Low FPS and GPU usage Far Cry 3 7970

[Matty]

With my single 7970 GHz edition I only get around 20-30 fps when playing far cry 3 at 720p or 1080p at low, medium, high, very high or ultra. Even when I add 8x msaa and hdao nothing changes. It is barely playable and vsync is not enabled. I have tried the latest drivers and even the latest beta drivers and nothing has changed. Even updating the game has not helped. I should also add that my GPU usage never goes up above 20%. It sucks because I see people playing at 70 fps and even in the NCIX video the 8800gt runs at medium better than mine does! Any help is much appreciated! Thanks!

[FamedKarma]

Weird. What are the rest of the specs of your machine? Your CPU, RAM or even (less feasibly) HDD speed could be bottlenecking what your graphics card is capable of. I'd definitely recommend staying on beta drivers regardless. Also, FC3 has a lot of weird settings that a lot of other games don't give to the user which often need to be set to pretty specific things for stability; for instance, your GPU max frame buffer should always be set to "1" for best performance. I can't remember anything else off the top of my head, but if none of that applies, I'll have a bit of a look around for you and see what I can find.

[Guest]

Other issues could include a energy saver mode that's throttling the performance back :)

[Matty]

Weird. What are the rest of the specs of your machine? Your CPU, RAM or even (less feasibly) HDD speed could be bottlenecking what your graphics card is capable of. I'd definitely recommend staying on beta drivers regardless. Also, FC3 has a lot of weird settings that a lot of other games don't give to the user which often need to be set to pretty specific things for stability; for instance, your GPU max frame buffer should always be set to "1" for best performance. I can't remember anything else off the top of my head, but if none of that applies, I'll have a bit of a look around for you and see what I can find.

My specs shouldn't bottleneck it, I have 3930k, 16gb of 2133 ram and dual samsung 840 pro ssd's in raid 0. I have read up about some of the settings that I have not encountered before, including that gpu max buffer set to 1. Thanks for your help!

[Matty]

Other issues could include a energy saver mode that's throttling the performance back :)

How can I check this is setting? Thanks!

[Guest]

Other issues could include a energy saver mode that's throttling the performance back :)

There should be something either in the BIOS or the like motherboard software. For example Asus boards often come with AI Suite 2.