What is my pc missing for Battlefield?

[AldoEmmerth1]

I recently upgraded my cpu/mb/ram to run Battlefield 1. The problem is I play on low 1080p without any fancy setting and yet I cant get stable fps.

 

These are my specs:

Cpu: i5 7500

Cooler: Cooler Master 212 evo

Gpu: Gtx 960 2gb

Ram: HyperX savage 2666 mhz (clocked to 2400 because motherboard)   Edit: 8gb

Mb: Gigabyte B250-ds3h

Hdd: Wd Blue 1 tb

Psu: Evga 500b

 

Temps, fps and settings are attached (these were recorded during a match). I run one 1080p monitor and one 1600p to the side (most of the time it just shows the desktop).

I would like to know what upgrade or what do I need to do at least get a stable 60 fps. Also my windows copy is no longer activated because I changed hardware, can that be a cause?

 

I appreciate the help.

[AHaskin14]

What's the GPU usage, that's not seen in your afterburner screenshots. Either way that's weird. I don't want to say it's your 2gb of VRAM but it's an option. Also perhaps set the frame rate limiter to 60. Either way you should be getting much higher fps.

[AldoEmmerth1]

1 minute ago, AHaskin14 said:

What's the GPU usage, that's not seen in your afterburner screenshots. Either way that's weird. I don't want to say it's your 2gb of VRAM but it's an option. Also perhaps set the frame rate limiter to 60. Either way you should be getting much higher fps.

I will play another match while monitoring that and update you.

[pzspah]

BF1 eats ram and vram for all it's meals.

 

I have close to your specs, but with a ssd, 1060 6gb and 16gb of 3000mhz ram. It runs full MP matches buttery smooth at ultra.

 

Non-activated windows isn't going to be it.

[AHaskin14]

13 minutes ago, AldoEmmerth1 said:

I will play another match while monitoring that and update you.

 

9 minutes ago, pzspah said:

BF1 eats ram and vram for all it's meals.

 

I have close to your specs, but with a ssd, 1060 6gb and 16gb of 3000mhz ram. It runs full MP matches buttery smooth at ultra.

 

Non-activated windows isn't going to be it.

So ya maybe monitor the RAM usage too, good call @pzspah. I have an 8gb card so I never think to look at that myself anymore.

[AHaskin14]

I see from your screenshots now you likely have only 4gb of RAM, that could be an issue even though your not saturating yet, VRAM may be having the same issue as well.

[AldoEmmerth1]

2 minutes ago, AHaskin14 said:

I see from your screenshots now you likely have only 4gb of RAM, that could be an issue even though your not saturating yet, VRAM may be having the same issue as well.

Forgot to say on the post that i have 8gb, its edited now but I can monitor that too. Here is the screenshot of cpu usage and gpu usage. Is this i5 not enough?

[AHaskin14]

Just now, AldoEmmerth1 said:

Forgot to say on the post that i have 8gb, its edited now but I can monitor that too. Here is the screenshot of cpu usage and gpu usage. Is this i5 not enough?

i5 is plenty, I run a  6600. your GPU is only going half powr though, thats a problem.

[AldoEmmerth1]

1 minute ago, AHaskin14 said:

i5 is plenty, I run a  6600. your GPU is only going half powr though, thats a problem.

At first I tought it was thermal throttling thats why I started monitoring temps, but seems like that isnt the issue. Maybe I need to overclock the gpu?

[mr195]

BF1 is notorious for poor performance with i5 processors. This could be your issue. Especially since the gpu isn't being utilized fully, because it's probably waiting on processes from the cpu. 

[Not_Sean]

3 minutes ago, mr195 said:

BF1 is notorious for poor performance with i5 processors. This could be your issue. Especially since the gpu isn't being utilized fully, because it's probably waiting on processes from the cpu. 

i5 is more than fine, its the 4Gb Ram and worse 2GB GPU.

 

the 960 was not a powerful card, its only this new gen of 10xx that even the mid range are stupidly powerful. 

