7970m Logging Thread, Games with Utilization Issues (Only post logs, NO questions please)

Hey guys, I know this thread isn't really for meant for questions but I thought I might have better luck here than in the NP9150 owner's lounge. I got my laptop yesterday, and I'm loving it. I've downloaded a bunch of games and I've been running benchmarks, checking utilization, framerates, temps, etc. I've only noticed some under utilization in Alan Wake so far, it sometimes dips into the 70s, but fps are good. Only thing I'm concerned about is temps. I know this card runs warmer than nvidia gpus, but the temp reading I'm getting in afterburner are freaking me out a little. After playing BF3 for an hour or two temps are in the 80s, peak temperature was 87 C. Is this normal for this card? Is afterburner accurate for temperature? Ambient temps in my room are pretty warm, but I'm using a Cooler Master Ergostand too.

Any insight would be really appreciated!

 

Definitely normal and well below specs. That's fine, don't worry about it. These hardware in general are rated to run at 100C for about 5 years. So yeah, no worries.

Also I really don't care what problems AMD has run into, I'd like the hotfix driver now. This is getting ridiculous on how long we have to wait for a driver that supports our hardware. I'm at the 5 month mark waiting now.

 

Thanks hulawafu! That's a load off my mind. I'll probably repaste anyway and see if that helps temps some. Would you recommend arctic silver or ic diamond?

And yeah, I can only imagine how annoyed you all must be after waiting this long. I've only had mine for a day and the performance is amazing for the most part, but when I load something like Saint's Row the Third I get to see how awful the under utilization can be. 30-40% gpu utilizaiton and around 15-25 fps is a travesty for this game. My 650m ran so much better at maximum settings lol. Fortunately, SR is the only game that I've played that is really affected by enduro so far.

 

is delay because of this?
AMD rumored to be prepping for massive layoffs - Neowin

 

I am will to bet none of those layoffs will be in the driver department! Compared to the rate at which they produce drivers vs Nvidia - they are obviously already undersized!!!!

This alone will nearly for sure push me to the nvidia for my next laptop come February! Still excited for this one tho!

 

already getting a new laptop in 4 months? man, I wish I could spend 2k on a new laptop every few months

 

Tested out the new APU 12.10 drivers, fix not included. Tested Crysis 2 and BF3. Same results as before.

 

I am surprised the driver even works for you. It seems to be targeted at a few specific GPUs (E6760, E6460, R and G series, HD 6970m, HD 5770) not including the 7970m. Apparently it is designed more for the mobile market, but it doesn't address the 7000m series. This is likely foreshadowing the 7000m hotfix that will follow.

 

Lets just say if I could get what I have planned for February for $2k I'd be one happy guy!

 

So far, two games I've played are heavily affected by enduro. Saint's Row the 3rd is awful, and Arkham City is really bad too. Any large open environments, and utilization plummets. 0 issues with BF3 single player, Metro 2033, Alan Wake, Binary Domain, and Dark Souls. Didn't test utilization in The Saboteur, but framerates were fine. Still need to download more.

Wow, going big, huh? lol

Why not chose the 680 to begin with, since money doesn't seem to be an issue?

 

Or why not skip the current purchase in general and wait a few months? Haswell is going to be huge in terms of power efficiency.

 

or that lol

 

Because of the fact this will end up as the girls laptop. While the power would be nice to have as a back up in the house, I just couldn't justify the price considering she will never use the power the 7970m has let alone the 680m. I'm sure when the hotfix comes out things will get better and continue to get better in the coming months.

For my uses, I want the maximum power possible. No compromises.

And yes, if something is right around the corner I will wait a bit - but that is when the purchase is "planned" for.

 

I'm not sure if this game's got any mention, but I am having low fps in SWTOR..... just measured with FRAPS and like people are reporting elsewhere, it doesn't get much better when lowering the settings.... On the planet Balmorra, when fighting bugs on maxed out settings, I get under 10 frames per second !! The f..... up thing is, turning the general settings down to LOW doesn't give me more than just over 20..... That's f.....!!
My internet connection is good and stabile, but I have heard people reporting performance issues with the game. My results though are just awful.....

 

I have the NP9150 w/7970M and I've been playing SWTOR a good amount in the past few months. I sometimes run FRAPS, and on all settings maxed, I get around 85 just running around, 65ish in combat.

 

85 ?? Is that for real ? What drivers are you using ? I took a look at notebookcheck, and clearly what I am getting is down in the range of the intel HD 4000 igpu......

