Time for a cpu upgrade?

[gepowr]

Just now, Tellos said:

I run on high or very high past 60FPS on my 1440P 144hz moniter with a GTX 1080 from EVGA and a E3-1270v2. does jsut fine.

What fps do you get in large cities?

[Tellos]

I'll check for Ghost recon when I get to a larger city. Benchmarkls had me bwtween 70s and 80s dependign on high or very high. even when lots was going on.

[Taf the Ghost]

3 minutes ago, gepowr said:

Okay didn't know that, interesting. But how do you explain @ApolloX75's equal fps and more consistent gpu usage (i'm guessing since he didn't reply to me yet what kind of usage and fps he gets when driving around in cities)? I'm starting to think my pc is performing just fine, i7 4790k bottlenecking a gtx 1080 at 1080p is probably just the way it is.

100% CPU utilization doesn't mean the CPU is actually doing anything. If it's waiting on Data from Memory, it can be pegged at a 100% but it's just wasting cycles while it waits. When you get a CPU pegged at 100%, you start to get those microstutters because the I/O starts getting locked up from a lack of cycles to process it. (Something not mentioned much these days, but I/O lockup used to be a big problem.)

 

If it's in city areas & in BF1 MP, things that come to mind: 1) draw distances set to high, 2) slow or failing HDD, 3) Nvidia driver issues and 4) some background process that's limiting CPU overhead. In Ghost Recon, you might think to fiddle with very specific settings. There might be one thrashing the memory much, much harder than you expect, which is causing texture loading issues.

 

Very, very few games respond like Fallout 4, but there's a solid boost in most games, especially in minimums, with faster RAM. If there's no issues with your storage, seeing if you can OC your RAM really far is probably worth some time.

[ApolloX75]

25 minutes ago, gepowr said:

Okay didn't know that, interesting. But how do you explain @ApolloX75's equal fps and more consistent gpu usage (i'm guessing since he didn't reply to me yet what kind of usage and fps he gets when driving around in cities)? I'm starting to think my pc is performing just fine, i7 4790k bottlenecking a gtx 1080 at 1080p is probably just the way it is.

I'll run some more tests for you when I get home from work.

[gepowr]

38 minutes ago, Tellos said:

I'll check for Ghost recon when I get to a larger city. Benchmarkls had me bwtween 70s and 80s dependign on high or very high. even when lots was going on.

Thank you.

31 minutes ago, Taf the Ghost said:

100% CPU utilization doesn't mean the CPU is actually doing anything. If it's waiting on Data from Memory, it can be pegged at a 100% but it's just wasting cycles while it waits. When you get a CPU pegged at 100%, you start to get those microstutters because the I/O starts getting locked up from a lack of cycles to process it. (Something not mentioned much these days, but I/O lockup used to be a big problem.)

 

If it's in city areas & in BF1 MP, things that come to mind: 1) draw distances set to high, 2) slow or failing HDD, 3) Nvidia driver issues and 4) some background process that's limiting CPU overhead. In Ghost Recon, you might think to fiddle with very specific settings. There might be one thrashing the memory much, much harder than you expect, which is causing texture loading issues.

 

Very, very few games respond like Fallout 4, but there's a solid boost in most games, especially in minimums, with faster RAM. If there's no issues with your storage, seeing if you can OC your RAM really far is probably worth some time.

I think my Hdd's are fine (at least wd lifeguard and crystal disk info say that. I did install my driver properly. I am not getting any microstutter tho. My fps are usually pretty stable, i really don't know what caused thos single fps drops i experienced earlier that morning. I guess i will figuere with my ram clocks later this day. Thank you for your help.

15 minutes ago, ApolloX75 said:

I'll run some more tests for you when I get home from work.

Thank you, i appreciate it.

[gepowr]

I found a video (i7 4770k, gtx 1080) and this guy holds a steady 140-160 fps in the first singleplayer mission. I tried playing this mission several times with the exact same settings an i'm averaging 120-140 fps, so there is at least a 10-20 fps difference between our systems which shouldn't be considering i'm using a bit faster cpu. In his comments he told someone who was having problems, too that ram timings and frequency really matter in bf1. Could this be possibly the reason ? He's running 2400Mhz while i'm at 1600MHz, both DDR3. I honestly never thought that ram speed would matter that significant at all, but well...

 

Video: 

 

[ApolloX75]

So I did some more tests, starting in 1080p and working up to 4K to see what differences took hold. The most interesting one was The Division; at 1080p I saw high CPU usage of 80-99% as well as high GPU usage in the 90-99% range, but jumping to 1440p knocked the CPU usage down to 60% and 4K to 50% while in both GPU was pegged at 99% which didn't surprise me at all.

Far Cry 5 at Ultra in 1080p ran an average of 55% CPU usage and bounced GPU usage all over the map from 50% to 99% randomly, it's almost like the 1080 was just bored with it and coasted, but definitely not a bottleneck issue as far as I can see, FPS was averaging 110ish as well.

I ran the GRW benchmark at both Very High and Ultra 1080p and saw almost identical results, average of 50% CPU usage and 98% GPU usage in both cases, only framerate average changed.

 

25 minutes ago, gepowr said:

I found a video (i7 4770k, gtx 1080) and this guy holds a steady 140-160 fps in the first singleplayer mission. I tried playing this mission several times with the exact same settings an i'm averaging 120-140 fps, so there is at least a 10-20 fps difference between our systems which shouldn't be considering i'm using a bit faster cpu. In his comments he told someone who was having problems, too that ram timings and frequency really matter in bf1. Could this be possibly the reason ? He's running 2400Mhz while i'm at 1600MHz, both DDR3. I honestly never thought that ram speed would matter that significant at all, but well..