[mr195]

Just now, Not_Sean said:

i5 is more than fine, its the 4Gb Ram and worse 2GB GPU.

 

the 960 was not a powerful card, its only this new gen of 10xx that even the mid range are stupidly powerful. 

Many people (including myself) haven't had good performance with i5s on bf1. Also, it says in op that he has 8gb? Or maybe im misunderstanding

[Not_Sean]

1 minute ago, mr195 said:

Many people (including myself) haven't had good performance with i5s on bf1. Also, it says in op that he has 8gb? Or maybe im misunderstanding

Sorry didn't see the Edit on it, yeah 8Gb ram is fine but for this its the GPU thats the issues. 

 

And Define not good performance. Cause my Redstone build is playing is very well and I really cont complain. It comes down to what you expect from a i5. If you want i7 performance well sorry you only have a i5, that said the i5 does handle it well. 

[mr195]

Just now, Not_Sean said:

Sorry didn't see the Edit on it, yeah 8Gb ram is fine but for this its the GPU thats the issues. 

 

And Define not good performance. Cause my Redstone build is playing is very well and I really cont complain. It comes down to what you expect from a i5. If you want i7 performance well sorry you only have a i5, that said the i5 does handle it well. 

Was seeing sub-60fps with my i5 with low settings, same as op is. And it looks like cpu is bottlenecking him since cpu is at 100% while gpu is ~65% during gameplay. When I upgraded to an i7 my gpu usage went up to 99%, and consequently my fps increased dramatically.

[pzspah]

1 hour ago, mr195 said:

BF1 is notorious for poor performance with i5 processors. This could be your issue. Especially since the gpu isn't being utilized fully, because it's probably waiting on processes from the cpu. 

I have the same exact cpu as OP and it isn't a problem in bf1, I can play at ultra just fine at 1080p. Thus it's one of the other components.

 

 My previous build had a skylake i7 and a 960 2gb, the latter couldn't run bf1 for shit.

[AldoEmmerth1]

44 minutes ago, pzspah said:

I have the same exact cpu as OP and it isn't a problem in bf1, I can play at ultra just fine at 1080p. Thus it's one of the other components.

 

 My previous build had a skylake i7 and a 960 2gb, the latter couldn't run bf1 for shit.

I didnt expect the gpu to be that bad, I upgraded from a dual core amd apu and the difference is giant, my gpu never went over 20% usage because of the bottleneck . What gpu do you have?

 

[AldoEmmerth1]

Looks like vram is my problem so new gpu is what it needs. Is there any setting that can be cranked up that doesnt consume too much vram? Or one that can be cranked down to reduce vram use? The weirdest thing is that when the hardware was just installed i got the smoothest 61 fps with a minimum of 58, not even explosions, 64 players or blimps going down made it go below 58.  But a few days later this is happening.

[pzspah]

18 minutes ago, AldoEmmerth1 said:

I didnt expect the gpu to be that bad, I upgraded from a dual core amd apu and the difference is giant, my gpu never went over 20% usage because of the bottleneck . What gpu do you have?

 

A 1060 6gb 

I'd suggest getting more ram while you're at it and you should be good to go for a few years.

[AldoEmmerth1]

5 minutes ago, pzspah said:

A 1060 6gb 

I'd suggest getting more ram while you're at it and you should be good to go for a few years.

I did this upgrade just to play Destiny 2 in peace, I hope that it doesnt need that much vram. Gpu upgrade is on the plans now but it takes me a long time to gather that much money. Thank you 

[JokerProduction]

GPU>RAM>SSD>CPU    in this case.

[typographie]

20 hours ago, AldoEmmerth1 said:

Here is the screenshot of cpu usage and gpu usage. Is this i5 not enough?

It's kind of hard for me to think otherwise going off of those graphs… Those big upward spikes in CPU usage seem to loosely mirror the big downward spikes in GPU usage, and likely the FPS drops you're seeing as well.

