Ok, so we can say, that it is not a stupid idea to buy a 7750 whrn I want to use Dolphin?
Perhaps I could not use it very well right now, but the next Catalyst should fix it?
If you havent bought it yet i'd suggest switching to Nvidia
Want to use it for a HTPC und nVIDIA have some problems with movie playback...(colourspace etc.)
I bought a 7750 finally and have been using it for a few weeks now. Dolphin's DX11 plugin is still having the same issues the topic creator stated it was having even with the 12.8 AND newest 12.9 beta drivers. Regardless of the internal resolution I set it to. D3D9 works great though, keeps consistent speed even at 3x native.
A really weird problem i've had though isn't even related to gaming. It's related to web browsing. I'll be watching flash videos and browsing image-heavy web pages and I randomly (but frequently) get black screen of death freezes. Screen will go completely black and computer will lock up. After anywhere from 3-25 minutes of watching flash video or loading a lot of large images at once. I have to reset by holding power down for five seconds to turn it off. This never happens with graphics heavy PC games (Arkham City, Crysis, etc) OR offline videos I watch. Only browser-related flash video and large image files loaded on web pages.
I did manage to fix these black screens of death. I had to do two things. One was downgrade my drivers to the 12.4 ones that came with the card's CD. The other thing I had to do was to go into the AMD Vision software, go into the Performance tab (and Overdrive), and manually set the fan speed to 55 and the power setting to 3%. The power setting is what made the system stable overall. I increased the fan speed in case the card was overheating but I don't think it's needed, higher fan speed alone didn't fix the issue. I heard someone mention using these settings on the Sapphire forums I think it was and it has worked for me since then. I cannot use these settings with any of the newer drivers either, has to be 12.4 for some reason.
I dunno whether this is a GPU or PSU issue either. Heard black screens of death can be caused by having either item defective. It would surprise me either way, but I am definitely running a crappy stock Dell 300 watt PSU with 18A on the 12V rail, so it's perfectly possible it's that. Don't have another PC with a better PSU to test the GPU in to see for sure. What I just can't figure is why the card is perfectly stable even with default power and fan speed settings in games (both extremely CPU and GPU intensive ones), it's just web-based flash video and large web images that cause the freezing. No issues in either intense PC games or emulators even if I game non-stop for hours (nor watching offline 1080p bluray movies either)...
Not sure whether I should pursue getting a replacement card considering I'm not sure whether it's the GPU or the PSU. I've no experience with having to return such a product and I'm not sure how they'd deal with someone having a PSU like mine.
Quote:I dunno whether this is a GPU or PSU issue either. Heard black screens of death can be caused by having either item defective. It would surprise me either way, but I am definitely running a crappy stock Dell 300 watt PSU with 18A on the 12V rail, so it's perfectly possible it's that. Don't have another PC with a better PSU to test the GPU in to see for sure. What I just can't figure is why the card is perfectly stable even with default power and fan speed settings in games (both extremely CPU and GPU intensive ones), it's just web-based flash video and large web images that cause the freezing. No issues in either intense PC games or emulators even if I game non-stop for hours (nor watching offline 1080p bluray movies either)...
Not sure whether I should pursue getting a replacement card considering I'm not sure whether it's the GPU or the PSU. I've no experience with having to return such a product and I'm not sure how they'd deal with someone having a PSU like mine.
It sounds highly unlikely that it's the PSU. But there is an easy way to check. Check your cpu load, gpu load, and system power draw while playing these flash videos and while playing PC games.
(10-17-2012, 11:03 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]It sounds highly unlikely that it's the PSU. But there is an easy way to check. Check your cpu load, gpu load, and system power draw while playing these flash videos and while playing PC games.
Did some testing like you advised. CPU load while watching 1080p youtube videos jumps anywhere around 47-55% according to Task Manager's CPU usage. Occasional leaps briefly to 60% or slightly higher (and the the low to mid 40's or slightly lower) but it generally stays around the low to mid 50's. GPU load using GPU-Z while watching the same videos is generally about 19-21%, sometimes slightly higher but never breaking past 24%.
Dolphin stresses both the CPU and GPU more. DKC Returns for example, i'm very much CPU bottlenecked due to my Athlon II X2 and the CPU activity remains at 100% most of the time. GPU load is around 28% with 3x internal resolution (no other enhancements). I can get that up to about 38% with 4x. Setting 4xSAA AND 4x internal res gets that number up to about 98% or higher on the GPU load (though then the game starts to lag rather badly and my CPU load drops to about 80-85% or so). Again though, I've yet to get any black screens in Dolphin regardless of how much I stress the CPU and GPU both. It's very odd because I'd imagine that Dolphin would be one of the more stressful things I could run on my computer with the right games and intensive settings applied.