 

You're probably running the game on the iGPU then. I'm using the 12.9 beta drivers with the latest CAP and the standalone Intel drivers.

 

The game was running on the iGPU... I dont know, but when i toggled the catalyst profile settings, that seemed to switch back to the 7970m. How it is possible to get 85 fps though is beyond me. For me it seems to hover between 30 - 40, and never goes above 40....

 

Maybe you should compare with DdudeAce what kind of processors you have in your laptops... I don't know if SWTOR is a CPU or GPU heavy game.

 

So I'm posting my specs as signature - I hope this doesn't get to be a question, but it seems people are all over the place with performance on the np9150/p150em.
Also, people are getting just BSOD's and what not when installing new drivers for this system. If somebody is sitting on a deep, dark secret on how to boost the performance of the 7970m , of course we want to know about it...

 

Two questions.

Starting a 3v3 game in Starcraft II my 7970m delivers 98-97% however, I see usage substantially dropping down to 90% then 80% to 77% in like 20mins time.
Is it possible that GPU performs well its the CPU that slows it down? 3610QM.

Second when playing Sleeping Dogs GPU usage during cinematics is at 99%, during gameplay drops down to 70-80%, but whenever I'm driving down the street on high speed it crumbles to 50%.

I have a suspision it's the CPU this time. What do you think?

 

It is the CPU, but it isn't related to the CPU being weak, but rather the bugged AMD driver that is bottlenecking a key connection between the CPU and the 7970m. AMD claims that the upcoming driver updates will fix this driver bug.

 

I second this. It was just suggested that my 3610QM couldn't manage high framerates in swtor, but there is definitely something else going on here. I have asked my reseller this question also, and they laughed at me when I implied that maybe the cpu wasn't up to snuff...

 

CPU is definitely up to snuff, its the enduro issue thats causing some sort of bottleneck somewhere. I have experimented with increasing and decreasing CPU speed from 3.8Ghz to 2.8Ghz and the other way around but Enduro issue remains the same, so getting a faster CPU will not improve your utilization.

 

It can't be the cpu. If the 680m is capable running the same games at a decent fps with the same cpu, then so should the 7970m. The performance should be very similar.

 

With the upcoming layoffs at amd, I'm kinda worried about getting the 7970 crossfire now.

What's the chances of the company going belly up any time soon?

I can afford the 680m's, but considering the price, I could build an sli 690 desktop setup.

So confused.

 

AMD will obviously try to make a comeback. The next gen CPU series has to be ground breaking and be highly competitive. If they fail one more time, they may go bankrupt.

How smartphones and tablets spell disaster for Intel | Firstpost

This is happening to every one, even Intel.

 

I have tried tweaking EVERYTHING in CAP and SWTOR, but I cannot acchieve the kind of fps mentioned earlier here.....
85 fps on the p150em I can get on the lowest game settings. everything maxed out I still get 30 -40 fps as I reported earlier. Any others have experience with performance in Star Wars - The Old Republic ?

 

I'm not worried about intel, or even nvidia, because both are making hard core pushes into the mobile market.

Amd on the other hand, in a way, is pushing it aside. Proof is the mobile driver debacle, and while they are attempting to fix it, what consequences will these layoffs have on driver development and fixes?

Not going to lie, between the driver/possible bankruptcy problems, and the price of the nvidia mobile cards, it's seriously making me think twice about getting a gaming laptop.

 

A laptop with a 7970M is hardly a device that fits the discription of "mobile market". AMD is not suddenly going to go bankrupt. These layoffs are just a natural step towards a more leanier and more agile company, a step which many big players have been forced to take in the past few years.

I see AMD focusing on GPUs and trying to pump out mobile processors. The desktop CPU business will be the first to go.

 

so has anyone tried the 12.9 driver yet?
AMD Catalyst
its definitely better but Diablo 3 still has the same weird behavior despite now getting 60fps at full max settings, from time to time it freezes a little dropping to really low fps for a fraction of a second, as if it has to wait to load more data to render

 

It does ok in some areas but is well known to perform worse than the stock drivers overall.

BTW, new post by Jarred at Anandtech, with new 680m vs 7970m info:

AnandTech - AVADirect Clevo P170EM Part 2: GTX 680M Grudge Match

Includes new utilization recordings!

 

Yes, a lot of people have tried the 12.9 driver - and a lot of people have failed. The ones who made it work are apparently getting good results but they don't want to share on how they made it work so.......

