7800GT CPU limited or just to stressed

[Mau1wurf1977]

Hi all,

I am hoping that someone here can give me some feedback / share his own experience.

I have a system based on an Asrock K8NF4G-SATA2 mainboard (Nvidia 6100/410/PCIe) and a Sempron 2600+ CPU. I used the onboard VGA for quite some time and recently got a PCIe 6600GT VGA Card.

However I was not totally happy with the performance (I have a 19" LCD, so I am running games at 1280 x 1024 and I want some level of AA and AF enabled).

So I took it back to the shops and got a 7800GT instead, as from what I have gathered, at the moment it is better to put your money into a fast GPU rather then a fast CPU.

OC wise, I am running the Sempron 64 at 2200 MHz ( can't go faster because of FSB/Mainboard limit) and OCed the 7800GT slightly. Benchmarkwise I am getting a 3DMark2005 of around 7300.

I have tried the demo version of Quake 4 and Battlefield 2 and noticed a difference in FPS between non AA/AF and AA/AF.

What puzzles me is that I thought that my System/CPU would hold back the Video Card and that the FPS wouldn't drop when enabling AA and AF. I notice the difference when just enabling 2x AA from within the game.

I have generic 768 CL 2,5 RAM and High Quality enabled in the Nvidia Driver. Bios, MB drivers, VGA drivers, Sound drivers are all up to date.

The question I have is: Are current games really GPU limited at 1280 x 1024? When I got the card thought otherwise, but now I am unsure. It seems to me that the 7800GT slows down noticably at the 1280 x 1024 resolution at current games like Q4 and BF2.

Any ideas / tips / suggestions / feedbacks are welcome.

And happy NY from Australia! Its 2006 here allready

 

[RussianSensation]

yeah the new games are really gpu limited. That is why your system slows down at 1280x1024 4AA/16AF. With games like FEAR and Call of Duty 2, you don't even need to enable AA/AF to notice gpu dependency since they are so demanding.

Cpu speed is not as important as people think:

Call of Duty 2
FEAR
Battlefield 2
Quake 4 cpu scaling with 7800GTX
More Proof
*although there is an impact on minmium framerates and there are differences, with your sempron at 2200mhz, this is certainly not an issue.

What happens is that when you enable AA/AF even on high end videocards, today's games are very demanding on them. So the more you increase the level of detail (ie. either increase resolution, enable high settings in game, enable AA/AF the less the cpu starts to matter for FPS). You also noticed that as you increase resolution, your performance falls. If the 7800GT was cpu starved, you would either not notice any decline, or a small one. At the very least you should have noticed that you can crank up AA/AF now at much higher resolutions than with 6600GT and have playable framerates.

 

[Mau1wurf1977]

Thanks for the feedback and links.

I'm kinda happy that I put most of my money into the Video card and went down the budget route with the mobo and cpu.

A lot of people recommended me the 6600GT for 1280 resolution. But even without any AA and AF enabled, I had to set the details to low/med to get any good frame rates.

Fear and COD2 are unreal. Reminds me of when Halo came out and I had the Radeon 9800. That card struggled and I could only play it on XGA with decent framerates.

 

[Elfear]

RussianSensation hit it on the nose. The only games you'll likely see a cpu bottleneck with are HL2 and UT2004. Those are the only games I've benched that seemed to get any kind of increase from ocing the cpu at high resolution.