21 replies to this topic

[PanzerFurrry]

Greetings, dear pilots,

I have quite an out-dated PC at my home and I tend to upgrade later this year. In the mean time, I managed to obtain a new graphic card Radeon R7 260X OC 2GB GDDR5, which should be about 2-3 times faster in synthetic tests compared to my old one Radeon 5670 1GB.
However after installation and updating of drivers, I see no improvement in framerate at all in MWO. I actually think that framerate has slightly regressed during heavy engagements, since it falls below 20 FPS during combats more often.

I know my CPU is severely outdated and is the biggest bottleneck, my question is, will my performance stay the same or even regress, regardless of how fast GPU I put in? In other games and benchmarks I see a noticeable improvement in performance, but not in MWO.

My specs:
Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 3GHz (stock),
4 GB RAM DDR2 800 MHz,
GA-EP35-DS3R motherboard,
Windows 7 SP1 x64 (up to date, clean, no bloatware)
Graphic settings: DX11, 1920x1080, everything LOW/OFF except for Object Details and Texturing (MEDIUM).
AMD Catalyst 14.3 beta (latest).

Edited by PanzerFurrry, 13 April 2014 - 02:27 PM.

[Barbaric Soul]

Quote

will my performance stay the same or even regress, regardless of how fast GPU I put in?

pretty much, MWO needs a powerful CPU to run at high FPS and graphical settings. That E8400 is giving you all she has, it's just not enough for MWO

Edited by Barbaric Soul, 12 April 2014 - 02:46 AM.

[CSHubert]

PanzerFurrry, on 12 April 2014 - 02:22 AM, said:

My specs:
Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 3GHz (stock),
4 GB RAM DDR2 800 MHz,
GA-EP35-DS3R motherboard,
Windows 7 SP1 x64 (up to date, clean, no bloatware)
Graphic settings: DX11, 1920x1080, everything LOW/OFF except for Object Details and Texturing (MEDIUM).
AMD Catalyst 14.3 beta (latest).

As Barbaric said: The E8400 is the real bottleneck here. I upgrated in steps too and as you noticed the lack of performance boost untill I took my E8400 and motherboard and traded it to a z77 board running an I7 3770k...

[PanzerFurrry]

Thank you both for confirming my speculations. I was hoping I did something wrong with drivers or something, but I guess my fears were real.

I'll go hide in a corner now.

[glakr]

You could always overclock your CPU if you have a cood cooler on it and get a little more performance out of it.

[Nick Rarang]

Since your going to replace your MOBO and cpu soon, a little overclocking might help improve things a bit provided your system can take the extra heat and voltage. I saw a considerable performance advantage in MWO between over clocked and stock clocks as this game is severely CPU bound.

Also you might give the 13.12 whql drivers a try because I experienced smoother and more consistent frame rates compared to the latest 4.3 mantle drivers. Overclocking the video card does very little performance gains.

Just so your wondering, I have a lower instruction per clock cpu compared to modern Intel CPU's and my fx8350@ 4.0ghz was unplayable because of 13 fps dips even at lowest settings gs and overclocking it to 5.0ghz gave me dips of 40fps at very high settings. I also have an amd 7970 gpu.

[PanzerFurrry]

I did run with increased clock speeds (3.2/3.33 GHz) some time ago and did see good results in performance. However, although I have decent ventilation infrastructure, the stock cooler is not really adequate for such high thermal output. Later I decided to revert changes to stock frequencies, since running with 40-75% fan speed is much better for quality of life compared to 75-100% all the time.

EDIT: After some matches, I can safely say that there is a slight increase in performance in regards to previous graphic card. Game is running smoother in general, but the dropdowns in framerate in big battles are still present.
Thanks for the Catalyst 13.12 hint, will investigate!

Edited by PanzerFurrry, 12 April 2014 - 06:50 AM.

[Catamount]

Panzer, you can OC the E8400 to 3.6 on the stock cooler. Literally just go in, bump your bus to 400mhz (keep stock multiplier of 9), make sure the RAM is running 1:1 which will keep it at 800mhz (your FSB will become 1600, from 1333, being quad pumped), boot the computer up, and you're done.

