R9 290 low gpu usage

[THGM]

My system:
Gigabyte B85M-D2V | Intel Xeon E3-1231v3 | Kingston hyperX 8GB | XFX R9 290 | CM G650M

My gpu usage seems to be extremely low and never ends up in 99%... Thats in ALL games i played so far, fps is often UNDER 60 and the gpu usage varies and its often around 50-70%, even though the FPS IS UNDER 60. VSYNC is always off for me, but i tried on too, no effect. I tried different windows 7 and 8.1 and completely formatting everything, different drivers, turning off ULPS from MSI afterburner, different PSU, incrasing power limit to +50%, overclock, installing all the drivers, turning on all fans on 100% in case its overheating... literally everything i could think of and im about to give up.
Here are some pictures from random games, altough the issue appears in all games(assetto corsa, project cars, dayz, rust, call of duty advanced warfare, battlefield 3, battlefield hardline, just cause 2, hitman absolution...:
 

Battlefield 3 multiplayer:

Rust:

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare:

 

[Aniallation]

There's multiple points where you hit 100% GPU usage...

[THGM]

There's multiple points where you hit 100% GPU usage...

Yea thats when i get high fps, but when gpu usage is low the fps is low too and the game is simply unplayable... According to most people and videos i watched, video usage should be always around 99%.

[nikolaizombie1]

 

My system:

Gigabyte B85M-D2V | Intel Xeon E3-1231v3 | Kingston hyperX 8GB | XFX R9 290 | CM G650M

My gpu usage seems to be extremely low and never ends up in 99%... Thats in ALL games i played so far, fps is often UNDER 60 and the gpu usage varies and its often around 50-70%, even though the FPS IS UNDER 60. VSYNC is always off for me, but i tried on too, no effect. I tried different windows 7 and 8.1 and completely formatting everything, different drivers, turning off ULPS from MSI afterburner, different PSU, incrasing power limit to +50%, overclock, installing all the drivers, turning on all fans on 100% in case its overheating... literally everything i could think of and im about to give up.

Here are some pictures from random games, altough the issue appears in all games(assetto corsa, project cars, dayz, rust, call of duty advanced warfare, battlefield 3, battlefield hardline, just cause 2, hitman absolution...:

 

Battlefield 3 multiplayer:

Rust:

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare:

 

Try dialing back the overclock see if that helps

[THGM]

I already tried that dude, think the full format and installing fresh windows pretty much sums it up.

[Picklenuttz]

The GPU usage you are seeing is nothing out of the ordinary  for for 290s, 

Clock looks fine and isn't dropping way down in the one game i see it in.

 

 

Right click on Catalyst Control Center  down in the bottom right task bar and tell me what your 3D settings are set at... "Balanced" or "High Performance"

[THGM]

Its at balance, but i tried high perfomance too, no effect. So its usual for r9 290 gpu usage to go down and up randomly, as in bad GPU utilization? Because i seem to be the having the exact same fps in 640x480 and 1680x1050(my maximum resolution).

[Picklenuttz]

Its at balance, but i tried high perfomance too, no effect. So its usual for r9 290 gpu usage to go down and up randomly, as in bad GPU utilization? Because i seem to be the having the exact same fps in 640x480 and 1680x1050(my maximum resolution).

Could be a few things, I'm not at home right now, but i'll post a few things you can try when i get back.

 

I run 2 290s, so fairly familiar with them

[THGM]

That would be lovely! I'll be very grateful if you test at least one of the games i mentioned and see if you have the same usage as i do(but with one r9 290, since im not running crossfireX).

[THGM]

Update: i seem to be getting 90-100% gpu usage at some battlefield 3 maps and decent fps(100+), but depending on the map/location, sometimes the usage goes down to around 50% and fps goes down as well, if anyone could test if its the same for him i would be grateful!

[SteveGrabowski]

Its at balance, but i tried high perfomance too, no effect. So its usual for r9 290 gpu usage to go down and up randomly, as in bad GPU utilization? Because i seem to be the having the exact same fps in 640x480 and 1680x1050(my maximum resolution).

