Processor and Gaming

ftd86

Hey, I've been struggling with some inconsistent framerates in games 25-250. I'm pretty confident the problem has to do with my Opteron 185. I was wondering what parts of the rendering process that the CPU is most responsible for so I can lower the settings? My system specs are as follows:

AMD Opteron 185 @ 2.88GHz
Radeon HD 4850 @ 675-1100
2GB Corsair XMS Platinum
500GB Barracuda 7200RPM HDD

The games I'm trying to play are Call of Duty 5 and Tom Clancy's HAWX. Everything seems to run fairly smooth until there's a great deal of smoke, or I look at a large part of the map.

BlueMak

When you say CoD5 you mean Modern Warfare 2?

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The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others(Bertrand Russell)"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil,You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them." - Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis
This is slavery, not to speak one's thought. [Euripides-The Phoenician Women (c.411-409 B.C.)] http://www.macedonia.info/FALLACIESANDFACTS.htm Sic semper tyrannis.

WillC

I found with mine that turning off filters and buffering fixed framerate. Although it may still be slow at times then lowering other things like game detail and shadows should help you.

SeraphicSorcerer

Post Processing, and Physics, are the top 2 settings your CPU will have to work on.
COD 5 is World at War Bluemak. It could also be Anti-Alias settings. With lotsa smoke etc. As memory bandwidth could be getting limited, you didn't really mention your resolution though. so I can only speculate

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comp_ali

Your specs are okay but like they said what resolution do you use.
I figure 2GB ram is also a limiting factor (in my case too) especially if you are running games in high resolution or viewing a large scene like in your case.

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ftd86

hey, thanks for the replies guys. My monitor's optimal res. is 1600x1200, so I try to play at it as often as possible. WillC, are your buffering and filter settings in game, or driver based?

I tried a number of resolutions from 1024x768 up to 1920x1440, but there is minimal performance gain. I think I'm being bottlenecked somewhere, I'm going to go run a few performance benchmarks to see if I can narrow it down.

SeraphicSorcerer

Are you you running high anti alias settings with this card???

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ftd86

the driver settings are set to "application based" and in game I have AA set to 2x. I just downloaded ATI tool, I'll see if I can fiddle with some settings.

ftd86

I went with the assumption that it was the CPU and decided to give myself the most headroom for an overclock by removing the protective casing on the CPU itself. I replaced the old thermal paste with some artic silver and placed the heatsink directly onto the CPU. I went from around 54 degrees celsius under load to around 41. I'm just shy of 3GHz on my opty and it's definitely noticeable in game =) The framerate transition is a lot smoother now with a low of 45-50fps. I'm gonna wait to bump up the RAM until my next build.

BlueMak

Eh, do you mean the heatsink? Because if you removed the actual CPU casing, I don't think that is very safe and surprised that it still works.

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The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others(Bertrand Russell)"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil,You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them." - Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis
This is slavery, not to speak one's thought. [Euripides-The Phoenician Women (c.411-409 B.C.)] http://www.macedonia.info/FALLACIESANDFACTS.htm Sic semper tyrannis.

OldBuzzard

Actually, that was something that a lot of OCers did with those processors.

By putting the HSF directy on the CPU you get MUCH better heat transfer.

It's pretty safe, as long as you are careful in removing the heat spreader.

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When looking for a reason as to why things go wrong, never rule out sheer STUPIDITY

greg1174

I have a system much like yours and have had absolutely no problems with any game with the exception of Crysis which doesn't look perfect but is still playable. My system specs are:

AMD Opteron 2.6GHZ (No overclocking)
2GB of OCZ DDR400 2-2-2-5
HIS HD 4850 512MB (Shortly to Crossfire)
1 Aegia Physx Card
2 Velocirator 150GB Raid 0

Every game is more than playable with this system and it has stuck it out through the hard times and rough budgets. I did just purchase an AMD Quad with 8GB of RAM with the 4850 and it's benchmarks are half of the other systems...perhaps driver problems but I do know that it reacts much slower than the other system with everything I do.

Note: I do not pay much attention to benchmarks; as with everything else it is market pushed, you can make anything "look" like it is better by exchanging values for reward; the real test is how does it coincide to your perception? A good example of this would be what can your eye actually perceive or acknowledge and it's responsiveness, for instance if it is what many people believe to be true between 60-80fps, then that video card that puts out 220fps in a game is like driving a Formula 1 car downtown New York City during rush hour.

Another note: 5-6 years ago if a game came out that performs like Crysis does it was seen as a problem not an industry standard! Idiocracy perhaps, who knows but the simple fact is your system should be just fine.

ftd86

does the Physx card really help out a lot? I may have to pick one of those up. I did play Crysis at 1280x1024 with everything set to low and I had a pretty consistent 25-45fps.

