109 replies to this topic

[xWiredx]

Rogue Jedi, on 14 October 2014 - 05:44 AM, said:

snip

I'd be willing to bet if you used FRAPS to benchmark, you would see averages below 60 almost all of the time, and dips into the 20s depending on the map. River City seems to be a little more taxing than some other maps, so pay attention to your performance there.

SSDs do not give you massively better frame rates unless you were on some really piss-poor 5400RPM drive with read errors abound before. That would mean you're disk I/O bound, and that isn't common with gaming at all (including MWO). Memory I/O bound situations are almost as rare (once you go above DDR3-1600 the improvements are 1-2FPS and never noticeable, but in DDR3, I would prefer 1866 or better simply because it's so easy to get). Putting a nice OC on that Thuban chip would be a good way to boost your mins.

The fact is that MWO loves to nom on CPU cycles. OP should go for the best he can possibly get if he's going to stick with AMD (which seems like an 8370 might be it). Intel is essentially king when it comes to this game. The GPU may still be holding him back, but that CPU should probably be the first thing OP tackles.

[Flapdrol]

I wouldn't recommend the 8370 (or 9590BE), that kind of money gets you the cheapest i5 + cheap mobo, would probably be much better for minimum fps.

[Alreech]

Sprouticus, on 13 October 2014 - 12:58 PM, said:

There are some decent 8300 series CPU's at 95 or 125 MW. I think my power supply can handle the extra load without issue. Those are in the $150-200 range. Plus a separate fan I assume.

The FX-6350 is $50 cheaper though. If I get the fx-8320, will I end up GPU bound and waste my cash?

Check your mainboard docs about how much power the CPU is allowed to draw. Some cheap AM3+ mainboards only support 95 watt.
If you check the Thread ninjitsu linked it seems that MWO support out of the box only 6 CPU cores, so a FX 6350 should give you the same performance as a FX 8320.
But the FX 8320 is still an option if yo have the money, because it has a sligthly better performance in Games like Crysis and Battlefield 4.
Anyway you would have to use a good CPU cooler and some good fans for the airflow in the case.

I have an Artic Cooling Extreme 3 on a Phenom II X4 BE 965 (125 Watts) and get only moderate noise during gaming and no noise on the windows desktop (Arctic specs says "up to 150 Watts").

Edited by Alreech, 14 October 2014 - 10:08 AM.

[Big Tin Man]

Rogue Jedi, on 14 October 2014 - 03:52 AM, said:

Assuming you do not already have one a Solid State Drive would probably get you a better performance boost than a new CPU or GPU, however in direct answer to your question the CPU is weaker than the GPU.

my PC was too slow to play MWO at above medium graphics at a decent frame rate before adding an SSD (especially on caustic for some reason I always got lower framerate on that map), I upgraded the RAM (from 4gb sticks to 16GB) and the GPU (from a Radeon 5870) but this gave little performance boost so as a last resort before buying a new CPU and Motherboard I added an SSD, I was then able to up the resolution to 1080p (from 1600x900) and still set it to higher graphics quality

my PC current specs
AMD Phenom 2 x6 1075t (3ghz) CPU
16GB DDR3 RAM
Geforce GTX 560 GPU
120 GB SSD

runs MWO on custom high/very high graphics settings usualy at 50+ 40+ FPS

the same trick worked on an older PC with a Athlon 2 x3 2.7GHZ CPU

edit: factual correction

This was my exact experience as well. DV, go ahead and hate on it, but here's my progression

i7 930 (old school!) Not oc'd
Radeon 5670 HD
6 GB DDR3 1600
WD something 7200 rpm drive

Got 20-30 FPS on low settings, 1600x900. Unplayable on 1920x1080

Then round 1 of upgrades
Radeon 5670-->evga GTX 750
6GB DDR3 1600-->12 GB DDR3 1600

Improved to 30 FPS on mid settings, 1600x900 unplayable on high, 15-20 on mid @ 1920x1080

Round 2 of upgrades
WD 7200 RPM HD --> SSD (OS and MWO on SSD)

Improved to 40-60 FPS on very high settings 1920x1080.

Go ahead and keep telling me the SSD upgrade wasn't the best bang for my buck. Round 3 of upgrades will finally do the CPU and MB. Just waiting on funds for the final round.

[ninjitsu]

Did you do a fresh install of Windows when you upgraded your video card and ram?

Did you test your old drive for errors?

