just bought hd 4850 , dont see improvements? any suggestions

[ajtyeh]

I essentially play World of Warcraft, and i wanted to increase my FPS to at least 60+ and so i decided to upgrade to the ati hd 4850 and i see marginally increase in frames per second?

i havnt changed my setup except i upgrade from an 256mb 8600gt which i thought was a definete upgrade.

i was getting about 35-45 frames in shattrath and 50-60 in orgrimarr with my 8600gt. and with the hd4850 i maybe get 40-50 fps in shat and 55-65 in orgrimarr. i thought i would get at least an average of 60fps in shattrath.

my specs of my comptuer are
amd 4000 skt 939, OC'ed to 2.75ghz on air
2gb. ocz pc4000 2x1gb in dual channel
gigabyte ati hd 4850
and a 36gb raptor / 300gb WD hd
dell e248wfp 24inch @ 1920x1280 (or whatver the native 24inch res is)

is my cpu bottlenecking cuase of my cpu?
or is that all the hd4850 can do in shattrath , 40-50fps?

 

[taltamir]

you CPU is holding you back....
And the lack of ram (only 2GB) isn't helping either, but I am not sure how much of an impact it will make in wow...
check out this thread: http://forums.anandtech.com/me...=2205375&enterthread=y
Where I discuss how an E8400 @ 3.6ghz is not enough to not hold back the 4850 and faster cards in mass effect and a few other games...

The 4850 is also a PCIe v2 part, so it has double the bandwidth of the 8600GT... And your mobo is making it run in v1 compatibility mode... although this should not account for the lack of improvement (it should be negligeble... i think)...

So AFAIK I would say... CPU, then ram (maybe), then pcie version (AFAIK, most likely irrelevant, just thought I would mention it anyways).

If you could check CPU and GPU percent utilizations, I would be interested to know... although the value of such an examination is being debated, I would still like to know.

 

[ajtyeh]

1. whats afaik?
2. i will give you CPU and GPU utilizations when i get home, i'm at work.
3. Another question, sometimes i play in windows mode, and when i go to mozilla and press the middle mouse button the UI(user interface) disapeers in the background in WoW, although it does not effect me, ive never seen this happen on the 8600gt and it makes me worried.

4. explain that pci-e v2 part v1 part again? im confused and havnt heard about this. it's been a LONGGG time since ive upgraded my computer back in my college days, when the amd skt 939's were the king of cpu's

 

[surfsatwerk]

afaik = as far as I know

 

[dakels]

I get capped at 60fps because I have V-Sync on which limits you to the refresh rate of your monitor. I don't need anything more then 60fps and I don't know why anyone else would in wow. I get 55-60 (cap) in shatt and the lowest it will hit 40-45fps when I am loading the busiest section for just a second it will dive to 40 to catch up then back up 50-55 or so. Old world like Org or IF it stays pinned at 60fps. I haven't hit a raid as I basically haven't played it in several months, I just wanted to see what my new 4850 could do. I'm running a Q6600 at 3.0ghz, 4gb 1066, 4850 stock. 1650x1050 everything is maxed to the limit, 24x8x, max details, even max distances.

 

[HumblePie]

Okay, first off, WoW is an MMORPG.

As an MMORPG you are going to be limited FPS wise by network latency. This is because the vid card sometimes has to wait on the network input for WHAT to draw. In areas that are heavily populated, even the best high end system can be brought to a crawl on network games with poor network coding. Not saying WoW has poor network coding, just saying there are other MMO's out there like that.

As far as areas that more underpopulated, then you will see a huge gain if there is little network latency and redraws forced upon the card. As far at the 60ish fps limit you are reaching, that seems odd because even when I last played WoW, which was awhile ago, I was using an x850xtpe card and could push up to 90ish fps in some areas with quite a bit of the eye candy turned on at 1280x1024 res.


Just be aware of the limitations of online games when it comes to redraws upon the vid card. This is especially true of MMO's that try to pack hundreds of people on to your screen all at once.

 

[taltamir]

are you sure humble? when the vid card doesnt know what to draw it draws without it... you see it all the time, a naked night eld appears and then suddenly armor pops up on him... so i don't think network latency has anything to do with it.

I remember having a HUGE difference going from 1-2GB in wow... more then doubled my FPS... but I upgraded to for GB for company of heroes (and needed it for sup commander and for WIC and a few others)... but I haven't played wow since...

 

[HumblePie]

Originally posted by: taltamir
are you sure humble? when the vid card doesnt know what to draw it draws without it... you see it all the time, a naked night eld appears and then suddenly armor pops up on him... so i don't think network latency has anything to do with it.

I remember having a HUGE difference going from 1-2GB in wow... more then doubled my FPS... but I upgraded to for GB for company of heroes (and needed it for sup commander and for WIC and a few others)... but I haven't played wow since...

Positive on this one.

You put a scene with 100 + people moving. The has to make several redraw passes to get everyone per frame, and then if people are constantly moving, that gets redrawn. The reason you get a naked night elf or something, was because your system couldn't keep up with the flow of info. You just got latencied out, or you are having a wierd driver issue. I remember a few before, we I would constantly get all black textures for characters for a driver release. Happens on occasion.

MMO's are not usually a good way to compare video card performance mainly due to the fact of network latency slowing down all cards. However, a better card will perform better, but in an highly populated area, that may be only a few FPS between the best card on the market and the worst card several gens back. But the newer cards can do all that WHILE turning up the IQ and not taking a hit on performance that older cards would get lagged out just for IQ reasons. Meaning an 8600 GT in WoW would be a slide show still in a zone with not another single other person around if the resolution was turned up to 19x12 with 16xAF and 8xAA or higher IQ. The 4850 would just laugh at that if it had a mouth.

 

[Mem]

Don't forget to crank up the AA/AF settings plus everything in options on max,something you can do even when CPU limted,I put everything on max settings in EQ2 and was amazed at how good it looks.

 

[themisfit610]

WoW is great fun, and in typical Blizzard fashion, it can be made to run well on almost anything. My friend plays at 1280x1024 on his Radeon 9600 Pro + Athlon XP 2400+ with 1GB of RAM, (albeit with low details etc) just fine. I play at 1920x1200 with everything maxed and 4xaa with my system just fine

I agree about the network latency though. It definitely is a bitch in the large cities / raids

 

[KIAman]

WoW is not a good game to base video card performance. I can run WoW with good FPS and settings on my laptop with integrated graphics. Also, if you were looking to remove the "lag" in heavily populated areas with many players on screen, the video card isn't going to do a thing about it.

Now considering what I have said, it might not have been a wise choice to "upgrade" to the HD4850 if you only play WoW. If you happen to play other newer games that tax a video card, then I can see justification, but just for WoW, kinda wasted money.

 

[phantom404]

Im running everything maxed out on 1900x1200 and a 4850. Haven't seen it dip below 60FPS since thats where its capped. I'm running q6600 at 3.1GHz with 4GB of ram

 

[IlllI]

you realize wow is a 4+ year old game? its not like it needs anything super powerful to run

 

[taltamir]

well... if it can't run at 60FPS (maxing out your monitor if you have a 60hz LCD), then it is obviously not old ENOUGH.

I would like vsync with 60fps stable on my games at max everything if I can.

 

[taltamir]

I have proven beyond a doubt that Mass Effect is bottlenecked by the CPU on a 4850 + an E8400 C2D overclocked to 3.6ghz...
I don't own a WOW account anymore, and I don't intend to pay for one to test it, but you are welcome to join in on our testing and see if WoW is indeed one of those CPU limited games.