Low FPS despite good hardware?

[voidnoir]

Hi All,

 

I've been experiencing some issues with couple of games whereby my fps seemed to be lower than my friend's fps (or so they say..) whose hardware isn't as good as mine. It's not just the comparison to my friends which lead me to think that my fps is lacking.. I have recently re-installed skyrim and tried modding it, specifically I've tried installing full version of RealENB with all recommended mods in order to make the game look amazing, and my fps seemed to be very low 35-60 when looking out into the distance (from the cave exit at the start of the game and looking towards Whiterun). The same case applies to World of Warcraft which I don't play as much these days, the fps dips below 60 even when idling in garrison. On the other hand however, I can play Witcher 3 with maxed settings (literally everything on max) and it barely ever goes below 60.

 

Any idea what might be happening?

 

My specs:

GeForce 980Ti 6Gb (although for some reason it only shows 4GB in DxDiag, in Advanced graphic settings it shows that total availble memory is 5835mb but dedicated is only 2048mb)

i7 5930k @ 3.50Ghz (12 CPUs according to dxdiag, but CPUID shows that half of them are parked or disabled)

RAM: 16gb Corsair 2400 ram

Samsung SSD 850 500gb

144hz Acer Monitor with 60hz secondary Philips TV/Monitor (connected via HDMI)

EVGA 1000 P2 PSU

Windows 7

.. i think that's it but if you need any further specs then please let me know.

 

 

[alucryts]

You would need to look in to your CPU, GPU, VRAM, and RAM utilization while playing each game to find out what is going on. I know for a fact that world of warcraft is almost entirely CPU bound as it uses like 1.25 cores total. The MMO part of it leads it to being a CPU bound game. I typically see well over 60 fps in WoW though......in dungeons I have seen like 200-300 fps at times.

 

Skyrim on the other hand should likely be GPU bound. I have a 4790k and a 980ti, and with 200 mods I see about 30 fps with the CPU utilization at 60% across all cores, 4 GB VRAM used out of 6, and GPU core speed around 1400 MHz 100% utilized. I have realvision enb, every 4k texture you can imagine, unbelievable grass 2 at max density, warzones 2015, and a host of other mods....my point is you need to be realistic about what you can expect from your rig...I have some good hardware, but I know that I am pushing it to the limit so 30 fps for me is acceptable.

[neotribe]

dxdiag is known to do this with newer 6GB cards. Go by what the nvidia control panel shows you.

 

See e.g. http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-2314354/gtx-780-6gb-showing-3gb.html

 

At what resolution are you running the game?

 

Here's some pure speculation: It's worth considering that Skyrim isn't all that well optimized for multicore, and WoW is even worse last I checked. CPU makers were still chasing higher clocks when they were developed. Your friends may have a CPU withj less overall grunt but slightly better single-threaded performance in certain situations.

 

Witcher III was developed after the focus in CPU improvement had fully shifted to multicore rather than raw speed, so it will be taking better advantage of cores for CPU intensive work. And even so, it's DX11, which is not optimized for multicore. The DX12 games will make even better use of modern hardware to distribute the CPU's share of the graphical workload.

Edited October 8, 2015 by neotribe

[Vagrant0]

WoW is something that can run on almost any computer, but not run well on anything. It was designed this way since many people playing are not running higher, or even mid range machines.

 

In addition to the post above, with Skyrim, ENB can drastically change hardware performance both by what the settings are and how those settings interact with hardware. You need to keep in mind that essentially an ENB patch is designed to force hardware or software effects that are not normally present within that application. Often these things are patched poorly, or are handled inconsistently depending on hardware, especially when there are so many settings out there made by people who don't know what they're doing. This is why they are bad for trying to establish any sort of benchmarking.