Arkham Asylum i'm playing with all graphical effects on, detail on very high, and at 1920x1080 with vsync. Don't have anti aliasing or physx (physx is Nvidia only obviously). The game uses anywhere from 75-100% of my CPU depending on the situation. GPU load tends to hover around 40-44%.
Also tested Arkham City which is a much more strenuous game on my system. Still using high graphical settings, with 1920x1080 resolution, though again with AA turned off. No tessellation on either as it makes the game run much slower than i'd like. The CPU jumps from 85-100%. GPU load is a lot higher than Arkham Asylum, usually jumping anywhere from 80-97% in general.
Again I don't have any sort of black screen issues on any games or even anything outside of web-based useage. Only does it on flash videos and when viewing large pictures on web pages. And again i've not had any issues even with flash or web images since using 12.4 drivers with power settings at 3% and fan speed at 55%...
I'm not sure how to check the system's power draw. Is there a piece of software you can use to do this?
Then it's a defective card and/or driver.
Quote:power settings at 3%
I'm not very familiar with CCC so please explain to me what you mean by this.
Quote:I'm not sure how to check the system's power draw. Is there a piece of software you can use to do this?
At this point don't bother. If both the cpu and gpu are under higher load the system power consumption is going to be higher.
I've been having random black screens again while browsing web pages now, even though I thought I fixed the issue. Though oddly the last couple of freezes haven't involved pages with either flash video or even images, text only pages with almost no load on either CPU or GPU. Flash seems to still be ok, but I'm not dealing with a defective card that could get worse over time. Will pursue an exchange or whatever I can get.
Doubtful it's a driver problem either, tried 3 different driver versions all with the problem. And yes gaming is much more intensive on CPU, memory, and GPU than anything I do web-browsing related. Still no problems with games at all.
The Power Setting is in the overclocking settings of the AMD software. It's a slider that sits alongside settings to control the clock speeds of the card itself as well as fan speed. Normally the card is set to 0%. It can go as low as -30% or as high as 30%, with 0% being default. I set the slider to 3% which seemed to improve stability. I didn't overclock the card or anything (I actually tried underclocking it the other day to see whether that would help stability, it didn't). But as I've said now, black screens are beginning to crop up again.
These are the power settings-
http://imageshack.us/a/img820/1516/poweramd.jpg
Sounds like either a bad card or bad drivers to me. You'll know when you get the new card.
(10-20-2012, 07:45 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]Sounds like either a bad card or bad drivers to me. You'll know when you get the new card.
EDIT- I had a spare hard drive from an old PC so I went ahead and swapped them out (didn't want to reformat my old one unless I knew it would help). Started from scratch with a reformat and brand new Windows install. Installed the latest beta drivers for my Radeon and haven't yet had a black screen (power and fan speed are default too). I guess too early to say either way as I need to do some more extensive web testing. But I left a flash video on for well over 45 minutes and haven't had any problems yet. I usually can't even watch 25 minutes worth of flash. We'll see what happened but maybe it was just a software side problem after all. Would be nice if so. I'll keep testing and monitoring.
Sorry for bumping again but I have an update. I did an RMA and got my replacement card back today. The new card didn't fix anything, I'm still getting the exact same problem I was having previously. Random black screens while web browsing and watching flash video. So I guess I can assume it's probably not the physical card's fault. Unless I have some very shitty luck and just happen to have gotten two different cards with identical issues. While I guess anything is possible, I find that extremely unlikely.
So I assume now it's either a software or hardware issue with some other aspect of my PC. I will try reformatting my PC as soon as I can. That should eliminate any potential software or driver problems. Still completely possible it's just a software problem seeing as how the card doesn't give me any trouble when it's processing an actual game that stresses both the CPU AND GPU. This PC could do with a good rewrite anyways, haven't done this since I first got it (also had it set up to dual boot in both 7 and XP, the XP part won't boot anymore for some reason, so I guess there's always a chance there's some issue software wise).
If that doesn't do anything to alleviate my black screens of death, that would narrow it down to an issue with one or more of my physical hardware components. Most likely candidates are the power supply or the motherboard. A new PSU may or may not help my current problem, but it will at least further narrow the problem's origin down, not to mention provide me with another step at building up a new PC. If the PSU still doesn't help, I imagine the only other component that would probably have any effect on my problem would likely be the motherboard. And that's the point i'd basically have to bite the bullet and buy a new mobo, cpu, and ram.
Right after I submitted this post I got another black screen of death, ugh this sucks...