I recently clocked my RAM up from 1600MHz to 1800MHz but I haven't started trimming timing yet nor have I started clocking the CPU Uncore up from stock, when I do I'll be sure to re run these tests and see if anything drastically changes, but so far I'm really not seeing a bottleneck on my end. I'll watch the video and copy the settings for BF1 and see what results I get.

 

*Edit: So I saw a maximum FPS of 172 and a minimum dip of 138, averaged about 150 or so at 1080p Ultra settings. CPU usage was around 50-55% and GPU bounced between 95-98%. Not bad I guess.

[gepowr]

10 hours ago, ApolloX75 said:

 

*Edit: So I saw a maximum FPS of 172 and a minimum dip of 138, averaged about 150 or so at 1080p Ultra settings. CPU usage was around 50-55% and GPU bounced between 95-98%. Not bad I guess.

Yup that seems like kind of the same fps like the guy in the video gets. I'm dropping down to 90fps in certain scenarios and my avg fps is about 20fps lower than yours. Could this be due to that i've 2 Monitors running from my system? I'll try this later today and see if this makes any difference. Any other ideas?

 

EDIT: running bf1 with only one Monitor plugged in i'm getting around 5fps more than with 2. I'm talking about the first singleplayer mission here, where i average at 135 fps now. I'm currently running everything at stock, note that my 1080 is a rebranded FE and clocks at around 1607MHz - 1750MHz ingame. I onced clocked it to 2GHz but i didn't really see an increase in fps. Should i try it again?

[gepowr]

@ApolloX75 Okay, so i basically found the issue.

My Evga Gtx 1080 is thermal throttling just like a FE card since its a blower style gpu. On the automatic fan curve the 1080 clocks down to 1607MHz to quietly maintain 83°. After setting an aggressive fan curve i'm sitting at 75° with the card boosting to 1800MHz resulting in a better performance. With a +200MHz on the core and +500MHz on the memory, i'm getting aftermarket 1080 performance (e.g. in unigine heaven benchmark), but it's very noisy and close to 90° which is too hot imo. So what do you guys say ? I got this card for a really good deal (370€). Should i sell it and get a different version, or just stick with it and life with the slower performance ?

[Tellos]

@gepowr so testing on high preset with SMAA and 60s to 70s occsional low 80s and some dips into the 50s are common. Fact is this CPU cannot keep up forever with the GPU and the GPu is being used plenty at times. I think if your lookign for higher FPS you may start with a new CPU. the GTX 1080 can handle it but either lower graphics settings at 1440P or a stronger CPU may be in order if you want a steady frame rate. Cities or very busy battles can really eat at frames.

[gepowr]

4 hours ago, Tellos said:

@gepowr so testing on high preset with SMAA and 60s to 70s occsional low 80s and some dips into the 50s are common. Fact is this CPU cannot keep up forever with the GPU and the GPu is being used plenty at times. I think if your lookign for higher FPS you may start with a new CPU. the GTX 1080 can handle it but either lower graphics settings at 1440P or a stronger CPU may be in order if you want a steady frame rate. Cities or very busy battles can really eat at frames.

Thanks for approving of this man, appreciate it. Jup, 4790k is getting old, still love it tho and it absolutely still does what i need it for.

[LogicWeasel]

24 minutes ago, gepowr said:

Thanks for approving of this man, appreciate it. Jup, 4790k is getting old, still love it tho and it absolutely still does what i need it for.

I still wonder how MUCH the Haswell CPU is actually the bottleneck once you remove the very obvious bottleneck of the poor GTX 1080 thermals and throttling.  I suspect your frames would be at a much more stable state if you had a 1080 with proper cooling that could keep up with high-thermal load during heavy gaming.  The problem is all too similar to what happens to mobile phones while gaming, the heat starts to kill the performance as it cannot withstand the thermal load and maintain optimal clock speed.

 

The Intel IPC hasn't actually improved THAT much in the i5-6600 and 7600k series such that I find it hard to justify blaming the CPU as much as others are in this thread (unless the Developer-stated system requirements declare outright they recommend more than 4 cores, which I find is very rare for prior to 2018 titles).

[gepowr]

9 minutes ago, LogicWeasel said:

I still wonder how MUCH the Haswell CPU is actually the bottleneck once you remove the very obvious bottleneck of the poor GTX 1080 thermals and throttling.  I suspect your frames would be at a much more stable state if you had a 1080 with proper cooling that could keep up with high-thermal load during heavy gaming.  The problem is all too similar to what happens to mobile phones while gaming, the heat starts to kill the performance as it cannot withstand the thermal load and maintain optimal clock speed.

 

The Intel IPC hasn't actually improved THAT much in the i5-6600 and 7600k series such that I find it hard to justify blaming the CPU as much as others are in this thread (unless the Developer-stated system requirements declare outright they recommend more than 4 cores, which I find is very rare for prior to 2018 titles).

Depends on the game, really. Battlefield is and always has been a very cpu intensive game, i just testet battlefield 3 and yeah my 1080 sits at 40-60% usage at 1080p ultra settings in 64 player servers. Getting well over 120 fps anyways so yeah. In benchmark it really helps setting your own custom fan curve to maintain a high clock, or even oc'ing it a bit as i did last week, but it's summer now with 30° ambient temp in my attic right now - i don't think oc'ing a blower card is a good idea right now