 

i have 12.9 and its performance is very close to previous drivers - all I did was install the AMD package without uninstalling previous driver. I get a little better fps in Batman AC, whilst worse in Crysis 2; BF3 seems the same.

 

The updated utilization recordings section, was a treat to see. Looks quite promising on the hotfix's behalf.

 

I have no idea why we STILL dont have this hotfix

 

no long nowww!

the article referenced the release to be this week sometime 15th-19th

 

Looking good! Once the issue is fixed, its time to move on to performance optimization (since they said the current drivers aren't yet optimized for the 7000m series cards).

 

One thing I don't get is how Batman is maxing out the 7970m with the 12.10 hotfix, yet performance is now somehow worse. Other than that, the 7970m is being utilized fairly well compared to the two cards tested.

And yes guys, "With the Hotfix driver (which still hasn’t reached the public, though we’re hearing “this week”—meaning, some time during October 15-19), we also noted that GPU utilization did improve" (Walton 5). I am very excited. The one thing I want to see is a performance boost in the three main open world games, namely Saints Row 3, Sleeping Dogs and GTA IV. If any of those end up having a decent boost I will be pretty damn happy. We will also get to test first hand how stable Skyrim is. Hopefully we see higher lows with the hotfix!

 

D: the 7970m performance against 680gtx is nothing short of pathetic , it is like comparing a mid-range card to a high-end card , the performance on the 7970m is at least 20% less than 680gtx .

 

hope we can really get this hotfix this week

 

Yeah, chuckles87, it is really quite pathetic that the the 7970m even with all the driver problems it has had can still keep up with the 680m.... i think that is why we're quite exited to see how the hotfix will accelerate it beyond the overprized Nvidia

 

The 7970M packs quite a lot of punch when you look at the fps in many of the most demanding games. Its often barely behind the 680M. We know that the 680M drivers are much more optimized, since AMD has only just commited itself to releasing unified drivers to its mobile cards.

Now that the basis is laid, AMD can make changes to their drivers more easily and faster. The 7970M will never be as powerful as the 680M (and considering the price difference, why should it?), but the difference you see now will likely diminish in favor of the 7970M.

Besides, Diablo 3 and Portal 2 benchmarks cause a bit too much distortion in the average fps of 15 games. And the lower performance on Batman AA is a driver bug, since it used to be 61fps with the previous drivers.

 

New faceoff by Anandtech

AnandTech - AVADirect Clevo P170EM Part 2: GTX 680M Grudge Match

 

So you didn't bother to check the previous page?

 

For those looking to update to 12.9 beta. I just tried, and calalyst stopped working. So I uninstalled the 12.9 beta package, and then my 7970m driver stopped working - bsod. So i had to uninstall the 7970m driver also do a cclean, reboot and install all the original ones from clevo. oh I tried doing a clean install of 12.9 beta also, but the display driver there doesn't work for the p150em. Actually there could be several things in the catalyst install manager for 12.9 that do not play nice - I don't know. So unless anyone has any better ideas I'm waiting for the hotfix...

 

Stop trying to install the drivers. You won't see any benefit.

No. Just, no. If anyone is benefiting, it's those who don't have Enduro. There is no evidence that points toward 12.9 having great results for us.

 

alright, so first of all no previous driver has worked for me, but the 12.9 did! its not perfect but its 9234589 times better than clevo drivers trust me!
so to install it all i did was remove EVERYTHIG including catalyst itself, and even the intel driver, reboot and install it worked out of the box

 

I wouldnt recommend trying this driver if the stock one works for you, but just in case if you want. You need to install the intel driver first. So hers what I did:

1. Uninstall amd driver, uninstall intel display driver if its between programs.
2. restart and check device manager->display adapters- you should have two standard vga adapters, one with an exclamation mark. If not uninstal the driver in the device manager.
3. some say that driver sweeper does harm and deletes important files, so to clean everything without using a cleaning software you can do this
how to properly uninstall ATI/AMD Software Drivers for Graphics Cards.
restart.
4. Dowload the intel hd4000 driver from intel page, and install it. restart. your desktop should now have roght resolution.
5. install the 12.9 beta, restart. Everything should work now.

Note that only benefit you'll get is the new UI which actually works and remembers all aplications, but performance is the same.
I would suggest to stick with the stock driver until the 12.10 is out. It should be around the corner.

 

I messaged Chris Angelini and he said AMD still had the drivers in QA but would check back with them again this week. I just hope this means these drivers will perform better than the ones Anandtech are using.