BF3 CPU bottleneck? Really?

[moonbogg]

Originally Posted by fugtigkost

http://www.twitch.tv/nicz_dk

and he is using these settings https://dl.dropbox.com/u/62958880/Untitled.png

his hardware is in the twitch info, look it out, the fps he is recording with is over 100 all the time

Settings explain it all. High end rigs can hold 60fps ALMOST all the time on ultra and often times well above. Its just on a few maps with 64 players where it dips below at times. It was never an issue, but was just merely academic. In order to hold 60 all the time we'll ned faster CPUs, but like someone else stated, we will be ready to move on to BF4 pretty soon after those CPUs come to market.

[Fx1]

Graphics settings shouldnt affect a CPU bottleneck. Ultra wouldnt matter would it?

Even on medium you would still see less than 60 fps

I play medium on my 460 SLI and i never see below 60 fps on a 4ghz 950 i7

[skipsneeky2]

Originally Posted by Fx1

Graphics settings shouldnt affect a CPU bottleneck. Ultra wouldnt matter would it?

Even on medium you would still see less than 60 fps

I play medium on my 460 SLI and i never see below 60 fps on a 4ghz 950 i7

Same can be said about when i had my 7850 installed,kill msaa and motion blur and it was smooth sailing pushing 60+ at 1920x1200.

My gtx670 can do high no msaa with 60+ which i think is a perfect mix of quality and performance,the difference in quality from medium to high is obvious and huge but from high to ultra,most people are hard pressed to find a major difference.

[Fx1]

Originally Posted by skipsneeky2

Same can be said about when i had my 7850 installed,kill msaa and motion blur and it was smooth sailing pushing 60+ at 1920x1200.

My gtx670 can do high no msaa with 60+ which i think is a perfect mix of quality and performance,the difference in quality from medium to high is obvious and huge but from high to ultra,most people are hard pressed to find a major difference.

It could be a driver issue then with one of the more major effects. My i7 has between 6 and 8 threads active when i play and never maxes out even on 64 player servers.

[skipsneeky2]

Originally Posted by Fx1

It could be a driver issue then with one of the more major effects. My i7 has between 6 and 8 threads active when i play and never maxes out even on 64 player servers.

Only in a few parts of some maps can people find these dips,it could be a cpu bottleneck or a game bug.

God behold people with 3 gtx680s in tri sli are in the middle of hell with half the world exploding with a army of tanks,rpg noobs and a near by havoc disabling your tank with tons of smoke,debris in the air and flames all while holding 60fps,but take a casual walk on the top of gulf of man on a empty server and find these dips...what gives ?

[Fx1]

Originally Posted by skipsneeky2

Only in a few parts of some maps can people find these dips,it could be a cpu bottleneck or a game bug.

God behold people with 3 gtx680s in tri sli are in the middle of hell with half the world exploding with a army of tanks,rpg noobs and a near by havoc disabling your tank with tons of smoke,debris in the air and flames all while holding 60fps,but take a casual walk on the top of gulf of man on a empty server and find these dips...what gives ?

Probably poor optimisation or a bugged graphic. Bad dips in FPS are always bugs and not bottlenecks. There is nothing that goes on in BF3 that can suddenly choke a CPU. All of the fast action is server side anyway. Thats why when u get shot and get around a corner you drop dead even though no way can u die from bullets that bend around corners.

If you want to test CPU bottlenecks then put the game on Low settings and turn off Vsync and you will see the bottlenecks

[moonbogg]

Originally Posted by Fx1

Graphics settings shouldnt affect a CPU bottleneck. Ultra wouldnt matter would it?

Even on medium you would still see less than 60 fps

I play medium on my 460 SLI and i never see below 60 fps on a 4ghz 950 i7

I didn't think so either until I discovered that they do. Ultra puts more strain on the CPU, not just the GPU. The CPU bottleneck is a lot less on medium....correction, there is still a CPU bottleneck, but your CPU is able to pull more frames on medium. With 2x GTX670's at 1920x1080 I am CPU bottlnecked no matter what in this game, but the CPU can pull more frames on medium. The GPUs are used about 50-60% on ultra and even less on medium.

