Why does my new Radeon RX 570 perform so poorly

[Ajesha]

Hello people,

I've been messing with this issue for almost a week now, and I'm kind of desperate because i just can't get it to work. 

I have been using a nVidia GTX 660 Ti card for a while, but it broke a few months back. Performance was alright, I was a happy camper, things rezzed in decent speed and the frame rate was ok (somewhere near 25 in most situations). When it broke, due to lack of money, I was reverting to the Radeon HD 7560D which is built into my A8 APU. This thing performed bad. OK, that was expected, my fps was around 15 to 20 most of the time, sometimes lower, but things rezzed and textured very slowly. I found that acceptable, since it needs to share horsepower with the CPU.

Now I got my brand new MSI RX 570 video card, but, unexplainable to me, it performs WORSE! My fps on Firestorm is commonly around 5, sims now take several minutes to rez and texture, and when there are people around me, the fps stays at 5 (funnily, if i zoom into some G&S animals, it skyrockets to 60).

Other games like Skyrim or Space Engineers are performing outstanding, the latter at about 100 fps, so I dare to say the video card is generally working. Just it does not like to collaborate with Second Life (which is about the only reason why I actually bought it).

Does anybody have experience with this card or can help me to diagnose the issue please?

My System:

PSU: Enermax Infiniti 720W (30 and 25 A on 5 and 3.3 V lines)

APU: A8-5600K

RAM: 8GB (DDR3?)

Video: MSI Radeon RX 570 ARMOR 4G OC

Internet Line: 20Mbit upstream, 1Mbit downstream (i did a speed test, it delivers that speed)

I'm thankful for any hints, thank you very much.

Cheers, AJ

[Sig Bravin]

I wish that I had read this thread before purchasing the just lowered price of $ 139.99 and $ 20.00 rebate on an AMD RX 570 video card. I hate spending good money on a poor product.

I wanted to upgrade my perfectly good Nvidia 470 graphic card to utilize my new LG UHD 32" 4K monitor. I was excited for two minutes until I discovered the horrible drop in frame rate of every room I was in SL and the awful stuttering effect of movement. Google search shows many unhappy people with this problem , even after many upgrades to latest drivers and configuration changes. So, it was back to my Nvidia card that will be replaced by another more powerful card as prices come down. I hope future buyers comparing video cards for SL usage read this thread and realize that SL and AMD have some problems in a smooth experience online.

[Lillith Hapmouche]

Any chances that the viewer might still be using the integrated graphics of the APU?

I may suppose that the old Nvidia drivers have been properly removed, before you installed the current AMD one? Or ones, counting in the APU

[Chic Aeon]

I was thinking along Lilliths's comment line. It seems like it should be working OK.

I CAN say though not helpful at all that SecondLife has a long time notsofriendly relationship with AMD cards. I had a top of the line long ago but it had MANY issues in SL. None in other programs. So it could, unfortunately just be that. 

I no longer buy Radeons now, not that they aren't great; just that they don't work in SL all that well. 

[Lindal Kidd]

While Chic is correct that Nvidia cards have a better reputation in SL, most people use Radeon cards with few or no problems.  Any problems that do arise are generally fixable by either updating the drivers, or in a few cases by rolling back to an earlier, "known good" driver.

Lillith most likely is on the right track.  Any of two or three issues could be at work here.

• Your BIOS may need to have a setting changed to switch the graphics from the integrated graphics to the new Radeon card.
• You may have some of the old Nvidia drivers still hanging around and messing things up
• Your Radeon drivers may need to be updated

[Ajesha]

First of all let me thank you all for taking the time to answer. I can say the following things to your comments:

1. The system might still be using the integrated video solution.

I can definitely say this is not the case. I did what I could to turn off the intgrated graphics card in the APU from the motherboard BIOS to be really sure it is not interfering. But, also, I connected my monitor to the socket of the new video card, not to the socket of the mainboard. So what I am seeing on my screen does come from the RX 570.

2. Old drivers may mess up things

To be really really sure that this is not the case, I did a fresh reinstall of my whole windows, reverting from windows 10 to windows 7 in the process, which is known to be good for games and mature enough to have gotten rid of the glitches a fairly young system might have. So no, there is no issue with old drivers.

3. The driver version of the RX 570 might just mess up stuff.

While i can't say anything about the internals of the video driver, this seems to be the most likely approach of the three. I found out that the RX 570 is only being supported from driver version 17.4.3 on, which i tried, along with all of the following versions up to 17.7.1 which is the current, and none of them work.

Bottom line: This card, at least in its current state, can't run SL. I'm going to sell it and get a NVidia 1050 Ti instead.

If anybody has still some working or helpful suggestion i would be thankful. The card is not sold yet, and I do it with a heavy heart.

I have been messing with this issue for a week now, and nothing I did would help. It's really frustrating, but when I ordered that video card it really was the best bang for the buck, and I'm sad that it does not suit its purpose.

Edited July 16, 2017 by Ajesha

[Lillith Hapmouche]

The irritaing bit is that the card performs well in Space Engineers and Skyrim, which I assume is still the case on your fresh Win7 install.
Otherwise, I might have guessed that the card itself might be broken in some regard. 
The fresh OS install also rules out my other guess towards corrupted preference settings of your viewer.

But well... at least you should get a nice little win if you sell your card on the second hand market, thanks to the Bitcoin Mining boom. 
I can't complain at all about my RX 480 and SL after all.

[ChinRey]

On 14.7.2017 at 8:47 AM, Ajesha said:

My fps on Firestorm is commonly around 5, sims now take several minutes to rez and texture, and when there are people around me, the fps stays at 5 (funnily, if i zoom into some G&S animals, it skyrockets to 60).

I can explain that at least. The fps depends a lot on the number of "active triangles and vertices", that is how many items are actuelly rendered on the screen. When you zoom in on something, you reduce the number of active objects and that will usually increase the fps singificantly.

I think I can explain why your ned gpu performs worse than youd old too. Viewers have an auto-detect function that makes them adjust your graphics settings to what they believe is the best for your specific graphics card. What probably happened is that the viewer cranked up a number of heavy graphics settings when it detected a new and more powerful gpu. Did you check all the usual fps drains to see if any of them has been changed?

Edited July 16, 2017 by ChinRey

[Nalates Urriah]

On the technical side... you may have run into a PCIe bus crowding problem. The motherboards have a certain number of PCIe channels that can be used. Video cards will use 4, 8, or 16 depending on what is available. SATA drives (Hard disk, DVD, etc), SSD's, and video cards use the PCIe bus. They can get in each other's way.

If the video card needs 16 channels, anything less will slow it. 8 channels would let it run well enough.

You could try plugging into different slots to see if they are on different channels.

To know, you will have to research your motherboard and PCI channels.

[Lillith Hapmouche]

Elsewhere and in a different context, a comment reminded me of another potential culprit: since one of the earliest Crimson driver versions, AMD has a so-called power efficiency setting, found in the Games > Global Settings category.

A single line with an on/off switch, just above the Frame Rate Target Control option at the bottom of that tab (which should be off as well).

Apparently, that option is switched ON by default and in that mode, the card will remain in an almost idle state and thus will perform horribly.

[Kane Tisane]

Yeah, Ive tried everything for the past 2 weeks also. Multiple settings, overclocking the device, reinstall of windows, every single SL viewer. I just dont understand why this card is such a beast but cant do ***** in second life.