[doraemon1987]

This thread was awsome and it might help me discover the weak points in my system, this thread mentioned a quadcore was at 30-70% load at 3.3 ghz ? i was wondering if anyone could tell me if my CPU is bottlenecking my system atm

atm i have:

Vista 64bit
E6600 at 2.9ghz (2.4 stock)
4gigs of ram (800mhz)
BFG 8800gt oc2 x 2 in SLI
and a decent 500gb hdd samsung

i get really great fps 35+ most of the time but sometimes it'll drop in to the 20's. (This is with every setting to the max except antialiasing which is on x2 or off)

will increasing my cpu make any major changes to my games performance ?

thanks

[profundido]

Originally Posted by terrasque All in all a good writeup, but there was a few things I reacted on.. First, regarding CPU : "Nvidia cards draw their power greatly on the processor and thus generate extra load. ATI cards operate at maximum speed pretty much independent of the processor." - This sounds like a complete load of bollocks, and a quick google search did not reveal any proof of this. Do you have any links that confirms this? Second ->"Always go for a hardware raid with a raidcontroller pci,pcie or onboard (=built-in in the motherboard)" *BEEP*, wrong. 99% of cheap (think sub-1000$) raid cards, and mobo raids are so-called "Fake RAID"s, and does NOT give any hardware acceleration, but does all through drivers (in other words, using your cpu, that should be using all its electrons on running the game). Many of those drivers also perform rather poorly compared to other software raids. In some cases, a pure software raid gives much better performance. Also, as a general tip, it's good to have the OS on one disk / raid, and the data/game on another disk / raid. That way system I/O won't block game I/O and vice versa (especially swap file). Oh, and another thing. I play the game with a card with 256mb ram, and it works fine. Some textures are slow to load, but that doesn't cause any slowdown on the game. One other thing, when it comes to 64bit and ram, if windows don't see all the installed ram, check http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929605 Regarding the graphics settings, because of my old gfx card (7800GT 256mb) I did a lot of testing and tweaking to get it to run well AND look decent / useful. I won't write a guide about it (not now at least), but I did take screenshots of my current settings, and a few "showcase" screenshots. With these settings I usually get as good or better FPS than Low settings, but IMO it looks way better (and you can see into the distance). Screenshots : http://thelazy.net/gallery2/v/games/aoc/graphics/

About the video card scaling in relation to cpu power to back it up: This is something I have tested and known for many years to be a fact. What's more I have right now in my mind still the images of a few nice webpages and charts that could have backed this up, including collegues that came to the same conclusion after extensive testing. Unfortunately, when -after your reading your reply- I tried to find back those old links I find them all gone. What's worse, a quick google reveals very few sources on the subject. On top of that, we have a new generation of ati cards on the block soon and we'll have to reanalyse the situation. I could quickly find the half of the proof which is best listed imho through this link:

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/cpu-gp...w-30828-4.html

However, since I couldn't find a clean ATI equivalent I can't proof this for a fact to you even though I still know it's like that. Because I can't proof it further without setting up a new test environment myself (which I'm not going to do for the sake of this alone) I decide to remove this part from the guide, even though I still consider this to be a fact until proven otherwise with the latest generation of ATI cards. I'll state my point again: "nvdia cards scale considerably more with better/worse cpu's than ati cards in general and on all types", even though I can no longer find the sources to proof that to you in an easy and fast way. Thx for bringing it up though since I'm always open to founded comments. Guide edited. Cheers


About the hardware raid controllers I wrote:

->"Always go for a hardware raid with a raidcontroller pci,pcie or onboard (=built-in in the motherboard)"

I wrote that because software raids in windows are AND an increased risk because in general, things go wrong with them alot faster than with hardware-based raids and because in general (there are maybe a few specific exceptions) they will always be faster than software raids simply because they calculate raid instructions at the bios lvl rather than on top of the running OS. You are very right however to point out that not all hardware raids have equal hardware support for it. Some add-on pci/pcie cards have excellent hardware support, offloading the OS completely but they are expensive and few. Typical clien cheap add-in cards have popular chipsets than DO calculate and effective offload but less than their professional counterparts and some on-board are merely connectors with little hardware support that indeed stresses the OS to a considerable degree, but in any case better than a pure windows software raid. Hope that clarifies. Guide not edited.

Extra links on the subject:

http://articles.techrepublic.com.com...1-5715216.html

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/...53747,00.html#

http://www.raid-data-recovery.net/ra...-hardware.html

http://opensystemsguy.wordpress.com/...-raid-5-or-10/

http://articles.techrepublic.com.com...1-5715216.html

about "Oh, and another thing. I play the game with a card with 256mb ram, and it works fine. Some textures are slow to load, but that doesn't cause any slowdown on the game."

