Under performing Sapphire AMD HD RADEON 7870

z4rco · 07 Jun 2013

I havea question I would like to ask all of you. I recently upgraded my gfx card from:

Sapphire HD 7750 > Sapphire HD 7870.

The benchmarking for each card shows that the 7870 DOUBLES in performance and benchmarking from the 7750. note that I used to run games with the 7750 @ 1280 res whereas with the 7870 I run them at 1920 x 1080 res.

However my question is that I havent noticed any drastic increase in gaming performance? Windows index says my card is, current at 7.9 - the highest, yet I cant run games like Hitman Absolution at full detail because there is fps drop. Minecraft doesnt run at far without fps dropping below 60. However I have noticed that games like league of legends are running at 60-80 fps with everything turned to max settings and at 1920 x 1080. The gfx card is also overclocked... but I have turned it off.

So my question is this:

Do i not notice the change in perfomance because Im at a higher resolution which is pushing the gfx card to its limit?
Do i have a bad card?
Does my psu not give steady/ enough power to deliver consistant aps on the 12v rail to allow my gfx card, and my cpu, to run in high performance mode?

The last question is a worry for me. I have the corsair CX600W PSU.
But I am running 3 HDs, x2 SSD x1 HDD.
Running x6 Fans, x2 are high pressure
Running 16GB RAM @1333mhz
Running 8 core AMD FX 8150
And finally HD 7870.

The temperature at "full load" hit 45-50 degrees and do not climb higher than that, and those temps are when the room temp is pretty high. Do you think the PSU cant supply the gfx card with enough juice causing it to under perform?

The CX600 delivers 40A @ max load on the 12v rail. I know my PSU can deliver enough power to the card... HOWEVER I have a high performance CPU, fans, and 16gb ram plus a lot of HDDs so am not sure whether the PSU is actually stretching the limits. I had a corsair GS700, which was bad, so if the psu is not enough I will look for 800W.

Sorry for turning this into a PSU thread, but I just cant figure out why my gfx card is under performing when it shouldnt... unless i am under the illusion it isnt, and just running games on high detail @ 1920 x 1080 is a huge deal for most mid-top end gfx card.

thank you.

Faladu · 08 Jun 2013

Yes, 1920 by 1080 is stressful gaming wise and you are not on a top end card, try it at the same resolution you used the 7750 on?

FPS above 30fps is fine, dipping below 60 is nothing.

You have to contend with server lag and non-optimized programming code that will vary greatly game to game, and more graphics involved game to game, so that is why some run so much better than others, too.

Everquest II is an example of poorly optimized coded MMO, if you want to see video card strained, complained about for years and sold a lot of video card upgrades!

I am running 3d games on my 7950 and using two other monitors at the same time, all 1080p's... (2 landscape, 1 portrait).
Just yesterday, I had Marvel Heroes (online only) drop to 9 FPS down from 60, and I started playing it like a RTS for grins, restarted game and it was back to 60, it didn't properly recover from a lag spike with a lot of people in an area, though it had been handling it fine, just minutes before, bugs bugs bugs.

z4rco · 08 Jun 2013

That makes sense, thank you for the response!

Faladu · 09 Jun 2013

You're welcome, the 7870 is a good card, you are way ahead of a typical user with that one.