Your processor is the problemFollow

On the upside, the new motherboard can handle a Crossfire - the older one could not.

So if I see another 7770 on the cheap this year (since the card is officially a year old now) I'll grab a second one and see how two of em perform together.

You'll see very little increase in the benchmark because you'll just be more CPU-Bound.

I should clarify the 'Feeding a monster' analogue to best illustrate why:

Your CPU feeds your GPU with just a few bowls, which have to be emptied before they can be filled fresh again. There are some fun details about VSync and Triple Buffering that this analogue is also used to explain, but I digress.

Your GPU is damned hungry, but it can only eat so fast. If you put a small bowl in front of it, it empties it in half the time of a bowl twice the size. Resolution is your bowl: It takes even a monster GPU a little longer to empty a large bowl than a small one.

SLI/Crossfire is like having two mouths to feed, but they have to eat from the same bowl. They empty bowls comparatively faster, but refilling those bowls then becomes a problem. This is why SLI/Crossfire only sees performance gains at large resolutions: Bigger bowls to eat.

Your CPU has a pump to fill the bowls. It can pump a given amount of food with other factors like memory and PCIe bandwidth being like the size of the nozzle. The pump is run off the same engine as other stuff like Physics though, so it can be starved for power at times. The CPU can be filling one bowl while the GPU is eating another, but there's still time involved for the CPU to grab and 'wash' and fill another bowl.

The bowls are simply frames. Bowls eaten being frames per second.

When you go to SLI/Crossfire you have two, three, or even four cards eating from the same bowl. Most people think this would double the number of bowls eaten, but their CPU can't pump that much. The cards are starving for more, especially when the bowls are too small, because the CPU doesn't have time to clean and fill even one bowl before they ask for another. When you run a larger resolution then, the CPU spends less time 'washing dishes' and more time filling the larger bowl.

At any rate, the thread title is misleading: Your processor is the problem if your resolution is too low, and the benchmarks run a hilariously low resolution on some settings.

Edited, Sep 12th 2013 3:58pm by Raelix

Long as the capacitors remain intact, it will survive.

Which is amazing because heat can make them expand and rupture.

Me want lol

I also upgraded from a Phenom II x4 955 to a 4770K. :)

Prior to that, I upgraded from a GTX 460 to a GTX 660. Although the 660 is about 60% faster than the 460, I received little increase in FPS, as the 2-3 year old Phenom was holding me back.

Now with my 4770K running at 4.7Ghz, I'm glaring at my GTX 660 for becoming the huge bottleneck lol. Waiting next year for 800 series. :)

FWIW, the HD 7770 is significantly underpowered in a machine with an i7-4770k. The GPU is a generation behind mid-tier card, the CPU is one of the fastest consumer CPUs on the market. You've got a point about the resolution dependence, but even then, she'd see benefit from a GPU upgrade, though it's probably running well as-is.

A more balanced approach (for gaming in particular, at least) if you were buying both from scratch would be an i5-4670k and an HD 7950. Same cost together, just taking $100 out of the CPU and putting it into the GPU. The main difference is the lack of hyperthreading, which tends to be of little value in gaming.

Edited, Sep 12th 2013 8:48pm by bsphil

The times where SLI/CFX are only 20-30% increase in performance are lonh over.
Of course it's not an 100% increase but in most you'll get 80-95% increase when conditions are right.
Game is demanding enough, CPU is fast enough and so on.
Even microstuttering is becoming better and better these days!

I have dual 1080p monitors, for the record.

A third one would be nice but my desk isn't big enough.

since we're talking about processors.. how well would this one work then:

4th Generation Intel® Mobile Core i7 4700MQ (Customizable)

Great.

I have a first generation intel i7 950, and it screams. The game puts it at 10-15% tops, and I run nvidia surround on 3 28" monitors at 5760x1200.

Right now, there is a problem with SLI and ffxiv. The performance boost is 10-15% at best, and since I'm spanned across 3 monitors, i actually ahve to lower my settings from max on one monitor with one video card, to low/medium with 2 video cards and 3 monitors. I did not have this problem wtih 1.0, I could completely max everything on surround with my 2 cards, now I'm playing low to mid level? Something is very broken.

HOpefully they'll fix it though.

Ahh sorry, that's a good point. The benchmark I downloaded a couple days ago doesn't even have a "medium" setting, and the default resolution is 1280x720.

Yes These are my personal scores.

System:
Core i7-950 @3.65ghz
24gb DDR3 1600 tripple Channel
2x Radeon 5850 1gb

Will do some tests with higher CPU clocks tomorrow.
Resolution was 1900x1200 at Max Settings

So, I bought an HD7950 on sale the other day to replace my HD6850.

I play at 1680x1050 for now, and have the GPU overclocked to 1000Mhz core/1400Mhz mem. Powering this is still my i5 4670k @ 4.2 Ghz and 8 GB DDR3.

Even with a close to top-of-the-line processor, I still average around 50 FPS in the market areas in town, with the GPU usage close to 70%.

This game (as with most MMOs) is definitely CPU limited when large numbers of characters are on screen.

On a side note, the CPU usage peaks around 80% on a quad-core. SE did a pretty good job with the multithreading, it seems.

Edited, Oct 1st 2013 5:36pm by Pickins