upgrade advice Fix the CPU bottleneck and improve Warzone performance: i5 8400 and RTX 2060

[curious-parakeet]

Hi everyone,

 

Such a great forum, lots of useful info in here! Unfortunately my google skills didn't allow me to find a solution to my problem, so I wanted to ask an advice from pros.

 

Current build:

https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/48010136

GIGABYTE B360 AORUS Gaming 3 WiFi (LGA1151/Intel/B250/ATX)

i5 8400

RTX 2060

2x 8 GB 2666hz Corsair Vengeance

PSU SeaSonic 620W

144 hz cheap 24" Acer monitor

 

Budget (including currency): $600

Country: US

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Warzone

 

Problem: I mainly play Warzone on this PC. It's infamous for its optimization, and also being very CPU heavy. I play on 1080p on low settings, but FPS drops and input lag are almost unbearable sometimes. It wasn't great during the times of when I made the tests (see attached), but with recent updates it's just mad bad. CPU lag is like 20-40ms. I tinkered with the settings and various set ups a lot already, but pc-builds says that's it's a CPU bottleneck. 

 

Also if Discord is turned on and I'm talking to someone, I literally start getting 1s input delay while playing. 

 

I also do realize that 2060 also becoming outdated soon, but paying thousands of dollars for just a GPU is not something I'm considering at the moment. 

 

So what are my upgrade options to improve the FPS and remove the input lag, so that I eventually could also slap a new GPU in there (when/if we're blessed with better prices and availability)? The same website suggests 9600K/8700K, but that's not for my chipset, is it? Or should I get an AMD compatible mobo and look for something like Ryzen 5? Basically something, that would have more threads and have an upgrade path for the newer GPU later?

 

Thank you!

 

Edited November 19, 2021 by curious-parakeet
Added PSU detail.

[WereCat]

userbenchmark and bottleneck calculater are useless websites

 

Your CPU is mostly fine, the game has many issues and it tends to run bad on way better HW than you have.

 

There are certainly things you can improve, not sure what exact settings you've tried but you mentioned you run at 1080p LOW settings. Well, there are many settings in Warzone that on LOW are more demanding than on HIGH because of how they work.

For example Shadow Map Resolution on LOW is the same as on Ultra except on LOW it also uses filter to make it look bad so it takes more performance to make it look worse... etc...

 

 

 

I had best luck with these settings. I run at 1440p so DLSS on Balanced looks fine for me. You may want to put it to Quality if you play at 1080p.

Also if you run into some VRAM limitations the first thing I would adjust are the Texture Resolution from Normal to Low.

 

The reason why I use Normal is that as long as you have enough VRAM the performance difference vs Low is almost none but the visual quality is a massive difference from Low.

 

Also another thing... I know it is common to use different sharpening and color filters for Warzone with the NVIDIA overlay settings but that also drasticaly cuts down your FPS so you may want to disable that if you're using it.

 

 

[Revioli]

Playing at 1080p low settings is the worst case scenario for your cpu, as it will be more loaded, as the load decreases on your graphics card.

That being said, an 8400 is not particularly fast either, so it might be time for an upgrade.

Before that though, I'd suggest going into the game, turning UP your graphics settings, and see if the stutter decreases.

If not, then even something like a 10400 would be a significant improvement. Pair that up with a B560 motherboard, some 3200 cl16 Ram, and that should minimize the stutter.

[DigitalGoat]

1 hour ago, curious-parakeet said:

Hi everyone,

 

Such a great forum, lots of useful info in here! Unfortunately my google skills didn't allow me to find a solution to my problem, so I wanted to ask an advice from pros.

 

Current build:

https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/48010136

GIGABYTE B360 AORUS Gaming 3 WiFi (LGA1151/Intel/B250/ATX)

i5 8400

RTX 2060

2x 8 GB 2666hz Corsair Vengeance

PSU SeaSonic 620W

144 hz cheap 24" Acer monitor

 

Budget (including currency): $600

Country: US

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Warzone

 

Problem: I mainly play Warzone on this PC. It's infamous for its optimization, and also being very CPU heavy. I play on 1080p on low settings, but FPS drops and input lag are almost unbearable sometimes. It wasn't great during the times of when I made the tests (see attached), but with recent updates it's just mad bad. CPU lag is like 20-40ms. I tinkered with the settings and various set ups a lot already, but pc-builds says that's it's a CPU bottleneck. 

