Blow my mind? Why are you assuming things? I was active here during the fast and furious market share stat comparison wars when NV and AMD fanboys were pelting each other with Mercury, JPR, and Steam HWS numbers with the launch of DX11. Most of us are well aware of how sorry the average SHWS computer specs are, though many of us are also highly skeptical about it for various reasons (e.g., dilution thanks to mobile computers, disconnect between SHWS and other market data, questions about possibly biased response rate, apocryphal stories about forumers getting SHWS requests more often with hardware changes and wondering how representative SHWS really is, etc.). Also, Valve themselves recently stated that they corrected some errors with SHWS; if there existed one error, surely reason stands that there could be more errors they have not yet corrected?
In any case, it is curious for you to use Steam HWS for GPUs
and not also CPUs. The actual part number of processors are not broken out AFAIK, so Core i7s get lumped together with Pentium 4s, but one may surmise from other circumstantial evidence (monitor resolutions, GPUs, etc.) that we're talking about either Pentium 4s or Core2Duos. The typical SHWS CPU is an Intel running at 2.3-2.69GHz. Even if we assume that they are talking about Core2Duos@2.3-2.69Ghz, that's still not a heck of a lot of speed by today's standards.)
Anyway, that's enough about SHWS. OP is using an oc'd i5-2500K and an oc'd 7850 that is reaching stock-7950 levels of performance, IIRC.
I am going to reiterate what I said about how if DS were the juggernaut you seem to paint it as being, people would refer to it as such (similar to how people talk about DotA and Counter-Strike as games unto themselves), and presumably OP's thread title would have been "could desert strike be bogging down my 2500K."
Until you showed up, the
only mention of "desert strike" in this entire thread was in post 15 by TidusZ:
To be honest, the only time I notice fps drop below 60 on my pc is toward the end of Desert Strike and especially on the final round. In regular melee games or 10+ player customs like phantom mode I'm pretty sure it runs at like 100+ fps anyway.
(Yes, TidusZ's GTX680 overclocked is a fair amount faster than OP's oc'd GPU. However, that does not change TidusZ's point. There is an even bigger differential between the two of them when it comes to pixels, as OP is at 1920x1080 (see post 61), whereas TidusZ is at 2560x1600, which is nearly double the pixels. Even with a nonlinear performance hit, the pixel gap is a bigger factor than the GPU gap between the two of them.)
However, TidusZ also said this:
Its definitely processor holding back fps, not the gpu.
So we have TidusZ, who plays Desert Strike, saying that OP's "definitely" being CPU bottlenecked and that that TidusZ's framerate drops below 60fps only towards the end of Desert Strike. He did not make a big deal out of that though and the general thrust of his posts is that SC2 is usually CPU bottlenecked. (Note that he, too, was assuming OP did not play DS, given his "definitely" statement with no qualifiers.)
And then we have you, who affirmed what I am guessing was a hilarious tongue-in-cheek post by yottabit in response to your posts:
I guess SC2 is the new Crysis
Hehe, well certain maps of sc2 are more demanding than crysis.
You can go argue with TidusZ about how demanding DS is if you want. Presumably OP doesn't care, because he never said anything about DS even after TidusZ brought it up, despite actively participating in this thread for many posts after DS was first mentioned. If OP wants to come back to this thread and clarify that he plays a lot of DS, then your point about DS could be relevant to him. Otherwise, just like almost everyone else in this thread, I am assuming that when OP says SC2 he is actually talking about SC2 and not DS. If you want to continue to post on and on and on about DS, despite the facts I just laid out, you are going to have to talk to yourself, because I refuse to discuss DS any further in this thread and nobody else seems to want to talk about it, either, except TidusZ (but only in passing). OP said SC2 and never said anything about DS, even after it was brought up early on. Literally only 2 people brought up DS, and one of them didn't think it was that big of a deal and said OP was definitely CPU bound. NOBODY else brought up DS other than him and you. If this entire paragraph sounds repetitive to you, that's intentional, because I for one am sick and tired of hearing about DS this and DS that when nobody else in this thread even brought it up except one guy who did bring it up and nevertheless thought OP was CPU-bottlenecked anyway.
The sensible suggestion you made is for OP to compare framerates depending on graphics settings.
I completely agree with you there. If he turns down graphics settings and it doesn't impact his min or average framerate than it would seem that his CPU is the bottleneck.
