Question regarding what components effect which aspect of gaming?

[JoeyMartin1958]

Hello,

So recently I have been adding a bunch of mods to my Skyrim game as I would like to play it again but I've already played the crap out of it in its original form. My game currently locks in around 52 FPS and won't component would be causing this? My initial instinct was that it was the CPU since its having to process all those extra entities. Is this correct? I plan on upgrading to a 980ti at the end of this year and am looking into possibly upgrading my CPU as well. Would upgrading my CPU provide higher framerates in this situation? I know usually CPU upgrades only provide a few frames but clearly this is a special situation that is bringing my computer down to a crawl. Also, if i were to upgrade my CPU, what would be the best CPU to upgrade to? I would prefer to stay on the LGA1150 platform so I don't have to buy a new motherboard as well, unless I could make huge gains by switching to a specific CPU on a different socket.

I have done some monitoring in and out of these high density modded areas and have noticed that my CPU usage jumps around from 60-90% usage, maybe occasionally spiking to almost 100 when I am looking around rapidly. This is initially why I suspect this could be the bottleneck. Is there a way to measure GPU usage? Currently I can only observe via EVGA Precision X that the fans ramp up to 80-90% speed. My ram sits around 6.9 GB usage so even though I play on expanding to 16GB as well, I don't think this is the issue.

My build:
CPU: Intel i5 4670 k
Motherboard: ASUS Gryphon Z97 LGA1150 DDR3 mATX
RAM: G.Skill Sniper 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory F3-12800CL9D-8GBSR
Boot Drive: Kingston SSDNow V300 Series 60GB 2.5" Solid State Disk
Main Drive Currently Being Used For Skyrim: Western Digital WD10EZEX 1TB 7200RPM 64MB CacheSATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5"
PSU: Cooler Master i600 - 600W Power Supply with 80 PLUS Bronze
GPU:EVGA GeForce GTX 780 3GB Video Card

Any help, insight, explanation, or suggestion would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!!

 

[Fanatical Meat]

My completely amateur opinion is modders have great vision and passion for what they do and come up with some great stuff however less time, money and resources make their mods run good enough but not great. Problems are more about the programming aspect rather than the hardware.

 

[Sabrewings]

Easy. Is your GPU at max utilization? If not, it's your CPU. If so, it's your GPU. Though, if your GPU is not utilized to max and nor is your CPU, there are some coding inefficiencies going on.

 

[mmntech]

GPUz will give you your GPU utilization and VRAM usage.
https://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/

I have a sneaky suspicion that a lot of these Skyrim mods really tax the VRAM. Though you have 3GB so that should be enough. Are you using ENB? Certain settings in there really nail your system to the wall. Only time I tried it, my computer vomited out a glorious slideshow.

 

[JimmiG]

Yeah, ENB can be torture for the GPU. There are some lightweight ENB presets that look great without the huge performance hit. Try turning off ENB if you're using that to determine how hard it's hitting your GPU.

Skyrim itself is pretty CPU-bound (DX9...) and adding more detailed models and props to the maps makes it worse. Some mods come with ludicrously large texture maps too so you could be running out of VRAM as well.

The 4670K can be overclocked to 4.2 - 4.6 GHz, making it as fast as the latest mid-range desktop CPUs. No need to upgrade the CPU at this point, IMO.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

Games and even different mods within the same game engine can cause vastly different loads on the CPU and GPU depending on the circumstances, that makes these kinds of questions hard to answer.

The best thing to do is monitor and graph both CPU and GPU usage over time playing a given game/mod and compare them, this will give you an idea of what component is maxing out it's usage and thus bottlenecking the other components, and to what degree.

The CPU and GPU are often doing very different things, the CPU is responsible for doing physics (typically), AI, tracking the game state and game logic and only marginally involved in rendering. The GPU is mostly making things look pretty, the important difference between the 2 is that the jobs the CPU is doing are essential and cannot easily be scaled down, however the graphics can easily be scaled in large amounts both up and down to add or remove load on the GPU, turning down graphics settings helps you solve the GPU being a bottleneck for frame rate, but there's no real equivelent for the CPU, if the CPU struggles to keep up and is limiting your frame rate then your only choices are to overclock or upgrade.

You can use windows task manager to track load across CPU cores, make sure you're displaying each core uniquely, and you can install MSI's Afterburner to track GPU usage, use these tools to get an idea of what games are bottlenecked by what components. Also MSI Afterburner comes with RivaTuner which can do OSD of things like GPU usage and memory usage, you want to track if your vRAM is bumping up against it's limit as swapping the vRAM during game play can cause stuttering and pauses.