 

Crap, that sounds like a CPU bottleneck. I have an E3-1231v3 also, and the benchmarks I looked at before buying seemed to indicate it was basically an i7-4770, so that would suck to hear it bottlenecks. I get almost constant 100% GPU usage out of my GTX 970 with this CPU when I have VSync off, though I only play single player games.

[SteveGrabowski]

Are you getting good temperatures with your Xeon?

[THGM]

Yea, temps are fine... but shoulnt be bottleneck, according to some people amd drivers arent as effective as nvidia ones, but according to other people thats not usual... 

Heres video to see what im talking about:

[xsadrulesx]

Try forcing constant voltage in your gpu and see if it you get the same results. Don't keep it like that just for a comparison. You can do this with Precision X (K Boost)

[SteveGrabowski]

Damn, I'm glad I didn't return my 970 for a 290x if that's what I could expect.

[SteveGrabowski]

Update: i seem to be getting 90-100% gpu usage at some battlefield 3 maps and decent fps(100+), but depending on the map/location, sometimes the usage goes down to around 50% and fps goes down as well, if anyone could test if its the same for him i would be grateful!

 

So this is with the Omega drivers too? I thought these were supposed to bring huge performance increases.

[Bussinateur]

ANSWER: THE XEON

 

The Xeon CPU in your system is bottlenecking your 290. Your GPU can't max out because your CPU is already struggling. Try upgrading to a i5

[xsadrulesx]

ANSWER: THE XEON

 

The Xeon CPU in your system is bottlenecking your 290. Your GPU can't max out because your CPU is already struggling. Try upgrading to a i5

 

Doubt it, that Xeon is basically a locked i7.

[SteveGrabowski]

ANSWER: THE XEON

The Xeon CPU in your system is bottlenecking your 290. Your GPU can't max out because your CPU is already struggling. Try upgrading to a i5

I'd be surprised, as Luke did a benchmark where a similar Xeon E3-1276v3 outperformed an i7-4790 in gaming. AMD's DX11 drivers might just really be shit? I'd like to see what's up here.

[Monarch]

AMD's DX11 drivers might just really be shit?

 

Yep. 

 

 

 

FX 6100 yields 80% more performance with GTX 980 than with 290X. That's a disgusting amount of CPU overhead that AMD's DX 11 driver causes. 

It's obvious that the 290X can produce 60+ fps, but with a much stronger CPU than if you had an Nvidia GPU, which is why GPU usage is low.

 

 

 

Same thing in BF4, although to a lesser extent.

A10-7850K 35% less performance with AMD than with Nvidia.

 

 

Huge difference. It's the difference between dropping below 60 to around 40 fps, and staying at 60+ fps. I can confirm this result. Luckily BF4 supports Mantle. AMD didn't want to address this issue and fix DX11, but rather created Mantle. But what about games that don't support Mantle? That's what worries me. There'll be a lot of DX 11 games in the future, and as much as DX 11 sucks, AMD's implementation is much worse than Nvidia's.

[SteveGrabowski]

Yep.

*snip*

FX 6100 yields 80% more performance with GTX 980 than with 290X. That's a disgusting amount of CPU overhead that AMD's DX 11 driver causes.

It's obvious that the 290X can produce 60+ fps, but with a much stronger CPU than if you had an Nvidia GPU, which is why GPU usage is low.

Same thing in BF4, although to a lesser extent.

*snip*

A10-7850K 35% less performance with AMD than with Nvidia.

*snip*

Huge difference. It's the difference between dropping below 60 to around 40 fps, and staying at 60+ fps. I can confirm this result. Luckily BF4 supports Mantle. AMD didn't want to address this issue and fix DX11, but rather created Mantle. But what about games that don't support Mantle? That's what worries me. There'll be a lot of DX 11 games in the future, and as much as DX 11 sucks, AMD's implementation is much worse than Nvidia's.

I thought the Omega drivers were supposed to fix a lot of this overhead. Bottlenecking on a Xeon E3 is ridiculous, as that is a really powerful CPU that maxes (or very close) all my games out with my 970. Dying Light is the only game I have not GPU bound in Xeon+970 pairing, only because of terrible parallelization of the game. I know this is a really strong gaming CPU since I'm strictly GPU bound on Crysis 3 Very High, whereas even an i5 + 780/970/980 is usually CPU bound at those settings in Welcome to the Jungle in the benchmarks I have seen.

