GPU upgrade causes stutter

Hello,
I've recently upgraded my GPU to a Sapphire Radeon HD 7850 2GB GDDR5 OC and I've been having terrible and constant stutters in PoE ever since.

PC specs:
CPU: Intel i5-2500
HDD: WD green 1TB
RAM: 8GB kingston DDR3 (4*2)
MOBO: Intel dh61ww
GPU: Sapphire Radeon HD 7850 2GB GDDR5 OC
Display: BenQ T201W [max resolution: 1680*1050]

Prior to the GPU upgrade, I was using a Geforce GT520 on the same PC which is quite a low card. Even though I had bad frame rates during certain combat situations[with low settings], I never had any stutter issues.

With the 7850 I'm having consistent stutters ever few seconds ingame and it's very unplayable, and this occurs only in PoE. I have already tested this card on ~15 other games without any issues. At first I thought it was a driver issue since I was using the 12.9 catalyst and I had an issue with League of legends at the same time, but since then I've upgraded to the 14.1 beta catalyst and my issue with the other game was fixed but not in PoE.
I've also checked the GPU usage using MSI afterburner during my PoE gameplay and it's usually around ~50% even with Vsync off, I have tried every form of option available ingame, with putting everything on max or min, with Vsync off/on but the issue still occurs.

I've checked other threads and see that this an issue with AMD cards however none of these threads that I found are recent or solved so I'm wondering if there is something that I have missed.

What's your PSU and its wattage? Just asking because the new video card should be consuming quite a bit more power when under load and if your PSU isn't sufficient, it can cause problems and even the potential for damage to the card.

"

Nicholas_Steel wrote:

What's your PSU and its wattage? Just asking because the new video card should be consuming quite a bit more power when under load and if your PSU isn't sufficient, it can cause problems and even the potential for damage to the card.

Thermaltake Smart SE 630W PSU, I upgraded the PSU along the card and made sure it's more then sufficient.

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Drakier wrote:

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zheavy wrote:

Thermaltake Smart SE 630W PSU, I upgraded the PSU along the card and made sure it's more then sufficient.

I personally wouldn't get anything less than a 750W and even that can be low depending on the rig and the hardware in it. 630W just seems a tad on the low end, but I have no idea what your system setup is beyond what you listed.

750W is sufficient to OC 2x 7950s alongside being sufficient for the rest of the components. a 7850 however is mid-range budget card which requires 450-500W at the most.

Besides my issue is not a power issue since I've played crysis 2 and AC4 on this card without any issues among-st other games.

"

Disable Tessellation, check that you have a frame limiter set and vsync enabled, etc. Look around at some of the other threads on the topic and maybe something suggested will work for you.

Thanks for the tip i'll check that out.

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zheavy wrote:

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Drakier wrote:

"

zheavy wrote:

Thermaltake Smart SE 630W PSU, I upgraded the PSU along the card and made sure it's more then sufficient.

I personally wouldn't get anything less than a 750W and even that can be low depending on the rig and the hardware in it. 630W just seems a tad on the low end, but I have no idea what your system setup is beyond what you listed.

750W is sufficient to OC 2x 7950s alongside being sufficient for the rest of the components. a 7850 however is mid-range budget card which requires 450-500W at the most.

Besides my issue is not a power issue since I've played crysis 2 and AC4 on this card without any issues among-st other games.

"

Disable Tessellation, check that you have a frame limiter set and vsync enabled, etc. Look around at some of the other threads on the topic and maybe something suggested will work for you.

Thanks for the tip i'll check that out.

You're correct that you're more then okay in terms of PSU. As for your problem, I can't really think of anything other then power saving settings, which you should disable because this is one of the various things they can potentially cause in various (Not all) software.

Basically in the BIOS you want to disable anything that mentions C-State or C1E, you'll also want to switch Windows to the High Performance power profile (You configure this last step in Windows Control Panel).

