that renders the game in a higher resolution than the user has selected, then resizes the rendered frame back down to the proper resolution before it is displayed on the screen. This obliterates jaggies because the number of pixels in an aliased edge is reduced by the SSAA factor when the frame is resized and shown to you. That might be confusing, so allow me to give you a living example that better explains this effect:

You, as the user, have configured your game to run at 1920×1080, and you’ve selected 4xSSAA as your anti-aliasing method. These settings tell the graphics card to render the game’s content at a 4x larger resolution of 3840×2160 (ultra-high definition), then resize that frame back down to 1920×1080 before display on the monitor. At 3840×2160, the game might have a hard edge with 16 pixels that are obviously jagged. After the resize to 1920x1080p, however, these pixels are reduced by our SSAA factor (4x in our example), leaving you with a considerably smaller jagged edge of just four pixels. This effect is applied across the entire scene, hiding visual artifacts in the same way shrinking a picture in an image editor can hide flaws in a photo.

As we did with HDAO, however, we take AA one step further in Sleeping Dogs. The “Extreme” anti-aliasing setting uses the compute horsepower of Graphics Core Next to do another anti-aliasing pass on the final frame, which will smooth out those last four pixels of aliasing we described in the example above. The resources required to drive the extreme setting are quite intense, so users of HD 7800 and HD 7700 Series GPUs might try the “high” preset (2.25x SSAA, no post AA) or the “normal” preset (post AA only).

When all is said and done, though, Sleeping Dogs’ extreme preset offers the highest possible anti-aliasing quality available to a graphics card.

In other words, we built the "Extreme" setting to be so demanding that it requires CrossFire. SD's "high" setting is more along the lines of what most games call their "extreme" setting, and Sleeping Dogs' "normal" is what most games would call "high."

Tushon

Good deal, I was quite sure you had an answer ready

shwaip

Definitely check for driver updates though, you should be able to run cs:go better than 16fps.

Thrax

^ Truth.

1. Perform a manual uninstall of Catalyst. Windows might be an asshole at the moment.

2. Download install Catalyst 12.8 and 12.7CAP3.

Jokke

I can attest to putting AA to extreme makes my game lag. Take AA down one notch and my game runs smooth. Everything else max, 1920x1080.

Evelon277

Well, I was messing around with catalyst settings (forgot to bookmark this thread so I didn't know any of you replied) and for some silly reason my GPU and CPU were both underclocked. I got rid of the limiter and now I can play Sleeping Dogs on extreme settings with 120+ FPS most of the time. I do still only get 6 - 10 FPS in CS:GO, though, even in the full released game. I'll do a clean driver install now and tell you guys the results.

Evelon277

1. Perform a manual uninstall of Catalyst.

I can't use that guide, I have an AMD CPU as well.

Ryder

What does that have to do with uninstalling Catalyst drivers?

Thrax

AMD chipset and catalyst drivers are closely linked on A+A systems.

AMD chipset people can download/install/run ATIMan uninstaller instead: http://www.mediafire.com/?0jdko53gk5npzo0

Ryder

Yes, understood, but having the chipset drivers gone for 25 minutes is no major problem

Thrax

Unless it obliterates your USB root hub drivers and you have no mouse/keyboard control.

Evelon277

What does that have to do with uninstalling Catalyst drivers?

I dunno, the guide says not to do it if you have an AMD cpu. :P
I've done did the drivers, but to no avail. CS:GO is still a slide show. :-(

Evelon277

So no one knows what I should do about CS:GO?

Tushon

Maybe force 3D clocks all the time, via Afterburner or w/e and then reboot, verify 3D clocks are going and check to see if CSGO still performs poorly?

shwaip

list all your in-game settings please

Evelon277

Tushon said:

Maybe force 3D clocks all the time, via Afterburner or w/e and then reboot, verify 3D clocks are going and check to see if CSGO still performs poorly?

Okay, I'll try that.

shwaip said:

list all your in-game settings please

I've tried every preset from lowest to highest, and it was all the same.

shwaip

maybe a CPU/ram/heat issue, then?

at what resolution are you trying to run?

Evelon277

1920 x 1080. I was thinking it was CPU, but it never gets over 50% when playing GO.
I still have 2 gigs of RAM free when playing CS:GO, Steam running, Winamp running, and Chrome with 11 tabs open.

Edit: GPU doesn't get over 45 degrees and CPU stays under 30.

shwaip

If you're running in windowed mode, what happens if you switch to fullscreen mode? (or the other way).

Evelon277

In windowed mode I get 2 - 3 FPS.

shwaip

check to make sure you have the latest bios for your mobo.

Evelon277

Yeah, I do.
Do you know how to make MSI Afterburner force 3D clocks? I've never used this program before.

Tushon

I've done it on Nvidia, so I don't know the AMD equivalent actions, but it appears that I changed the "performance mode" to "prefer maximum performance" in the Nvidia control panel, then used Afterburner to OC and set the profile (last tab in options) to load that automatically. This forced it into 3D mode on loading the profile, or it could just be that the first thing I did actually made it work :/ I'm not sure, as it has been a long time, different cards, etc.

shwaip

can you please post your full system specs?

Evelon277

Graphics card: HD7950 3GB Powercolor (non overclocked)
CPU: AMD FX 8120 (non overclocked)
RAM: 8GB 1600 MHz
Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-990XA-UD3
Power supply: 650W
Case: Thermal Take MK-1