*Please see bottom of post for PC specs*

Hi,

I recently purchased Crysis 3 and am somewhat disappointed by the performance of my single Asus Direct cu2 HD 7970. I am playing with most settings completely maxed out, barring anisotropic filtering which I have set to x4, fog on medium, and Msaa x4 high. With these settings I'm currently getting an average of about 30 fps with frequent dips into low 20's (even late teens in larger environments). I have even tried to clock the card to 1125/1575, and the performance is still way too low in my opinion. Only in smaller rooms do the frames go up to about 50, but in general they are all over the place causing a bit of a lag like feeling. In MP performance is better for some or other unknown reason, and I am getting 45-60 frames.

I am running the latest Catalyst 13.2 6 beta drivers which are supposed to be optimized for Crysis 3, so I cant imagine that this is a driver issue, unless AMD havent quite got the polish right yet. The only thing I can think of is that Crysis 3 is just a very demanding game when graphical settings are turned all the way up.

Having spent quite a bit of $ on my setup, I cant justify turning the settings down to compensate for poor performance. Instead i have been thinking of picking up another Asus HD 7970 Direct cu2 and running them in Xfire to improve general performance and frame rates.

Having said this, I do worry about a couple of things though, and I hope the community here at Toms hardware can help me out.

1. Bottleneck: This is the number 1 issue I am thinking of. I know that there are very few CPU's at the moment that will not bottleneck 7970's in Xfire, but how will my first generation stock i7 960 @ 3.2 GHZ hold up? I am not opposed to the idea of overclocking, but have never done so before when it comes to CPU's, and have also read that it did not do all that much to compensate. I understand that if benchmarks had to be taken it would be very clear how big the bottleneck is, but I'm more concerned with actual in game performance. Basically, will the increase in performance justify the $400 I am about to spend? Or will my CPU prove to be useless for powerful cards like these in Xfire? Its worth noting that I plan on upgrading my CPU as well, but only within the next generation or so.

2. Heat & noise: I used to run two Gigabyte windforce GTX 570's in SLI and I remember the amount of noise being made when those plastic windforce fans hit 100%, it sounded like my PC was taking off! Granted the Direct cu2 has much better cooling and bigger, better steel fans that run much quieter, I am still curious as to the level of heat I will be getting, and how noisy my system will run under load. Given the size (close to 3 slots) of specifically these 7970's, I will have to fit the cards rather close together and as such Im worried my temps will sky rocket. Would I have to resort to liquid cooling? I really would prefer not to resort to such measures quite yet. My case is a full tower Antec 900 with good airflow. Ambient temps can get quite hot at times as I live in Australia.

I am playing at 1080p resolution with the following setup: (I will be getting a better monitor capable of higher resolutions in the near future)

i7 960 @ 3.2 GHZ (stock)
Asus ROG Rampage 3 extreme
Asus HD 7970 Direct cu2
12GB Corsair Vengeance RAM (3x4GB)
Intel 330 120GB SSD
Corsair 1000w PSU
Antec 900 full tower case.
Windows 7 64bit

TLDR; Will the increase in performance justify the $400 I am about to spend with my current setup, or will it bottleneck way too much rendering the second GPU pretty much an un-needed expense?

Thank you for your time,
Regards,
BeastofWar

Very well written post, sir!

Your bottleneck is, as you suspected, your CPU/Chipset. If memory serves correctly, the i7 960 is on the x58 chipset and LGA 1366. If you're an Intel guy, aim for the i7 2600 series or the i7 3770 series CPU's as these will reduce the bottleneck considerably (64bit UEFI and unified NB circuit on CPU die). 12GB of RAM is more than enough, even at 1333MHz (which is higher than the stock clock of the memory controller on the initial run of the i7 line; they have 1066MHz memory controllers natively; anything else requires OC).

If you're an AMD guy, the FX 8350 on a 990FX chipset will do quite nicely and at a lower price point. I average about 35-40 FPS in the more open environments and higher than 60 in closed ones with my 8350 and 7970GHz.

As for the added 7970, you're likely to only see about 30-45% improvements with CFX and still have issues with games not optimized for it. You are better off trying to reduce your system bottlenecks the way I mentioned above first.

Cheers.

Thank you for the advice LordofNosgoth. I am definitely in the market to upgrade my CPU, I will just be very disappointed if I upgrade and Intel release the next generation within the next couple of months. Might be worth hanging back a little while and see what happens. Guess I will play around with the AA settings and hope I can get performance to an acceptable level, and upgrade in the near future.
Thanks again.

Disable vsync, use SMAA T2x

Darkchazz is right, try to change your graphic settings.
My configaration is a intel 920(no OC, same chipset as you) with gfx 570 and with the lowest settings on mp i get up to 100 Fps in MP.

I started to play with 30 Fps at res 1920*1080 and AA 1x.

I wont change the motherboard yet, because y can always buy a faster GPU(gtx670).