[Oderint dum Metuant]

Big Tin Man, on 14 October 2014 - 10:12 AM, said:

This was my exact experience as well. DV, go ahead and hate on it, but here's my progression

i7 930 (old school!) Not oc'd
Radeon 5670 HD
6 GB DDR3 1600
WD something 7200 rpm drive

Got 20-30 FPS on low settings, 1600x900. Unplayable on 1920x1080

Then round 1 of upgrades
Radeon 5670-->evga GTX 750
6GB DDR3 1600-->12 GB DDR3 1600

Improved to 30 FPS on mid settings, 1600x900 unplayable on high, 15-20 on mid @ 1920x1080

Round 2 of upgrades
WD 7200 RPM HD --> SSD (OS and MWO on SSD)

Improved to 40-60 FPS on very high settings 1920x1080.

Go ahead and keep telling me the SSD upgrade wasn't the best bang for my buck. Round 3 of upgrades will finally do the CPU and MB. Just waiting on funds for the final round.

Hating on it is a strong term; it's just an impossibility; a SSD writes and retrieves data; it has no graphical or computational aspect.

It is a hard drive. It is not responsible for you beige able to go from medium to high graphics.

Having a fresh install; less bloat and resource drain and removing corrupt sectors and corrupt or damaged files sure these will help.

But a hard drive itself does not increase your FPS

Edited by DV McKenna, 14 October 2014 - 11:22 AM.

[xWiredx]

Correct. The only way a drive can directly affect things like that is if it has a ton of read errors that are causing CPU cycles to be tied up with disk I/O and things are becoming corrupted. I can't believe people spout such nonsense (especially after I said this on page 1...).

[Sprouticus]

Thanks everyone for the advice.


I am going to test with MSI afterburner, maybe tonight! See what I can see. If that doesn't give good/consistant results, Ill try the Overlay to see the GPU usage.

FYI, I am not going to upgrade this machine. I am looking for a one shot simple upgrade where I dont have to rebuild my machine, the OS, or the mobo. If/when I do an upgrade, it will be from scratch! And probably Intel)

As for overclocking, I know I tweaked it when I first got the CPU, but if I remember I only got it up to 4.0 before it got unstable. I didn't want to fool around with a high end cooling option (this WAs a budget mahcine after all) so I just left it at 4.0 at the std voltage.

My Mobo supports up to 140W so Im good with the 125W 8350 if I decide to go the CPU route.



Thanks again for all the advice guys. I learned a lot. Now I have to go read Lordred thread...

[Big Tin Man]

ninjitsu, on 14 October 2014 - 10:26 AM, said:

Did you do a fresh install of Windows when you upgraded your video card and ram? Did you test your old drive for errors?

Old drive was tested for errors, nothing to speak of found prior to any upgrades. New drive was a mirror of the old because I'm too lazy to reinstall all of the other programs I run, so no fresh install at any point. Win 7 64 bit is supposed to keep things nice and defragmented, so I didn't check that.

Impossible or otherwise, the results speak for themselves. I do agree that on paper upgrading my GPU and RAM should have had a larger impact on performance (derp, that's why I upgraded that FIRST), but my experience says otherwise. I don't claim to understand the reasons, but I do know the results.

SSD's are cheap and everyone should have one simply for the other advantages of having an SSD. Take $80 out of your top tier GPU budget and buy and SSD. Your performance will go farther.

Edited by Big Tin Man, 14 October 2014 - 01:23 PM.

[Catamount]

I have heard people claim performance improvement from faster storage, anecdotally, but I did a controlled test for this supposed effect (even comparing a very fast SSD to a Caviar Green!), and got no corroborating results, whatsoever.

http://mwomercs.com/...57#entry3494757

I certainly won't knock getting an SSD, when and only when all other components have been taken care of completely, but I would personally much rather spend $80 more on a GPU in a build than get an SSD if it's a dichotomy, in almost any situation. I only bought an SSD once I had spent my heart out everywhere else.

Edited by Catamount, 14 October 2014 - 01:28 PM.

[Big Tin Man]

Catamount--I'm curious what CPU you were running for those tests.

Not that it makes sense on paper, but I'd bet there is a correlation from the anecdotal evidence that SSD's provide a more noticeable boost for slower, older CPU's.

[Catamount]

Well nothing in my results would disagree with that - I was using my 3570k@4.2, but I just don't see how that could be the case.

I could easily test this in a year's time, once I'm -theoretically- settled down, but until then it would have to fall on someone else to see. If MWO had some never-before-seen gaming behavior where an SSD actually did something, it could be worth bringing up, but only once we know for sure who it would actually benefit.