***beep*** wrong You will not experience this as stuttering but your fps will effectively go down as soon as your available amount of memory on the card is saturated. Unfortunately this game is very heavy on textures and DOES saturate above 400 very easy, even at low solutions. Hence a 256MB card does slow down the general fps. If you can find a 8800GT with 256MB, test it against and 8800GT with more mem and find out for yourself. I tested with a 512MB and a 1GB version on high resolutions and noticed the fps drop when swapping the card using the same installation and drivers. Even my 512MB was easily saturated during my test. I personally recommend that as a minimum therefore.

[profundido]

Originally Posted by anotherzen I have 8800gtx in SLi and q6600 @ 3.2ghz i get around 19-45fps ingame, nowhere have i ever been close to 60, unless i see straight down ^^, on a single card i cant even play in Tortage, in old Tartania i guess i would get around 12fps with one card, as i get around 19-22 on the docks there with SLi. I havent tested with the latest patch tho, but im having my doubts ^^

on a general note we have to realize that people when certain people say: "I have X-Y fps in this game" (even though I did it myself so I'm guilty as hell) we have to realize that that is absolutely unusable for comparison. If you really want to mention your fps for the purpose of comparing it to whatever, zone from khemi to OLD Tarantia, let go of the keyboard and mouse and wait till your fps stabilizes. THAT I find personally to be a decent and indicative number that people can use for comparison. Then you can start swapping out video drivers or hardware or start changing video settings ingame and retest the fps under those same circumstances.

[profundido]

Originally Posted by omergurlek Would buying another of the same GPU help? Or can we SLI 2 different GPUs together. And isn't there any other option to solve this problem?

your stuttering may come from different situations. I would first delete the shader.cache.temp and shader.cache.local and then rerun tests in some area's. If performance stays as bad as as dropping to 5fps I would consider upgrading to a better videocard (with more memory). I don't think however that that is the main source of your stuttering problem and I definately am convinced that adding another card like that will not solved it, so don't do it imho. Rather upgrade to another card if you want to change anything.

[profundido]

Originally Posted by doraemon1987 This thread was awsome and it might help me discover the weak points in my system, this thread mentioned a quadcore was at 30-70% load at 3.3 ghz ? i was wondering if anyone could tell me if my CPU is bottlenecking my system atm atm i have: Vista 64bit E6600 at 2.9ghz (2.4 stock) 4gigs of ram (800mhz) BFG 8800gt oc2 x 2 in SLI and a decent 500gb hdd samsung i get really great fps 35+ most of the time but sometimes it'll drop in to the 20's. (This is with every setting to the max except antialiasing which is on x2 or off) will increasing my cpu make any major changes to my games performance ? thanks

you have a good system and the fps drops that you experience are imho due to the gamecode, not to your hardware. Alot of optimization is being done still as we speak and it's not ready. Expectations are that in the comming months, the game will perform better on existing (including older) hardware but the question is often: "Do we want to wait for that and play (multiple) chars to lvl 80 having performance problems" It's up to the player to decide if it's wroth the investment. In your case you did the investment, I don't think your cpu is a big bottleneck to this game but do test it yourself. You can't do much more but wait until gamecode is further optimized. As a matter of fact, hey: the patchnotes from the last days seem to have already fixed some more of that in certain zones...there's hope =P

[Chiamara]

Hmm I did try all these things out and tried a fresh installation of windows. I still get insanely low FPS in some areas and quite alot of stuttering.

Could you give me a quick hint if Im right when I say that my CPU and RAM needs an upgrade?

My current rig is:
AMD Athlon dual core 4400+
2GB DDR2 RAM
2x WD raptor raid0
Asus 8800GTX 768mb
Windows XP SP2 (SP3 not released in my language yet)

Cheers for an excellent post, appriciate your work here. :-)

[profundido]

imho you are right, but in addition you would be better of with formatting to Vista 64 bit if you have the product and 4GB ram or more

[profundido]

Originally Posted by Bardunet Statement ; "Vista 64bit bad for gaming no matter what game or specs." myself running 32bit Vista sp1 and get more fps with hardware way over mine but those pll using 64bit i know for a fact Vista64 is more difficult to please when it comes to gaming performance and drivers.. comments please.

wrong thread m8, plz put this up in a new thread (next to the already existing others on this subject)

[profundido]

Originally Posted by Verun Well I did not read the whole thread. Very nice guide, but one thing is wrong: If you set the Virtual Memory to 0 on Windows, serveral Applications might not run or crash or have unusual behavior... thats because Windows is build to expect some Virtual Memory. This cannot be changed. So don't ever set it to 0.

for systems with less than 4GB your statement is completely true and I had this in mind when writing the guide and it's reflected in it, therefore what I wrote in the guide I still consider correct.

[profundido]

Originally Posted by Conchobar Thanks Profundido Are there any observations about the "superfetch" service regarding game performance?

besides the fact that the game starts and loads faster with 8GB and superfetch ? No, nothing else that I know of