On to that comment about only being able to see at 60 frames per second. This is definitely true when watching a video, but in terms of feeling the responsiveness in game, it's definitely noticeable. I can certainly feel the difference between 60 and 120 FPS.

DJ BIG T

i dont think so it just helps out on certin thins like flag movement explosives and other stuff but for performance i dont think it will help...

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ftd86

yeah, sounds like I'm in need of a system upgrade before long. I've pretty much taken my socket 939 board as far as I can go besides getting another HD 4850.

greg1174

Well, I can say it does with the right drivers; however, I was never aware until I got one how much heat it puts out. It increased the internal temps up to dangerous levels. I ended up having to create my own air cooling using a combination of high CFM fans and creating fan controllers of my own. I used >80 CFM 80mm fans and 92mm fans (Vantech Tornados) and the 210 CFM Delta fans; all of which pull >1 amp each which I was unable to locate a fan controller that could handle it and honestly running full blast sounded like I had a leaf blower in the room. I took an industrial on-on toggle switch and wired molex connector 5V to one side and 12V to the other to allow me to run them roughly at 40% when not gaming. I would recommend the card itself if you can find one, I bought mine when they first came out and they are still covered by Nvidia drivers.

BlueMak

Why do you use so small fans? They are bound to make more noise. Use 120mm or 140mm ones.

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The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others(Bertrand Russell)"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil,You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them." - Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis
This is slavery, not to speak one's thought. [Euripides-The Phoenician Women (c.411-409 B.C.)] http://www.macedonia.info/FALLACIESANDFACTS.htm Sic semper tyrannis.

greg1174

The case I have is a mid-size that houses 5 fans total. 3 fans are located in the rear being the 80mm. Up front bottom is the 92mm and up top a 120. I chose my case because it is 1: cheap and 2: well hidden (looks like a regular computer). When I originally built it I had roommates that were questionable and did not want to gather unwanted attention. The fans I have are fine, just loud but when I toggle it to 5V it is not so loud, much louder still than a regular computer like the new one I just got but it is a project anyway all the time. Everyone has to have a hobby, this is one of mine.

BlueMak

I didn't mean to insult you. Just trying to help. I am sorry if I said something that made you feel awkward.

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The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others(Bertrand Russell)"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil,You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them." - Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis
This is slavery, not to speak one's thought. [Euripides-The Phoenician Women (c.411-409 B.C.)] http://www.macedonia.info/FALLACIESANDFACTS.htm Sic semper tyrannis.

greg1174

Oh no; don't worry about it. You didn't say anything insulting or anything to make me feel awkward. I do want to upgrade to something new as far as my system is concerned and I have been playing with this Quad system I bought but it is not performing the way I thought it should. Bottom line the old Opty system is still performing better than the Quad; but in its defense I do not do any DVD ripping or anything, just simple gaming and multi-video applications running at once as well as surfing. System response is very important to me and it seems that the old system responds better than the new. I must admit I am enjoying having all the extra space available from the 1TB drive but if I wanted I could add another drive to the old one. I am sure if I did more CPU intensive things I would be able to tell the difference but as of right now I can't. Therefore, I can't help but recommend someone to keep this system until something else offering a more dramatic difference comes out.

OldBuzzard

Greg, just what AMD quad cor processor do you have?

I know that the Optys were danged good processors, but I find it hard to believe that it's not being outperformed by a quad core,

Well, unless it an Athlon 2 620. If it's almost any of the Phenom IIs it should perform quite a bit better than the Opty.

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When looking for a reason as to why things go wrong, never rule out sheer STUPIDITY

deBelly

There is a nice French test of 131 processors here.

greg1174

Sorry for taking so long to respond. The processor is the 9650. I have been doing some tweaking but still have yet to "unleash" the power. Sitting side by side they are still night and day. Who knows, maybe I just have a bad chip? My best friend has a Q6600 and it performs similar to my Opty when we are sitting side by side playing games. I know that most x2 chips run slow because I owned one (3200) and his wife's machine usually on the other side of mine runs really slow and she is running the 4400 I believe. Both his and his wife are running 9800gt cards in their machines, both running 2GB of memory just as I am, though they are running DDR2 and I am running DDR. They were not as anal as I was with finding memory with close timing nor are they running raid on either and neither have a physx card. I will say that he does a lot of DVD stuff and I have attempted on my computer and his does take about 40% less time to do the same function when it comes to that type of applications. Other than that I have not really noticed much difference. I will say that his machine and hers are much more quiet than mine sitting side by side...that physx card required me to put Vantec Tornado fans in mine to keep it some what cool....those are loud! I am really starting to wonder if benchmarks are nothing more than a ploy to get you to buy new stuff, perhaps they are in bed with the companies.....after all they do have to get paid; when was the last time you paid for futuremark software?

DJ BIG T

try adding more ram to see if that helps.. are you using vista?

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