Almost every E8400 out there can achieve this clock speed at stock voltage. If you're having thermal problems, it means you either need to just dust your cooler off, or get some new thermal paste. I ran those clocks on an E8400 for years.

Edited by Catamount, 12 April 2014 - 12:15 PM.

[Barbaric Soul]

An inexpensive aftermarket heatsink like the Cooler Master Hyper 212 will allow for OC'ing up to 4.25ghz. I ran my E8400 at 4ghz for almost two years before selling it when I upgraded to a Q9650.

http://www.ncixus.co...ER&promoid=1018

[Catamount]

a 4ghz E8400 would definitely perform decently for a dual core, probably well enough for good overall gaming. MWO would still hate it, but would at least become smooth enough to play well.

[Kaptain]

Lots of inexpensive options if you don't want to upgrade the mobo, ram and CPU

Aftermarket Air coolers are fairly inexpensive and will allow you to OC your dual core nicely
Q6700 Quad Cores can be had for $60 on ebay and almost all of them can hit 3.2ghz
Q9650 Quads Can be had for $150ish and depending on board and can hit 4.0
Qx9650 Quads sometimes go for as low as $150 and almost all of them can hit 3.8-4.2
Cheap Quad Core Zeon processors can be inexpensively adapted to work in 775 boards and they are server grade and OC well

If it helps I play on medium averaging 30fps
Qx9650 (free) at 4.0ghz
8gb ddr (No difference 4gb - 8 gb at all)
780i FTW at 16000mhz
770 4gb only because it was "free" to me. The GTX280 handled medium settings just fine

Also, DX11 drops FPS by 10-25 depending on CPU specs in my experience... Try DX9

Edited by Kaptain, 13 April 2014 - 08:39 AM.

[ItchyHairball]

Another pro tip: With those specs, drop your resolution to 1600x900, and gain 12-20 fps right off the bat. My wife has my hand-me-down rig and runs at 1366x768, and even at that rez the game is very playable, with steady 40+ fps.

Everyone seems to NEED to run games at max resolution, but a simple step-down in screen size makes a HUGE impact on FPS, and the visual difference is negligible. I'd rather have a 1600x900 screen and 40fps than 1920x1080 and 20 or less.

Give it a try.

Cheers!

Edited by ItchyHairball, 13 April 2014 - 09:12 AM.

[Catamount]

The problem is that dropping resolution only helps with GPU bottlenecks. It's not going to alleviate a CPU bottleneck :/

[Odins Fist]

This is another case of "Put NEW video card in OLD system, and not seeing the difference I wanted to see".
Older CPU, DDR2 800, and PCI-e 1.0

You're never going to see it with that system, sorry, but you're not.

The Gigabyte site says you have a PCI-e 1.0 slot as well, and it WILL gimp that card for picture quality.
EDIT: Well it didn't say PCI-e 2.0, it only listed as a PCI-e x16.
DOUBLE EDIT: PCI-e 1.0 slot confirmed.

Sorry, but it's as good as it will ever get with that card, even OCing that CPU a little won't make hardly any difference.

Edited by Odins Fist, 13 April 2014 - 11:17 AM.

[PanzerFurrry]

Alright, thanks everyone for valuable comments and input.
This system is scheduled to be replaced soon (after 6 years, I never even dreamed for it to last that long) and I am not really interested in spending funds and much time for semi-upgrades.

I managed to obtain a spare new graphic card R7, which should be much faster than previous one. This is true for most games and applications I run, where performance went up a lot. For example Hawken (High, 30+) and Path of Exile (High, ~60) received a significant boost in performance, so did Unigine Heaven test (from 5-8 to 15-20 avg FPS). Unfortunately this isn't the case for MWO, where improvements were negligible. I knew there would be diminishing return on performance, but I wasn't expecting zero improvement.

I am now running with 3.3 GHz CPU (366 FSB) and there is visible improvement in performance. Training grounds - River City - on top of the citadel 23 FPS compared to previous 18. So yeah, CPU is definitely a severe bottleneck.

Thanks again for the comments.

Edited by PanzerFurrry, 13 April 2014 - 02:13 PM.

