Ati 7970 // help // frames killing me

I bought a MSI R7970 and I know this card destroys games.. I'm having a very weird issue that I cant pin point the cause of... Some games I can play butter smooth and other games have shakey frames.. It's not the low fps kind of frame rate issue because i'm getting 200+ frames.. It's the in between shakiness / frame snapping / objects shaking.. It's driving me beserk.. I cant tell if this is a common ati issue which i doubt, a driver issue or possibly a bios option.. i've tried 13.1, 13.2 and 13.3 catalyst drivers. I can play games like guild wars 2, dead space 3 and torchlight 2 perfect.. games like battlefield 3, crysis 3 and skyrim are some i'm gonna mention.. it doesn't matter if i have the graphics at the lowest possible graphic setting with all the effects(aa,af) etc.. turned off or everything cranked to the max.. the same issue persists... i've tried stuff like limitting fps with msi afterburner to 60,59,58 30 etc.. i've tried window mode and full screen and i've also tried stock bios settings, stock clock and 4.7 overclock as well as stock video clock and overclock.. 

i'm running a intel 3770k, sabertooth z77, msi r7970 lightning overclock edition, corsair vengeance 1600mhz, kingston hyperx 3k and nzxt hale82n 750watt power supply.. i feel this setup should be destroying video games.

 i'm half tempted to buy a nvidia 670 next week just to see if i get the same issues..

i'm gonna record some videos and upload them on youtube in a bit.

the issue only exists when panning with a mouse.. i've tried other mouse and other monitors of diferent hz and cables of different types.

NO! DON'T GET A GTX 670! IT IS WORSE THAN THE 7970! 

Right, the choppiness COULD, it just maybe screen tearing from extreme FPS. If there is Vsync on, use it but it will kill your FPS to fit your monitor. 

I haven't heard of this issue before but try disabling Intel HD 4000 graphics from your CPU. If you shown video it would help but I know we will see some soon.

This could be a seperate issue entirely, but I'm going to explain something that happened to me recently (it could also contain some false information as I'm not entirely educated on the subject, all I can say is that this did indeed help)

I recently went from a Geforce 9800 GTX, to an 7870, and although frame rates were better.. there was always this "choppiness" that I couldn't get to go away, I'd have a constant 60+ frames, but it would seem to stutter (this sounds like your issue).

So I started looking into it a bit, and as far as I read, is that radeon cards have worse "frame latency", the delivery of the frames isn't as consistent as geforce cards, or something like that anyway.

After some research I heard some people had fixed their frame latency with RadeonPro, so I decided to try it out as well, and it most definitely helped. It was pretty easy to setup, the only thing that I did, was use the "Adaptive Vsync". I made a global profile but for whatever reason the settings weren't taking effect.. so I had to set it a profile for each game.. but instead of doing all of them I realized I could just right click on one of my profiles and "apply now", it saved me the hassle of creating the other profiles.

The only things I changed in my profile was under the "Tweaks" tab. I ticked triple buffering, put on "Always on (Double Vsync). And under the "Advanced" tab I set "Flip Queue Size" to 0 (this one was needed for Diablo 3, I think, for the stuttery/choppiness to go away, but I've just used it for all my games)

http://www.radeonpro.info/download/ is the download link

I do not know if this is your issue, my issue disrupted most of my games, but there were one or two that were fine without using RadeonPro (Blackops 2 was one of them), it doesn't hurt to try I guess.

I had issues trying to get this problem to show up in video.. I resorted to using my phone to record it on a kickstand...

i can walk fine forwards, backwards, left or right... that is smooth... when i go to move the mouse/camera while walking in any direction then the issue shows up.. this isn't limited to skyrim.. i've seen it in battlefield 3, bioshock infinite and it's noticable on crysis 3 if i try to look for it. 

skyrim:
http://youtu.be/ykRnzQhGAog

bf3:

http://youtu.be/Xx7lkkW8y5U

 

on the tv it looks way worse than it does here in these videos... the mouse lag+frame latency causes everything to vibrate... 

I tried radeon pro, while it's a cool program the options only seem to affect the performance in a negative way.. i've messed with the program for 2+ hours trying different combinations just to make sure...

670 may not be have as high of an fps as a 7970.. But if it is smoother I would definitely sacrifice those 10 frames. I have the iGpu disabled as well as render standby disabled...

i've ruled out video cards at this point.. i tested the iGpu HD4000 and an nvidia 9500gt on the lowest graphics settings and got the same effect.. This must be an os, bios/motherboard or memory issue. 

I was having some issues in games like BF3. My roads were green and there was some stuttering issues. I thought it was because I need more Vram in my card.

So anyways I googled the problem with the green roads in BF3 and I found this forum topic about a certain windows update. http://battlelog.battlefield.com/bf3/forum/threadview/2832654490186361812/.

The windows update is    KB2670838 . I deleted this update and it got rid of the green roads. I also found out that by deleting this update it completely cured the stuttering issues in games like Metro 2033, Far Cry 3, Crysis 2. I thought it was a Vram problem but it turned out to be that update.

I don't know if you have it installed and if you do I don't know if it will fix your problem. I just thought I would share this because it helped me out and in more than one game.

It may also be that your framerate is still too high for the monitor to display properly. If you have the setting available, you should set the card to cap your frames at whatever the refresh rate of your monitor is (60 fps for 60 Hz and 120 for 120Hz.) If your refresh rate is higher than the minimum framerate that you have within the game then cut that number in half and cap it there. So if you don't reliably get 120 FPS, but you have a 120 Hz monitor and you happen to be able to consistently get 60FPS, then you should cap it at 60, the graphics card will sort out sending duplicate frames to fill in the additional refresh cycles. 

Adding to the comment from Madgnad, since Windows acts as an abstraction layer, if it has an update that interferes with how it handles the bus relegation and interrupt requests, it can cause some really weird things to happen. It may also be one of the reasons why games and benchmarks seem to run better in Windows 8.

I'll be honest, those videos are seemingly the exact same issue I had, I'm sorry that it didn't fix it. Unfortunately that was the only idea I had, was hoping it worked for ya =/.