Solved Poor GTX 770 SLI Performance

[XGamer95]

I recently bought a second EVGA 2GB GTX 770 SC and have SLI set up, but the performance increase I got was a lot less than expected. I ran my own little benchmark with the first mission of the BF3 campaign on Ultra settings and my average frames per second only increased about 20 from about 90 to about 110. I decided to run the 3DMark Fire Strike Benchmark to check if I am really getting the performance I should and it turns out I'm not. I compared my results to Legit Review's results and my GPU score of barely over 11000 is over 3000 less than theirs on the normal test. On the extreme test, my result of just over 5200 is significantly less than the site's result of 6700. What is going on here? I'm very frustrated. I already tried reinstalling the latest 337.88 driver and chose to clean install but the benchmarks are still yielding the same results.

 

[Dude]

How much of an overclock are you using, on core and memory? Are you changing the NVIDIA Control panel setting for performance rather than quality?

 

[XGamer95]

How much of an overclock are you using, on core and memory? Are you changing the NVIDIA Control panel setting for performance rather than quality?

I have not overclocked the cards past their factory overclocks. The core clock is 1111 MHz with a boost clock of 1163 MHz and I don't know about the memory clock but it's 7010 MHz effective. The model number is 02G-P4-2774-KR. Originally I had it set to Let the 3D application decide, but then I changed some of the advanced 3D settings which included setting Multi-display/mixed-GPU acceleration to Single display performance mode and Power management mode to Prefer maximum performance but it made no difference either way.

 

[Boozad]

Have you treid the 337.50 drivers?

 

[badger906]

how well is your case ventilated/how hot are the cards?

the reason I ask is gtx 770 as well as other gtx cards have Gpu boost 2.0. they will overclock themselves until they hit thermal limits. if theyre already rather toasty in your case they wont run as well.

the comparison your doing it to could be sat on a text bench with 101 fans pointing at them.

 

[XGamer95]

how well is your case ventilated/how hot are the cards?

the reason I ask is gtx 770 as well as other gtx cards have Gpu boost 2.0. they will overclock themselves until they hit thermal limits. if theyre already rather toasty in your case they wont run as well.

the comparison your doing it to could be sat on a text bench with 101 fans pointing at them.

I ran the benchmark in Windowed Mode so I could monitor everything and card 1 never goes past 72 degrees C. The second card is always about 10 degrees cooler because there is nothing below it unlike the first card which has the second card only an inch or two away from its fans. Both GPUs were being fully utilized and the core clocks even boosted themselves past 1200 MHz.

Have you treid the 337.50 drivers?

Once I run out of things to try, I will install an older driver but the 337.50 driver is what I had when I first installed the second card and realized I didn't get much of a performance boost.


What's weird is that I booted up my computer today and ran the benchmarks again and I was finally getting the scores the site got, even a bit higher actually. I hadn't done anything between the tests last night and this morning. I was so happy but then I rebooted and the score plummeted back down to ~11000 for the regular Fire Strike test. I'm now thinking it may be some software I have on my computer causing the inconsistencies, but I just did a clean install of Windows 7 when I built the new rig so there isn't much on here. The same programs run at start-up as far as I know. I already considered EVGA Precision X because I had a huge problem with it in the past when it would start-up upon login. Even during the tests that yield the lower score the GPU monitoring looks the same. I did a quick search before and a couple people said that the benchmark results themselves are just inconsistent with SLI setups, but unless I can know that for sure I'll always be worrying that I'm not getting the performance I paid for in my games.

 

[logicearth]

You should not worry, you will be getting awesome performance. The only thing really holding you back is the CPU now.

 

[badger906]

lol theres nothing his core i5 cant handle maxed out these days and or in the forseeable future!! you compare a top end i7 with an i5 for gaming and your talking less than 10fps difference in performance. and if the op is aiming for 144fps to match his monitor then that 10fps wont make any tangible difference!

also overclocking his i5 to 4.5-5ghz will cover any gains a i7 will have!

 

[logicearth]

I'm not comparing his i5 to an i7 or anything like that. He could have an i7 would not matter, the CPU is still the bottle neck in a high end SLI configuration. A dual graphics card setup is only going to be as fast as the CPU allows. If the op wants better performance from his dual 770s,he needs to look at his CPU.


I myself run with a GTX 690 with a six core SandyBridge-E, I am still bottlenecked by it, even when overclocked to 4.6ghz or more.

 

[XGamer95]

Thanks for the responses guys. Fortunately I figured out the cause of the problem; Shadowplay. NVIDIA's own software reducing their own GPUs' performance by quite a significant amount. I used Shadowplay with just one 770 before and the performance hit was minuscule, but when running an SLI configuration it's a pretty big deal - about a 25% loss in fps from what I experienced. I just turned it off and now I'm very happy with the performance I'm getting from my two cards.

 

[Dude]

Glad you sorted it, enjoy it XGamer95