Crysis 3 Performance Inconsistencies

[Defacto Atheist]

So I'm running dual GTX580's, an i7 hexacore and 4GBs of DDR3 RAM (yes, I am aware that is a shitty amount, I'm working on it!), all of which outputs to a 2560x1440 display.

Now obviously at that resolution with previous gen. GPU tech, I expected Crysis 3 to struggle a little. I recently downloaded nVidia's GeForce Experience optimizer BETA, which actually gave me quite playable settings, whilst still looking visually acceptable.

HOWEVER, occasionally the performance will really really choke, frame rates will crash and burn, and the whole thing is just a mess. Out of curiosity, I ran MSI Afterburner on my secondary monitor whilst in game, paying particular attention to the GPU1/2 usage monitor.

Interestingly enough, neither GPU often surpassed about 80% usage at anytime during the game; in fact, whenever performance choked up and my frame rates plummeted, the monitoring graphs spiked DOWN, bottoming out at around 10% usage.

To me, this suggests my poor frame rates are being causes by the GPU just "not bothering", rather than the game pushing the GPU beyond its capacity; something I find a bit weird.

I would love any opinions on this matter, because it's really got me a little stumped.

Sorry for the super long post from a newbie on these forums; here's a link to my introduction thread for anyone who's interested (http://forum.overclock3d.net/showthread.php?p=618974#post618974), AND managed to get to the bottom of this post!

Peace out for now!

 

[SeekaX]

that is weird. i dont know which CPU you mean by "i7 hexacore", but i see no reason for a bottleneck. Crysis could be pushing the 4GB RAM a little, so since you got that kind of rig i doubt it will be much of a problem for you to spend 50$ on some new RAM. My guess though would be that the game is just shitty optimized and so are the drivers. Also the GPU load wouldn't drop because the game pushes the cards to much, benchmarking would be impossible then are there any repeating patterns in the game that might be involved in the fps drops?

 

[SavageCupcake]

Have you tried it without sli? might just be buggy with sli enabled

 

[Damien c]

It seem's there are allot of people having this issue so you are not alone.

http://www.mycrysis.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=65&t=59554&sid=fd4967018244ccc6d57848c278a5fe91

https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/532193/pc-games/crysis-3-performance-issue/

There maybe something in those threads to help you, but I know my SLI'd GTX 680's don't give me any issues that I have noticed but I will be looking at it again tonight in detail.

 

[SuB]

how much ram do you have on the 580's the 1.5gb or the 3gb?

It sounds like you're hitting the limit on the frame bugger, I have a very similar setup, hexcore, 580sli (3gb), 32gb ram (doesn't make a lot of difference) and i'm not seeing this issue AT ALL. with all settings high, except textures on very high, motion blur low, smaa x1. 1920x1200

Fairly steady 50+ upto 120fps and even 180 in places. There are some seriously complex looking layered shaders in this game so it is a bit up and down. but to lose your frame rate so badly screams frame buffer at that resolution.

Sli has been absolutely fine, with latest nvidia beta driver, and the evga sli profile patch. Really does run 100% fine

 

[Damien c]

how much ram do you have on the 580's the 1.5gb or the 3gb?

It sounds like you're hitting the limit on the frame bugger, I have a very similar setup, hexcore, 580sli (3gb), 32gb ram (doesn't make a lot of difference) and i'm not seeing this issue AT ALL. with all settings high, except textures on very high, motion blur low, smaa x1. 1920x1200

Fairly steady 50+ upto 120fps and even 180 in places. There are some seriously complex looking layered shaders in this game so it is a bit up and down. but to lose your frame rate so badly screams frame buffer at that resolution.

Sli has been absolutely fine, with latest nvidia beta driver, and the evga sli profile patch. Really does run 100% fine

I was thinking of Vram being a issue, but a bloke at work is having a similar issue with 2x 4Gb GTX 670's in SLI.

Looking at mine the last time I played it, I think my game was using around the 1.6Gb to 1.9Gb of Vram on each card according to MSI Afterburner.

 

[SuB]

Edit: Sorry I thought that was the OP, but it's not, removed this line

Which drivers are you using? Did you do a full cleanout of them etc?

I did a full, clean driver install (remove all components, restart in safe mode, driver cleaner, restart, install completely fresh beta drivers using custom settings, only physx and driver files, clean install, reboot) and then i installed EVGA's sli profile file update (google for that one) and I'm having 100% stability matey.

Have you checked your main ram usage? 4Gb is a little on the low side ? Are you running 32 or 64bit windows? and is it 7 or 8?

 

[Scoob]

I'd not suspect you running out of vRam unless you're using high-AA settings. I just use FXAA as I think the slight blur it gives to textures feel more real than the sharper look of 4xMSAA.

Anyway, using FXAA but with everything else Very High, I only see around 1,300mb vRam used typically - so easily within the 1.5gb limit of your 580's. Regardless, that 1,300mb is what my card is using rather than what it might need to render the given scene as GPU's cache stuff too, and delete it when needed - at least in most games I play.

I'd suggest your system ram of 4gb might make things a little tight. W7 can use 1gb on its own quite easily, so I suspect things are tight, but not critically so.

F.Y.I. for me, with my 2x GTX 680's @ 1920x1200 "very high" FXAA gameplay has been flawless so far. My CPU is only a 2500k @ 4.6, suggesting your i7 is more than up to the job.

Are you using the latest 314.07 WHQL drivers? Only these have a Crysis 3 profile apparently.

Scoob.

 

[alienware]

When you run out of vram you will encounter what Nvidia call 'Texture Streaming'. Basically instead of using vram (as you have run out) you will use your paging file on your hard drive. However this *shouldn't* (in theory) cause slow down it will just cause input lag (so basically your FPS shouldn't change but there will be a delay between what you do on your keyboard and the screen).

I used to get it in BF3 single player on my GTX 470 with everything on full and 4xFSAA.

What is probably causing your issue is that MSAA uses physical memory (especially on Nvidia) so does cause things to crawl.

I'm running GTX 670 in SLI and I thought I was getting slowdown but it turns out you just move slower on stairs lmao.

I know that there isn't a single GPU alive (other than Geforce Stupid (tm) AKA Titan) that can run this on max with 8xmsaa so you may have to just keep reducing settings until you get it right.

 

[alienware]

I'd suggest your system ram of 4gb might make things a little tight. W7 can use 1gb on its own quite easily, so I suspect things are tight, but not critically so.

I still play NFS : Shift and with 8xMSAA I got a message (when I was running 4gb) that told me I did not have enough physical memory for my chosen aliasing setting. For some reason MSAA dips into your physical memory it seems.

FXAA is much easier on your hardware.