[skipsneeky2]

For you 3930k owners,how is the cpu scaling as far as usage across cores and threads?

Got my 3930k@4ghz and i noticed only 6 threads in task manager are active,the other 6 are completely idle,running all high no msaa@1920x1200 with a single gtx670.

Is the game smart enough to know which threads are cores and which are hyperthreading?

[Frogman_190]

Hi guys , I've been reading this thread the last two days and the info has been really helpful.

I've been doing fraps logs of bf3 for some time and i'm going to post them here. All of these are in 64 player servers and are a mixture of maps.

2012-09-09 17:46:25 - bf3
Frames: 15863 - Time: 172772ms - Avg: 91.815 - Min: 57 - Max: 201

2012-09-09 17:55:13 - bf3
Frames: 17315 - Time: 205890ms - Avg: 84.098 - Min: 54 - Max: 174

2012-09-09 18:01:17 - bf3
Frames: 23970 - Time: 295544ms - Avg: 81.105 - Min: 56 - Max: 134

2012-09-09 18:09:00 - bf3
Frames: 12604 - Time: 155018ms - Avg: 81.307 - Min: 60 - Max: 119

2012-09-09 18:14:35 - bf3
Frames: 20373 - Time: 251848ms - Avg: 80.894 - Min: 52 - Max: 124

2012-11-11 08:41:01 - bf3
Frames: 9021 - Time: 63524ms - Avg: 142.009 - Min: 109 - Max: 198

2012-11-18 15:31:51 - bf3
Frames: 286656 - Time: 2700674ms - Avg: 106.142 - Min: 24 - Max: 202

2012-11-19 16:34:51 - bf3
Frames: 110727 - Time: 1323575ms - Avg: 83.658 - Min: 47 - Max: 201

2012-11-19 16:59:55 - bf3
Frames: 170605 - Time: 1685435ms - Avg: 101.223 - Min: 31 - Max: 201

2012-11-20 17:17:43 - bf3
Frames: 64534 - Time: 567891ms - Avg: 113.638 - Min: 58 - Max: 201

2012-11-22 13:14:29 - bf3
Frames: 113983 - Time: 1171692ms - Avg: 97.281 - Min: 57 - Max: 179

2012-11-22 13:44:29 - bf3
Frames: 197876 - Time: 1875476ms - Avg: 105.507 - Min: 53 - Max: 200

2012-11-23 13:02:48 - bf3
Frames: 4645 - Time: 42776ms - Avg: 108.589 - Min: 58 - Max: 164

2012-11-23 13:25:06 - bf3
Frames: 142342 - Time: 1650163ms - Avg: 86.259 - Min: 50 - Max: 195

2012-11-23 13:59:32 - bf3
Frames: 76464 - Time: 809115ms - Avg: 94.503 - Min: 52 - Max: 166

2012-11-23 19:03:13 - bf3
Frames: 84777 - Time: 947253ms - Avg: 89.498 - Min: 54 - Max: 160

2012-12-28 20:06:29 - bf3
Frames: 33530 - Time: 313343ms - Avg: 107.007 - Min: 56 - Max: 1962012-12-29 19:18:27 - bf3
Frames: 104939 - Time: 945974ms - Avg: 110.932 - Min: 27 - Max: 201

2012-12-29 19:34:21 - bf3
Frames: 148025 - Time: 1422261ms - Avg: 104.077 - Min: 27 - Max: 201

2012-12-29 19:58:07 - bf3
Frames: 51769 - Time: 489796ms - Avg: 105.695 - Min: 64 - Max: 199

2013-01-11 17:10:38 - bf3
Frames: 5475 - Time: 60591ms - Avg: 90.360 - Min: 67 - Max: 201

