Upgrade advice from 8800GT

[DeckardBlade]

I have a Q6600 on a Gigabyte P35-DS3L with 4gB of ram. I mostly play TF2 at 1920x1080 and get some pretty bad video lag in 32 player maps.

Is my CPU the bottleneck in this situation or the card? And if it's the card what would be a good pairing with my current configuration?

Thanks in advance!

 

[cubeless]

460... even a 768mb one would be fine, and cheaper... any oc on the cpu? if not only get something better than a 460 if you plan to keep it through your next upgrade...

of course an ati 6850 would be ok, too... but i really like my 460's...

 

[happy medium]

I have a Q6600 on a Gigabyte P35-DS3L with 4gB of ram. I mostly play TF2 at 1920x1080 and get some pretty bad video lag in 32 player maps.

Is my CPU the bottleneck in this situation or the card? And if it's the card what would be a good pairing with my current configuration?

Thanks in advance!

Did you try overclocking you cpu some?
Did you enable multicore support in options?

 

[BFG10K]

Lower your resolution to something very low like 800x600. If the performance improves then it’s your graphics card. If not, your CPU is holding you back.

 

[DeckardBlade]

460... even a 768mb one would be fine, and cheaper... any oc on the cpu? if not only get something better than a 460 if you plan to keep it through your next upgrade...

of course an ati 6850 would be ok, too... but i really like my 460's...

Thanks, no current oc on the CPU -- I know I should be able to get a pretty sizable one on there but never bothered. What kind of performance increase going from a 8800 to a 460 should I expect?

Thanks again.

 

[DeckardBlade]

Lower your resolution to something very low like 800x600. If the performance improves then it’s your graphics card. If not, your CPU is holding you back.

Thanks, I've lowered every setting but the resolution. I'll give that a shot.

 

[DeckardBlade]

Did you try overclocking you cpu some?
Did you enable multicore support in options?

Have not tried overclocking yet. I have enabled the multi-core support but didn't notice a difference in FPS.

 

[superccs]

Have not tried overclocking yet. I have enabled the multi-core support but didn't notice a difference in FPS.

Well that should suggest that you are GPU limited... Try getting GPU-Z and monitoring your GPU usage while playing, see if it goes 100%.

In general I think getting the 460 gtx or 6850 should be a big help.

 

[Throckmorton]

I have a hard time believing an 8800GT has any problems running TF2.

Turn the multicore option OFF in TF2, it causes problems with some HL2 engine games. In L4D2 I get terrible performance unless I disable multicore.

 

[postmortemIA]

I can vouch that 8800GT (and old 8800GTS that I also have) has trouble playing TF2 at 1920x1200. Frame rate can drop to less than 20 when you have lots of players.

 

[chewietobbacca]

8800GT gets hit by resolution and AA and memory constraints pretty big. It's a G92 issue

I wouldn't recommend a 768mb GTX 460 if you're playing 1920 x 1080 - look at either a GTX 460 1GB or get the 5850 @ $169.99 clearance bargain, which will keep your rig going for quite some more time

 

[Dribble]

If you've lowered all the settings be surprised if the 8800GT was the problem . In 32p TF2 is pretty cpu bound, hence I suspect your cpu is your single biggest problem - see if you can o/c get it to at least 3Ghz, more if you can manage it (I run a Q6600 at 3.2).

For a graphics card upgrade a GTX 460 768mb would give you big gains and not cost too much.

 

[TurtleCrusher]

I have a hard time believing an 8800GT has any problems running TF2.

Turn the multicore option OFF in TF2, it causes problems with some HL2 engine games. In L4D2 I get terrible performance unless I disable multicore.

:\

The only game it had problems with is Portal. I had many crashes to desktop with it. I've been running with multicore on since it was released on the 2007 engine in TF2 and DOD:S. CS:S now supports it as well.

When I was on my x2 4200+ (2.2ghz s939) i literally had an 85-100% improvement in fps when paired with my 8800gts. Considering running this with multicore off with his Q6600, is crazy. At least he could utilize another 4mb of L2 cache and another core.

 

[DeckardBlade]

Well that should suggest that you are GPU limited... Try getting GPU-Z and monitoring your GPU usage while playing, see if it goes 100%.

In general I think getting the 460 gtx or 6850 should be a big help.

Thanks for the program recommendation, it was very useful. It's never hitting 100%, highest was 66% average is about 33% with typical spikes of 50-55%. Highest amount of memory being used is 320.

Seeing that I figured I'd look at my CPU and disabled my distributed computing application which is supposed to be running at a low priority but obviously not low enough as it made some difference to my average FPS.

I'll probably try a minor OC prior to going with a newer card but appreciate the card recommendations.

 

[Throckmorton]

I can vouch that 8800GT (and old 8800GTS that I also have) has trouble playing TF2 at 1920x1200. Frame rate can drop to less than 20 when you have lots of players.

I ran EVGA Precision yesterday and played TF2. I noticed that framerates went down to the 20s (with settings maxed but 4x AA and 8x AF) BUT GPU usage was at only around 30-40%. CPU usage was about 80% for both cores even with multicore turned off.

What does that mean??

Edit: BTW I have an E6600 2.4ghz C2D