Nvidia gtx 970 SLI and poor performance
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 ...
Forum Discussion
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.
"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.
> 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.
@mersukuski wrote:
16GB is standard. 32GB is high end.
For Photoshop and After Effect maybe, but for gaming, 8GB is still the current standard.
> 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
> 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.
- http://m.hardocp.com/article/2013/12/10/hdd_vs_ssd_real_world_gaming_performance/5
looks like Intel probably had some financial motives to peddle that idea
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.