2013-01-11 17:13:26 - bf3
Frames: 66310 - Time: 701506ms - Avg: 94.525 - Min: 59 - Max: 157

2013-01-11 20:38:27 - bf3
Frames: 89987 - Time: 947534ms - Avg: 94.970 - Min: 58 - Max: 201

2013-01-11 21:40:20 - bf3
Frames: 20814 - Time: 212551ms - Avg: 97.925 - Min: 62 - Max: 146

2013-01-11 21:43:54 - bf3
Frames: 82596 - Time: 797945ms - Avg: 103.511 - Min: 54 - Max: 201

2013-01-12 10:33:27 - bf3
Frames: 75145 - Time: 775169ms - Avg: 96.940 - Min: 56 - Max: 201

2013-01-12 10:48:19 - bf3
Frames: 121296 - Time: 1275230ms - Avg: 95.117 - Min: 54 - Max: 196

These have been recorded using an i5 3570k oc to 4.4ghz for the first few and 4.6 about halfway through. Also running 2x GTX 670 FTW, 8gb Tridentx ram and the game is on ssd.

Seem as though these results represent what most people are experiencing , the 27fps minimums are from loading screens, sorry.

Just today I had a friend who has i7 3770k (oc to 4.5) and 2x GTX680 run a benchmark whilst we were playing in the same squad 64 players and our results were near enough identical , his minimum was 53 and mine was 54.

Hope these help!

[Frogman_190]

I should mention that we both run the game in Ultra

[Puppies04]

Originally Posted by Black96ws6

2. When you look at CPU utilization in Windows, you will not see CPU usage @ 100% (unless your CPU is getting hammered) because it splits the load evenly across all the cores.

Sorry but I have to disagree with you completly here. You will not see 100% usage because it doesn't split the load evenly across all the cores. A CPU doesn't just take game code and decide how many cores and how it is going to run, the game code decides that and all the CPU can do is report which cores are being used at lower %s so the different priority/workload size threads can get spread out as well as possible.

[2is]

Originally Posted by Puppies04

Sorry but I have to disagree with you completly here. You will not see 100% usage because it doesn't split the load evenly across all the cores. A CPU doesn't just take game code and decide how many cores and how it is going to run, the game code decides that and all the CPU can do is report which cores are being used at lower %s so the different priority/workload size threads can get spread out as well as possible.

You can disagree with him, but he's right. "split" is not the right word, and it's not the CPU that decides, its the windows scheduler. it will move the process to different cores, and tries to do so evenly. This is why if you look at task manager on a dual core computer and you're playing a game that is sinlge threaded, you will often times see both cores at 50% it's really one core that is doing all the processing, then the other core doing all the processing, but the switching takes place so fast that task manager shows it as both cores being utilized at ~50%

[1b0b1]

I have recently build my rig, the specs are the below:

CPU: Intel Core i7-3770K (OCed at 4.3)
CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO
Motherboard: Asrock Z77 Extreme4
VGA: MSI NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 (Lightning Edition)
HD WD Caviar Black 1 TB 7200 RPM 64 MB
SS Corsair Force GT 240 GB
RAM: Corsair Vengeance 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3 1600 MHz (PC3 12800)
PSU: Corsair Enthusiast Series TX 850 Watt ATX/EPS Modular 80 PLUS Bronze
Monitor: Samsung S23A950D, 1920x1080, 23", 120hz, 3D, 2ms

I think this can be pretty much considered as a high end rig but meh, I am having fps drops all the time on BF3. Yesterday it even reached 28 for 1 sec during an explosion. Most of the times it is between 60~110 (everything maxed out).

Drivers are all up-to-date and I've checked the CPU usage during the game and I can confirm that it is not being fully utilized. The GPU (not overclocked) is also fine, the core clock speed during the game started on 1110MHz (which is the normal) and increased during time.

What do you think the problem is ?