[Nryrony]

PanzerFurrry, on 12 April 2014 - 02:22 AM, said:

Greetings, dear pilots,

I have quite an out-dated PC at my home and I tend to upgrade later this year. In the mean time, I managed to obtain a new graphic card Radeon R7 260X OC 2GB GDDR5, which should be about 2-3 times faster in synthetic tests compared to my old one Radeon 5670 1GB.

I basically experienced the very same thing.

A week ago I changed from my I7 3770K 32GB HD7970 to an GTX 780TI that runs @ 1200 with its boost (without my overclocking).

There is close to 0 improvement, the only real difference I noticed was that I tend to get more frames looking at the sky/wall.

However my old PC (AMD T90 @3.4GZ) that ended up reviving the HD7970 had the same experience, frames are here roughly around 30s while my I7 rig with the same card gets roughly 60.

So I gave overclocking a shoot, just a smooth boost from my I7 standard clock 3.5 to 4.2 - still no major improvements - except while looking at walls/sky (up to 200 now..).

My main issue are the frame drops / min frames, I usually get drops in every match down to 30ths for no apparent reason...

Looks like i got to tweak the cfgs ... -.-

[Ngamok]

It's still a good thing you upgraded the video card. Back when SWTOR came out I had a 5670 in my PC as well. Then I got rid of it and put in a GTX 550 Ti. Much better card and was 2 or 3 steps up according to Tom's Hardware Hierarchy chart. So at least now, if you upgrade the CPU, you still have a nicer card.

[MrWeaseluv Fetladral]

have to agree with the guys on this it is your CPU causing the issue as I am running the 1g HD5670 myself and am getting an average of 60+ FPS but then mine is paired with a nice AMD A10 CPU which gives any ATI GPU a major boost. On the same token I was getting 20-30 fps running an older amd 630 quad core with the same video card. Top of the line GPU will get you nowhere with a crap CPU.

[Grendel408]

PanzerFurrry, on 12 April 2014 - 02:22 AM, said:

Greetings, dear pilots,

I have quite an out-dated PC at my home and I tend to upgrade later this year. In the mean time, I managed to obtain a new graphic card Radeon R7 260X OC 2GB GDDR5, which should be about 2-3 times faster in synthetic tests compared to my old one Radeon 5670 1GB.
However after installation and updating of drivers, I see no improvement in framerate at all in MWO. I actually think that framerate has slightly regressed during heavy engagements, since it falls below 20 FPS during combats more often.

I know my CPU is severely outdated and is the biggest bottleneck, my question is, will my performance stay the same or even regress, regardless of how fast GPU I put in? In other games and benchmarks I see a noticeable improvement in performance, but not in MWO.

My specs:
Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 3GHz (stock),
4 GB RAM DDR2 800 MHz,
GA-EP35-DS3R motherboard,
Windows 7 SP1 x64 (up to date, clean, no bloatware)
Graphic settings: DX11, 1920x1080, everything LOW/OFF except for Object Details and Texturing (MEDIUM).
AMD Catalyst 14.3 beta (latest).

You need at least an i3 2500k for decent gaming with a 1gig GPU and at least 8 gigs RAM... your CPU is the bottleneck holding you back. I've got the Radeon HD6850, an i7 3770K quadcore (w/hyper-threading!), 8g Gskill, ASUS mobo, and a 750w PSU to power it all. Settings are Very High, 1920x1080 DX11... avg 38-48FPS depending on what's happening in-game. I used to have the i3 2500k CPU prior to the i7 chip... I noticed a 15-20 FPS increase.

Edited by Grendel408, 06 May 2014 - 03:33 PM.

[Barbaric Soul]

First off, the 2500k is a i5(4 cores, 4 processing threads), not a i3(2 cores, 4 processing threads).

Secondly, you claim going to the i7 3770k from the 2500k gave you a 15-20 fps gain? There is simply no way. MWO only uses four processing threads. The Ivy Bridge CPUs (3770k) is only at most, 10% faster than Sandy Bridge CPUs (2500k). If you saw a 15-20 FPS gain, there was something else causing issues with the 2500k system.

Oh, and BTW, I get a 60 FPS average with my sig rig, which just replaced a 2600k, which got the exact same performance in MWO with the same video card and only half the RAM..