 

Also if Discord is turned on and I'm talking to someone, I literally start getting 1s input delay while playing. 

 

I also do realize that 2060 also becoming outdated soon, but paying thousands of dollars for just a GPU is not something I'm considering at the moment. 

 

So what are my upgrade options to improve the FPS and remove the input lag, so that I eventually could also slap a new GPU in there (when/if we're blessed with better prices and availability)? The same website suggests 9600K/8700K, but that's not for my chipset, is it? Or should I get an AMD compatible mobo and look for something like Ryzen 5? Basically something, that would have more threads and have an upgrade path for the newer GPU later?

 

Thank you!

 

Apart from the suggestions about turning up some graphics settings to increase GPU load and decrease CPU load, which are valid suggestions, you could also try to use DSR in the Nvidia settings to render the game at 1440p (or a % higher) and display at 1080p, this will take a lot of pressure off the CPU, but also your frame rate may suffer due to the 2060 not being designed to render at 1440p. Try it, adjust some settings, see what works for you. 

[curious-parakeet]

21 hours ago, WereCat said:

userbenchmark and bottleneck calculater are useless websites

 

Your CPU is mostly fine, the game has many issues and it tends to run bad on way better HW than you have.

 

There are certainly things you can improve, not sure what exact settings you've tried but you mentioned you run at 1080p LOW settings. Well, there are many settings in Warzone that on LOW are more demanding than on HIGH because of how they work.

For example Shadow Map Resolution on LOW is the same as on Ultra except on LOW it also uses filter to make it look bad so it takes more performance to make it look worse... etc...

 

 

 

I had best luck with these settings. I run at 1440p so DLSS on Balanced looks fine for me. You may want to put it to Quality if you play at 1080p.

Also if you run into some VRAM limitations the first thing I would adjust are the Texture Resolution from Normal to Low.

 

The reason why I use Normal is that as long as you have enough VRAM the performance difference vs Low is almost none but the visual quality is a massive difference from Low.

 

Also another thing... I know it is common to use different sharpening and color filters for Warzone with the NVIDIA overlay settings but that also drasticaly cuts down your FPS so you may want to disable that if you're using it.

 

 

Dang, you're totally right. I increased load on the GPU and the spikes are almost gone now! This is way better, thank you. 

 

So when I do upgrade though, what should I start with? New mobo and a processor, right? Since the 2060 is already (sort of) bottlenecked by CPU, getting a 30xx wouldn't make this any better..

[WereCat]

2 minutes ago, curious-parakeet said:

Dang, you're totally right. I increased load on the GPU and the spikes are almost gone now! This is way better, thank you. 

 

So when I do upgrade though, what should I start with? New mobo and a processor, right? Since the 2060 is already (sort of) bottlenecked by CPU, getting a 30xx wouldn't make this any better..

I know that the i5 8400 on some cheap boards can't boost properly high enough and it gets stuck at around 3GHz but if that's not the case and you're actually getting around 3.8GHz+ when playing games then you would still benefit from upgrading your GPU significantly more than from a CPU upgrade. 

[curious-parakeet]

On 11/19/2021 at 9:18 PM, WereCat said:

I know that the i5 8400 on some cheap boards can't boost properly high enough and it gets stuck at around 3GHz but if that's not the case and you're actually getting around 3.8GHz+ when playing games then you would still benefit from upgrading your GPU significantly more than from a CPU upgrade. 

Interesting! Could you please give a hint on how do I check that?

 

Also, speaking of RAM—makes any sense to upgrade that? Found a good deal on 32GB 3600.

 

P. S.

Sorry for not replying earlier, I don't get the email notifications for some reason.

[WereCat]

23 minutes ago, curious-parakeet said:

Interesting! Could you please give a hint on how do I check that?

 

Also, speaking of RAM—makes any sense to upgrade that? Found a good deal on 32GB 3600.

 

P. S.

Sorry for not replying earlier, I don't get the email notifications for some reason.

With HWinfo

 

I don't think that RAM upgrade would help you, that kit will likely not be able to run at those speeds with your motherboard and CPU