[2is]

I've heard several complaints of FPS drops similar to what you've described, even on high end machines after one of the patches (don't know which one)

[1b0b1]

Originally Posted by 2is

I've heard several complaints of FPS drops similar to what you've described, even on high end machines after one of the patches (don't know which one)

It is ridiculous to not be able to sustain high FPS during intense scenarios.

Anyways, how can I make sure that this is a bug related to the game itself and that there is nothing wrong with my hardware ?

[2is]

Play another game and see how it performs there would make sense to me. If there's really something wrong with your hardware, you should see some odd behavior in more than just BF3

[Termie]

Originally Posted by 1b0b1

I have recently build my rig, the specs are the below:

CPU: Intel Core i7-3770K (OCed at 4.3)
CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO
Motherboard: Asrock Z77 Extreme4
VGA: MSI NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 (Lightning Edition)
HD WD Caviar Black 1 TB 7200 RPM 64 MB
SS Corsair Force GT 240 GB
RAM: Corsair Vengeance 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3 1600 MHz (PC3 12800)
PSU: Corsair Enthusiast Series TX 850 Watt ATX/EPS Modular 80 PLUS Bronze
Monitor: Samsung S23A950D, 1920x1080, 23", 120hz, 3D, 2ms

I think this can be pretty much considered as a high end rig but meh, I am having fps drops all the time on BF3. Yesterday it even reached 28 for 1 sec during an explosion. Most of the times it is between 60~110 (everything maxed out).

Drivers are all up-to-date and I've checked the CPU usage during the game and I can confirm that it is not being fully utilized. The GPU (not overclocked) is also fine, the core clock speed during the game started on 1110MHz (which is the normal) and increased during time.

What do you think the problem is ?

If you're running ultra settings, you probably have 4x MSAA enabled. I'd try shutting that off and repeating the test. If the minimums are much better, you know it was too much for the GPU. If minimums are still that low, you may have an issue with your cpu or memory.

By the way, the best way to report back is by using FRAPS to measure actual frames per second.

[1b0b1]

You are right, I have 4x MSAA enabled. However, the GTX 680 lightning is a beast and considered as one of the best single gpu on the planet, I really doubt that this is a gpu related issue. Anyways, I'll give it a try and keep you posted. Maybe, mine is faulty, who knows.

[Termie]

Originally Posted by 1b0b1

You are right, I have 4x MSAA enabled. However, the GTX 680 lightning is a beast and considered as one of the best single gpu on the planet, I really doubt that this is a gpu related issue. Anyways, I'll give it a try and keep you posted. Maybe, mine is faulty, who knows.

Doing a FRAPS run at a few different settings will help us figure out the actual issue. Also run MSI Afterburner in the background to track GPU usage. If it's at 99% when it bottoms out, it's the GPU. I'd also consider starting a new thread once we determine it's not a cpu bottleneck.

[1b0b1]

Originally Posted by Termie

Doing a FRAPS run at a few different settings will help us figure out the actual issue. Also run MSI Afterburner in the background to track GPU usage. If it's at 99% when it bottoms out, it's the GPU. I'd also consider starting a new thread once we determine it's not a cpu bottleneck.

I did use MSI afterburner before and if my memory doesn't fail me, the gpu utilized only 70~% . Any ideas ?

[Termie]

Originally Posted by 1b0b1

I did use MSI afterburner before and if my memory doesn't fail me, the gpu utilized only 70~% . Any ideas ?

BF3 multiplayer is a very complex game engine. GPU usage will never be at 99% all the time, although it shouldn't just sit at 70%.

Again, the key will be to match moments of minimum FPS to GPU usage using the Afterburner graph.

