Performance with R9 390X

[Monster Adagio]

Hello and thanks for your time!

I'm running a SAPPHIRE NITRO Radeon R9 390X (rest of system specs found below) and I just can't seem to get worthwhile FPS in Second Life. Tried with both Firestorm and Singularity viewers. 
Altered my viewer settings more or less with every setting and seems like I actually get worse FPS with lower settings. Tried altering Radeon Settings programs settings for Firestorm as well with minimal success.

I've talked to several friends in SL running other GPUs that actually have lower benchmarks than my own card and they'll be running 50-100FPS with high settings while I'll somehow be running more like 15-25FPS even after turning settings down. This is while we are standing in the same exact sim next to each other as well.

In the past I know SL didn't always get along with AMD but I thought that was mainly because of AMDs lack of OpenGL support which has since been remedied.

Any tips to improve FPS are greatly appreciated!


Radeon Software Version - 17.11.1 (I updated to this one to see if it would help, no change)
Radeon Software Edition - Crimson ReLive
Graphics Chipset - AMD Radeon (TM) R9 390 Series
Memory Size - 8192 MB
Memory Type - GDDR5
Core Clock - 1080 MHz
Windows Version - Windows 7 (Service Pack 1) (64 bit)
System Memory - 8 GB
CPU Type - Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4820K CPU @ 3.70GHz

[cykarushb]

I honestly got no idea why you'd be getting 15-25fps, your specs are phenomenal for SL, especially that 4820k.

Ive got a Athlon 5350 and integrated R3 graphics and the thing handles SL on medium settings at 1080p to get similar results.

You're not running in a ridiculous resolution or something are you? 390x should handle 4k but you'd probably see those framerates on any settings in 4k due to vram limits in some viewers.

When running SL, monitor your CPU and GPU usage to see whats going on. The 4820k will be hardly used because SL doesnt really take advantage of multiple cores that well, but your GPU should be seeing a solid 50% usage on max settings.

Otherwise i suggest just testing a variety of different GPU driver versions. I would also recommend upgrading from Windows 7 SP1 to something newer, 7 is nice and all, but with 8.1/10 you get a lot of more modern features for the LGA 2011 platform that will benefit CPU performance.

[Monster Adagio]

2 hours ago, cykarushb said:

I honestly got no idea why you'd be getting 15-25fps, your specs are phenomenal for SL, especially that 4820k.

Ive got a Athlon 5350 and integrated R3 graphics and the thing handles SL on medium settings at 1080p to get similar results.

You're not running in a ridiculous resolution or something are you? 390x should handle 4k but you'd probably see those framerates on any settings in 4k due to vram limits in some viewers.

When running SL, monitor your CPU and GPU usage to see whats going on. The 4820k will be hardly used because SL doesnt really take advantage of multiple cores that well, but your GPU should be seeing a solid 50% usage on max settings.

Otherwise i suggest just testing a variety of different GPU driver versions. I would also recommend upgrading from Windows 7 SP1 to something newer, 7 is nice and all, but with 8.1/10 you get a lot of more modern features for the LGA 2011 platform that will benefit CPU performance.

Forgot to mention resolution. It's at 2560x1080 which I can contribute some of my low FPS to but I don't bother with 4k.
Though even with SL in windowed mode filling half my screen it's laggy.

I'm mostly testing it out at a rather laggy sim but then comparing what I'm getting FPS wise to folks with also looking the same direction with similar settings etc. They'll be 20-30 while I'm 10-15.

Using HWMonitor yeah CPU's not really going over 25% most the time. Maxed at 40% when I was intentionally trying to be crazy with my camera.
The GPU though fluctuates nonstop from 0-100% hitting numbers inbetween but still jumping to 100 repeatedly. (SL in windowed mode half the screen). Cards also pretty much new as well as PSU.

I'll look into getting windows 10, was only holding off because of some older software in the past but they should be fine now.

Appreciate the response, even if you're as confused as I am haha.

[Nalates Urriah]

There are somethings to consider. However, setting the graphics setting to LOW shoud increase your FPS. If not, I suspect the problem is outside the viewer.

I assume you watch the Viewer Statistics panel to get your numbers. For troubleshooting and benchmarking you want a place with no avatars. Avatars coming and going will mess up your numbers and that can mislead you to thinking a setting change made a negative or positive difference when it was one or more avatars arriving or departing.

I'm an NVIDA person. The latest from them is http://blog.nalates.net/2016/06/05/nvidia-settings-2016/ which may give you some ideas for your R9.

HDMonitor will tell you if there is a heat problem.

There are a number of panels inside the viewer that can help you figure out what is wrong.

Ctrl-Shift
 1 - Viewer stats
 2 - Scene Load Statistics
 3 - Texture Console
 4 - Debug Console
 5 - Notifications Console
 9 - Fast Timers Console

The texture console will tell you when you are downloading and decrypting textures. That should correspond to the peaks in GPU use... more or less.

The viewer is multi-threaded using about 20 threads with the render engine being the single biggest thread and likely to choke. 

If your CPU is hitting 100% while running SL something isn't right. Mine seldom gets above 50%. i5-6600k @ 4MHz.

That your GPU hits 100% also says something isn't right. My 1060 hovers around 50%.

If you are using SSD or have a loaded PCIe bus, that could be your problem. That is a motherboard thing. While a video card can use 16 channels and survive on 8 a crowded PCIe bus can be a problem. Look at your MB specs and see what you have for PCIe and figure out what is being used. Some MB makers put all their channels on one bus. Others have them on 3 or 4 buses. So, the total number can be hype if they are all jammed on one bus.

If System Resource shows a high fault rate, there is a memory issue. Having a RAM drive that is too large can be counterproductive.

Slow memory chips (system ram) can cause surges as buffers reload or page fault out.

Watch the Windows System Performance Meter to see what else may be surging the video card.

Good luck.

[cykarushb]

19 minutes ago, Nalates Urriah said:

If your CPU is hitting 100% while running SL something isn't right. Mine seldom gets above 50%. i5-6600k @ 4MHz.

Man and i thought my Intel 8086 at 8.16mhz was slow.

[Nalates Urriah]

That is a speed problem caused by fingers... or maybe a bad keyboard... 

28 minutes ago, cykarushb said:

Man and i thought my Intel 8086 at 8.16mhz was slow.

4010MHz... is what it should have been... 4GHz