[THGM]

ANSWER: THE XEON

 

The Xeon CPU in your system is bottlenecking your 290. Your GPU can't max out because your CPU is already struggling. Try upgrading to a i5

Do you mean downgrade to an i5? Because the xeon is faster. The drivers im using are 14.12, im not sure how to switch to mantle. I don't have battlefield 4 to test it, only 3, not sure if it suppports mantle. I tried forcing constant voltage from msi afterburner, no change.

Yep. 

Huge difference. It's the difference between dropping below 60 to around 40 fps, and staying at 60+ fps. I can confirm this result. Luckily BF4 supports Mantle. AMD didn't want to address this issue and fix DX11, but rather created Mantle. But what about games that don't support Mantle? That's what worries me. There'll be a lot of DX 11 games in the future, and as much as DX 11 sucks, AMD's implementation is much worse than Nvidia's.

So this bad gpu usage and bad fps im having... its because amd drivers and optimization is shit and thats completely normal?

[Mephy04]

I think i'm realizing the same thing as you, I dont see my 280x maxxed ...ever but fps will still be 30 40 ish with 2600k cpu...wish I would have known before buying.

[Monarch]

I thought the Omega drivers were supposed to fix a lot of this overhead. Bottlenecking on a Xeon E3 is ridiculous, as that is a really powerful CPU that maxes (or very close) all my games out with my 970. Dying Light is the only game I have not GPU bound in Xeon+970 pairing, only because of terrible parallelization of the game. I know this is a really strong gaming CPU since I'm strictly GPU bound on Crysis 3 Very High, whereas even an i5 + 780/970/980 is usually CPU bound at those settings in Welcome to the Jungle in the benchmarks I have seen.

 

That Xeon is a beast but it's designed for heavy multi-threading. DX11 obviously sucks in that department, so framerate relies on single core performance. If you add such a huge amount of CPU overhead on top of that, you get shit performance. I think that's why AMD's 6 and 8 core FX CPUs perform so bad in CPU heavy games like BF4 and Dying Light. We've seen framerate in Dying Light choking on CPU0 due to extremely high view distance even with Nvidia's driver. But I believe it's a DX11 limitation, so they had to "fix" it by decreasing max view distance. I guess that's why Mantle and DX12 are such a big deal.

 

Firaxis on Mantle:

Besides being more efficient, core per core, Mantle also enables fully parallel draw submission (this has been attempted before, but never with the same degree of success). Until now, the CPU work of processing the draw calls could only by executed on one CPU core. By removing this limitation, Mantle allows us to spread the load across multiple cores and finish it that much faster.

http://www.firaxis.com/?/blog/single/why-we-went-with-mantle

 

Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

 

 

Do you mean downgrade to an i5? Because the xeon is faster. The drivers im using are 14.12, im not sure how to switch to mantle. I don't have battlefield 4 to test it, only 3, not sure if it suppports mantle. I tried forcing constant voltage from msi afterburner, no change.

So this bad gpu usage and bad fps im having... its because amd drivers and optimization is shit and thats completely normal?

 

Yeah, no point in messing with GPU when it's not even being fully fed by the CPU. But that's AMD's fault. Like I've said, DX11 sucks, but AMD's implementation is much worse than Nvidia's. 

All you can do is switch to Nvidia. With AMD, in DX11 games that aren't so CPU heavy you could get 60+ fps, although still significantly less than if you had Nvidia's card, but it wouldn't be such a big deal. It becomes a serious problem in CPU taxing games where framerate drops below 60.

[THGM]

How do i take advantage of mantle?

Also i noticed something funny:

In just cause 2 no matter what resoltuion im playing i have the exact same fps, just different gpu usage, usually the lower the resolution, the lower the gpu usage, same for hitmana absolution, rust, insurgency and probably the other games...

On the hitman benchmark im getting average 60fps on 1680x1050, ultra preset, 8x AA. Which seems about right according ot this:

Cpu usage seems to be pretty decent during gaming, all cores are being loaded equally:

http://i.imgur.com/00SDrP0.png