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Trouble with more recent games

J

JDrew

Junior Member
Hi everyone,
I have been patchwork upgrading over the past year or so on an as-needed basis (forums have been helpful), but I think I am starting to run into issues with newer games brought in through the most recent Steam sale😛

Brief specs:
Q9550@3.4
4GB DDR2 PC-6400
EP45-UD3R (rev 1.1)
GTX 570
27" monitor (2560x1440)

MOST games run OK. I only play single-player so perhaps my tolerance for low frame rates is higher than some. BF3 ran OK. RE5 ran OK (granted, these aren't new games). Booted up the first newer game - Tomb Raider - virtually unplayable, even dropping resolution down to 1680x1050 and turning VSync/AA/AF all off and other features to normal. Maybe Tomb Raider is not a good example, but I don't know if results will be typical if I try to play anything from the last year or so (ie Skyrim, FarCry 3, and so on).

I suspect that I am still GPU limited even with the older CPU which has served me well? Would it be as simple as finding a newer GPU with more VRAM or would that not be cost efficient?

Thanks in advance; can add more info as required. Also, I do realize that the question is closer to a video cards forum question but I suspect it will evolve into a hardware thread😉

Drew
 
Actually you're more CPU limited than you are GPU limited. The GTX 570 isn't too bad of a card even though it is 2 generations behind at this point. You Q9550 however is a good bit behind the times. I would say it's time to upgrade to Haswell.
 
RAM, maybe?

Lowering the res should remove the GPU as the problem, with low game settings. With a C2D (2 less cores) at 3.2GHz, and GTX 460 1GB, but 8GB of RAM, I found Tomb Raider quite playable. Poor enough to start the upgrade itch, sure, with some choppy spots, but good enough that I never even bothered to bring up an FPS counter. If your RAM usage gets close to max while playing, that could definitely cause some stuttering in some new games.

Looking at tested scores, like Techspot's (note the Athlon II), my experience doesn't look atypical, save that I couldn't run that kind of quality level w/ my video card.

Definitely run Afterburner and Task manager while playing, and compare CPU usage, CPU usage, and RAM usage, to see if you can find anything obvious. We're both definitely in need of new hardware, but TRR shouldn't be running at unplayable speeds.
 
JDrew said:
.....
I suspect that I am still GPU limited even with the older CPU which has served me well? Would it be as simple as finding a newer GPU with more VRAM or would that not be cost efficient?

Thanks in advance; can add more info as required. Also, I do realize that the question is closer to a video cards forum question but I suspect it will evolve into a hardware thread😉

Drew
Click to expand...

Your cpu(or lack of memory) is holding things back since the 570 is still very capable. But it could also be newer high end graphical features (like tesselation) which would bog down older cards like yours, or maybe the lack of vram since you run at a higher than normal resolution.
 
bononos said:
Your cpu(or lack of memory) is holding things back since the 570 is still very capable. But it could also be newer high end graphical features (like tesselation) which would bog down older cards like yours, or maybe the lack of vram since you run at a higher than normal resolution.
Click to expand...

That seemed to do it (I guess this is why we ask😉). I ran the in-game benchmark and so long as I set "tessellation", "post-processing", and "high precision" (whatever that is) to "OFF", I can pretty much crank up everything else at native resolution and things are good. I ran the in game benchmarking feature and right now I get 21.4fps min/40.9fps max/30.4fps average which seems to work. It seems to drop sharply if I enable any of the aforementioned features.

Good to know I'm not obsolete just yet! Just wish it wasn't something I should have tried first😳

Thanks!
Drew
 
Those are all graphics features, indicating that your GPU is the bottleneck in the benchmark. That last bit is important because the TR benchmark is graphics with some very light physics simulation, e.g. nowhere near as CPU-intensive as the real game.

When you referred to "virtually unplayable" in your OP, were you talking about the benchmark or the actual game?
 
mfenn said:
Those are all graphics features, indicating that your GPU is the bottleneck in the benchmark. That last bit is important because the TR benchmark is graphics with some very light physics simulation, e.g. nowhere near as CPU-intensive as the real game.

When you referred to "virtually unplayable" in your OP, were you talking about the benchmark or the actual game?
Click to expand...

The game itself was unplayable when I first tried it (I didn't run the benchmark until after the fact). When I first tried running the game, I configured the settings on the game launcher and even the main menu on first boot was a slide show (which I took as a bad sign😛) - I had to CTRL-ALT-DEL out of the game as choosing menu options was a challenge with the mouse pointer bouncing around; I wouldn't have thought menus would be that graphically demanding.
 
The TR menu is pretty damn fancy, and is actually more demanding than many parts of the real game. Looking at some benchmarks online, your performance seems just about right. An upgrade to a 7970 or thereabouts would be a nice boost except you'd then be massively CPU limited.

How much money are you willing to throw at this? 😛
 
mfenn said:
The TR menu is pretty damn fancy, and is actually more demanding than many parts of the real game. Looking at some benchmarks online, your performance seems just about right. An upgrade to a 7970 or thereabouts would be a nice boost except you'd then be massively CPU limited.

How much money are you willing to throw at this? 😛
Click to expand...

It depends - I guess that's the million dollar question (er...well, $650ish question in this case😛). I looked at the prices of the 7970 from where I would buy (NCIX Canada) and the cheapest I saw was ~ $330CDN, which is a bit pricey and would use up a fair percentage of my budget. The 7950 is ~ $215, which is more reasonable. I tend to keep CPU's for 4-5 years and GPU's about half that. Could I upgrade my CPU/MB/RAM/GPU for under the $650 and noticeably benefit? Fortunately, I still have my Coolermaster Hyper 212+, SSD, storage drive, HAF922 case, Corsair 650W PSU, optical drives, and Win7 x64 (Retail) that I can reuse.
 
Get a factory OCed 7870 or 7950 and use the saved money for a motherboard and an i5 4550 (or 4550k if you're an overclocker). Throw in 8GB of RAM to go with the motherboard and definitely within that $650 budget for a system that will easily last you your typical timeline.
 
JDrew said:
It depends - I guess that's the million dollar question (er...well, $650ish question in this case😛). I looked at the prices of the 7970 from where I would buy (NCIX Canada) and the cheapest I saw was ~ $330CDN, which is a bit pricey and would use up a fair percentage of my budget. The 7950 is ~ $215, which is more reasonable. I tend to keep CPU's for 4-5 years and GPU's about half that. Could I upgrade my CPU/MB/RAM/GPU for under the $650 and noticeably benefit? Fortunately, I still have my Coolermaster Hyper 212+, SSD, storage drive, HAF922 case, Corsair 650W PSU, optical drives, and Win7 x64 (Retail) that I can reuse.
Click to expand...

This is one of those cases where spending an extra $30 makes a difference.

i5 4670K + ASUS Z87-A combo $390
G.Skill DDR3 1600 8GB $67
XFX 7950 3GB $220 AR - not the best cooler, but the others are +$40
Total: $677 AR
 
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