 

That's not to say an i5 just can't play BF1. I do fine at a solid 60 FPS with an overclocked i5-6600K, and I guess others are reporting acceptable performance with locked i5's. Your Task Manager says you've got 95% CPU usage at the time of the screenshot but only 87% from bf1.exe. What's the missing ~6%? Trying shutting down EVERYTHING you can from the Task Manager, so that you're at an empty desktop with nothing but Task Manager, so that your CPU usage is 0%. Then try BF1.

 

Additionally, as you crank your details up to medium, high, or ultra, does your performance get noticeably worse?

[AldoEmmerth1]

1 hour ago, typographie said:

It's kind of hard for me to think otherwise going off of those graphs… Those big upward spikes in CPU usage seem to loosely mirror the big downward spikes in GPU usage, and likely the FPS drops you're seeing as well.

 

That's not to say an i5 just can't play BF1. I do fine at a solid 60 FPS with an overclocked i5-6600K, and I guess others are reporting acceptable performance with locked i5's. Your Task Manager says you've got 95% CPU usage at the time of the screenshot but only 87% from bf1.exe. What's the missing ~6%? Trying shutting down EVERYTHING you can from the Task Manager, so that you're at an empty desktop with nothing but Task Manager, so that your CPU usage is 0%. Then try BF1.

 

Additionally, as you crank your details up to medium, high, or ultra, does your performance get noticeably worse?

Hi, about cranking up the details I found something really weird. I decided to open Geforce Experience to see what settings nvidia recommended for me; they recommend a mix of low, medium and high (I will attach them), and to my surprise, my fps went up by cranking up the settings. Instead of the annoying 40-50 Im getting 55-70 now. I have no idea of why is this happening or how this helped me because the resolution is the same and the game isnt scaling down, and yet it looks better with more stability.

 

Aside from that, is it actually okay or safe to kill every single thing in task manager (except for system things)?

[the MBK]

Well for me upgrading my RAM from 8 to 16GB did the trick. No more frame drops. But you might run in some problems with your 2GB GPU as well.

Maybe you get a better experience now because the GPU is the only bottleneck. If you use higher settings, the game feels more consistent.

[AldoEmmerth1]

1 minute ago, the MBK said:

Well for me upgrading my RAM from 8 to 16GB did the trick. No more frame drops. But you might run in some problems with your 2GB GPU as well.

Maybe you get a better experience now because the GPU is the only bottleneck if you use higher setting and so the game feels more consistent.

I just cant understand how the higher settings help me in this case, but Im okay with that.

[typographie]

3 hours ago, AldoEmmerth1 said:

Hi, about cranking up the details I found something really weird. I decided to open Geforce Experience to see what settings nvidia recommended for me; they recommend a mix of low, medium and high (I will attach them), and to my surprise, my fps went up by cranking up the settings. Instead of the annoying 40-50 Im getting 55-70 now. I have no idea of why is this happening or how this helped me because the resolution is the same and the game isnt scaling down, and yet it looks better with more stability.

 

Aside from that, is it actually okay or safe to kill every single thing in task manager (except for system things)?

As far as I know nothing is "unsafe" to kill in Task Manager. There are probably a few things in there that Task Manager will refuse to shut down, still other processes may constantly restart themselves. Even if you could shut down something important there, everything should be back on a system reboot anyway. Basically I just meant to shut down anything that isn't crucial, and isn't required to get BF1 to run. I'm just thinking that if BF1 is topping out your CPU into the 90's, having something running in the background that's eating up 5-7% could be significant.

 

Basically under a CPU bottleneck, settings that add to the GPU's load are often "free" in that they don't affect your performance at all. Seeing performance go up is kind of odd, but I suppose it's possible that shifting more of the load to the GPU could result in smoother performance since the stuff the GPU is responsible for is more consistently and constantly applied per scene. When you're more CPU-bound, your framerate is probably more at the mercy of explosions and crazy physics events.