If you still had your drive around, you could theoretically do some testing, but it would either require you to put Windows onto the slow HDD, dual-boot, install MWO there, then compare OS+MWO on each drive like I had originally hoped to do, or just toss MWO onto the slower drive and run it. Either approach introduces extraneous variables that are unlikely to but not incapable of having an effect. Why don't you start by putting MWO onto the old drive? Come up with a consistent beginning and end to record on, run at least three matches in the same mech and mode with the same start/end point for FRAPS benchmarking (I ran from the HUD appearing after mech startup to the instant the last person died, moving to another HUD of the same mech or weightclass when I died)

Edited by Catamount, 14 October 2014 - 02:11 PM.

[Big Tin Man]

Catamount, on 14 October 2014 - 02:11 PM, said:

Well nothing in my results would disagree with that - I was using my 3570k@4.2, but I just don't see how that could be the case. I could easily test this in a year's time, once I'm -theoretically- settled down, but until then it would have to fall on someone else to see. If MWO had some never-before-seen gaming behavior where an SSD actually did something, it could be worth bringing up, but only once we know for sure who it would actually benefit. If you still had your drive around, you could theoretically do some testing, but it would either require you to put Windows onto the slow HDD, dual-boot, install MWO there, then compare OS+MWO on each drive like I had originally hoped to do, or just toss MWO onto the slower drive and run it. Either approach introduces extraneous variables that are unlikely to but not incapable of having an effect. Why don't you start by putting MWO onto the old drive? Come up with a consistent beginning and end to record on, run at least three matches in the same mech and mode with the same start/end point for FRAPS benchmarking (I ran from the HUD appearing after mech startup to the instant the last person died, moving to another HUD of the same mech or weightclass when I died)

I wish I had time to experiment like this. I haven't touched the old drive since I mirrored it a couple months back, so I could totally do this, if I had a free afternoon.

Kids, work, wive, blah.

[ninjitsu]

Buy me an SSD and I'll make this happen!

[Sprouticus]

ok here are some numbers from MSI after burner. 2 drops, both on the new map. The lines are the rough start./stop times. Sorry for the crappy lines, I was in a hurry.

https://www.dropbox....pu_cpu.JPG?dl=0

As you can see, neither the GPU nor CPU are pinned all the time, although the GPU gets hit hard in the first match (less than the 2nd). . The frame rate is still variable though.

With this info I am leaning towards a new video card. A

Edited by Sprouticus, 14 October 2014 - 06:42 PM.

[Sprouticus]

If I go with a GPU upgrade, which should I use if I am limited by my Mobo. My best slot is a PCIx 2.0 (16)

I am thinking Nvidia, but does it matter?

[ninjitsu]

Sprouticus, on 14 October 2014 - 06:48 PM, said:

If I go with a GPU upgrade, which should I use if I am limited by my Mobo. My best slot is a PCIx 2.0 (16)

I am thinking Nvidia, but does it matter?

Go for the best card you can afford. There's no true benefit for going AMD or Nvidia. There are a lot of people loyal to one brand but they trade blows pretty evenly at competing price levels. If you want to go SUPER high end, the Nvidia 980 is top dog at the moment.

[Big Tin Man]

^^ Agreed, no major difference between AMD and Nvidia. Completely disagree on buying the best you can afford with how quickly they drop in value and the fact that you said you were not doing a piecemeal upgrade. The GTX 7xx series took a huge price drop when the 900's came out. That's probably a much better price/performance point for what you have. Hell, that 980 is worth more than his entire system.

And take the other $75 you would have spent and get a SSD.

[Flapdrol]

Your gpu is only maxed out during a small portion of the first game, during which you probably have decent fps. The second match it hovers at around 60%

You are cpu limited, don't get a new gpu.

Edited by Flapdrol, 14 October 2014 - 11:44 PM.

[Catamount]

There will be a time and a place to really look at a new GPU, but right now, that CPU is easily what's holding you back in MWO.

You can adjust the GPU's performance by adjusting in-game settings. While it's almost uniquely true in MWO that you can help the CPU bottleneck a little with settings, for the most part you can adjust that by either getting a new CPU or not playing the game.

Take care of the CPU side of things for now, and you'll be fine in gaming in general for awhile before the GPU really becomes all that pressing, much moreso in MWO where even incredibly underpowered GPUs can squeak by at often-decent settings.