Here's what I've tried so far:

-GGPK Defragmenter: I wasn't really doing this for the stutter reasons but rather out of curiosity since I've had PoE installed since launch of open beta and it reduced the game size almost by half.
-deleted all the cache files from "C:\Program Files (x86)\Grinding Gear Games\Path of Exile\ShaderCache" which were over 30k files.
-Tessalation off in CCC [however that resulted in nothing noticeable]
-Wiped clean the driver and made sure that nvidia drivers were also wiped and made a fresh install of catalyst 14.1 as my last one wasn't done properly. However I didn't install the ccc along with it as it was suggested somewhere on this forums.
-Playing the game on windowed full screen mode as of now.

All of this has resulted in significant improvement after some minor testing, the GGPK defragmentation being the most noticeable difference, I'm not even sure if it's relevant honestly.

The stutter still occurs frequently but is minor being 30-100ms frametime, rather then a constant 200ms+. 400ms frametime spikes still occur sometimes, I ran few tests so far and will need to see how it goes on in the next few days to provide accurate info.

One issue that I've noticed that I didn't before, during dominus fight at the second phase, my FPS drops to around 40-50 whenever he does the blood rain spell [vsync on]. And I have checked MSI afterburner, my GPU usage never went above 70%, so what gives?
EDIT: just ran a 6-man group in ledge and the same thing happens when there's a lot of particles, FPS would drop while theres many effects happening[not stutter] but my GPU usage would stay at ~50%

"

Basically in the BIOS you want to disable anything that mentions C-State or C1E

I've checked around the bios and all I could find power related which I couldn't really understand are the following:
-OS ACPI C2 report: enabled
-OS ACPI C3 report: disabled [both appeared after triggering a "custom" option related to intel tech]
-And this was further along the lines - PCIe ASPM: enabled [i'm not sure if this related]

Should I enable/disable any of these? I couldn't really find anything about C-State or C1E, sorry I'm not exactly a tech genius here.

"

you'll also want to switch Windows to the High Performance power profile (You configure this last step in Windows Control Panel)

Done. I didn't know about this one before and I'm a heavy windows user lol, I will have to run a few test runs and see how it goes.

So I've been playing for a few days in the new leagues and the stutter is still unresolved thus far. It's getting worse the more I progress into the game, and the more fast paced/flashy I get, the more often it happens.
The stutter is heavier then other places in the sceptre of god, but it still occurs a lot in other places, as well as opening strongboxes stutters me 99% of the time.

Here's my latest fight during dominus, I took a picture of the ingame charts + msi afterburner, unfortunately I couldn't SS the worst moments of it, you will see a constant FPS drop while my gpu is only half load.[VRAM ~1GB non-visible in picture] My CPU/RAM usage was also around 40-50%.

http://imgur.com/dhY57b1

This is after the fight was over and I was idling and I couldn't get to 60FPS.
http://imgur.com/C1mT2PZ

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zheavy wrote:

"

Basically in the BIOS you want to disable anything that mentions C-State or C1E

I've checked around the bios and all I could find power related which I couldn't really understand are the following:
-OS ACPI C2 report: enabled
-OS ACPI C3 report: disabled [both appeared after triggering a "custom" option related to intel tech]
-And this was further along the lines - PCIe ASPM: enabled [i'm not sure if this related]

Should I enable/disable any of these? I couldn't really find anything about C-State or C1E, sorry I'm not exactly a tech genius here.

Unsure what those settings do, does it provide any description of them? Also the settings I speak to will be in a CPU related area of the BIOS.

Thanks for the clarification. This is all I could find that is CPU related in the BIOS:

Performance> Processor Overrides:
-Processor Idle State: Low performance [I set this to High Performance tho I'm not sure if this has any effect on it]
-Intel Turbo Boost Technology: Disabled [I Enabled this, some options became active related to watts/volts/amps I kept things on default]

Power:
-Intel Dynamic Power Technology: Energy Efficient Performance (3options to choose from: Energy Efficient Performance/Off/Custom)
-Processor Power Efficient Policy: High Performance [If I set the above to Custom, the following 2 options appeared:]
-OS ACPI C2 Report: Enabled
-OS ACPI C3 Report: Disabled