[1b0b1]

Alright, I've uploaded both fraps benchmarks & MSI afterburner log file:

http://s000.tinyupload.com/?file_id=...52025217725810

[moonbogg]

Originally Posted by 1b0b1

I have recently build my rig, the specs are the below:

CPU: Intel Core i7-3770K (OCed at 4.3)
CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO
Motherboard: Asrock Z77 Extreme4
VGA: MSI NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 (Lightning Edition)
HD WD Caviar Black 1 TB 7200 RPM 64 MB
SS Corsair Force GT 240 GB
RAM: Corsair Vengeance 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3 1600 MHz (PC3 12800)
PSU: Corsair Enthusiast Series TX 850 Watt ATX/EPS Modular 80 PLUS Bronze
Monitor: Samsung S23A950D, 1920x1080, 23", 120hz, 3D, 2ms

I think this can be pretty much considered as a high end rig but meh, I am having fps drops all the time on BF3. Yesterday it even reached 28 for 1 sec during an explosion. Most of the times it is between 60~110 (everything maxed out).

Drivers are all up-to-date and I've checked the CPU usage during the game and I can confirm that it is not being fully utilized. The GPU (not overclocked) is also fine, the core clock speed during the game started on 1110MHz (which is the normal) and increased during time.

What do you think the problem is ?

The quick dip to 28fps for a second is expected sometimes and i'm sure you don't see that hardly ever, but regarding your normal FPS dips heres what I expect you are seeing. Do you see frequent dips to the 40's? If so, thats your GPU bogging down. If you had a second GPU installed, those dips would be in the mid to upper 50's and after that point the CPU would be bottlenecking you with so much GPU power. That is to say, you are GPU limited for you min FPS now, but no matter how much GPU power you add, you will be CPU limited at that point and get dips in the 50's.
I bet your rig is just fine and you aren't alone here. In your case you would have to go SLI. If you still want more min FPS after that, then you either OC the piss out of your chip or wait for Haswell, but I wouldn't spend any money right now if I was in your position.

[1b0b1]

I did notice it when it dropped, it was buggy as hell. Anyways, normally, fps drops to 40~50's for 1 sec and then goes back to 60+ (Depending on the maps). I was wondering if this is normal because the gtx 680 should be able to handle everything you throw at it.

[moonbogg]

Originally Posted by skipsneeky2

For you 3930k owners,how is the cpu scaling as far as usage across cores and threads?

Got my 3930k@4ghz and i noticed only 6 threads in task manager are active,the other 6 are completely idle,running all high no msaa@1920x1200 with a single gtx670.

Is the game smart enough to know which threads are cores and which are hyperthreading?

All I know is that from my testing the game continues to benefit up to 8 threads. After 4 threads, the benefit of each additional thread is small (2 or 3fps) but it does add up once you get 8 threads. After 8 threads the benefit is precisely zero. My testing was not perfect but it did show a small benefit. Regarding the game knowing what is a core vs a thread, I don't know.

Originally Posted by 1b0b1

I did notice it when it dropped, it was buggy as hell. Anyways, normally, fps drops to 40~50's for 1 sec and then goes back to 60+ (Depending on the maps). I was wondering if this is normal because the gtx 680 should be able to handle everything you throw at it.

It is normal. Try to unsderstand that people with less powerful cards are actually not able to play the game on the settings you are. If you had a GTX580, your mins would be like in the 20's or something like that, maybe lower 30's if you were lucky. My friend just got a 7970ghz edition card and his fps was floating around 38 or so on a large, full map at 1920x1200. That was closer to the min, but still it should tell you that mins in the 40's is normal for your card.
I have two 670's (OCd editions) and when I play with one card active, the FPS mins are lower 40's, sometimes in the upper 30's if I recall. Granted your card is faster, but its not so much faster as to change the equation that much. Nothing wrong with your FPS from what I am hearing, but I understand why you are puzzled. It is because BF3 is a beast of a game with a next gen game engine and when you got 64 players going insane trying to kill eachother, it will strain both CPU and GPU, even the latest and greatest.

EDIT: Also, your 680 IS handling what you are throwing at it. 40-50 MINIMUM fps is by all accounts GOOD, especially for a game like this.