Oddly low performance, help please?

[Rennn]

I have very low performance in some games, and I'm not sure what the bottleneck is.

Here are my specs:

 

GPU: Galaxy GTX 660 GC 2GB at 1006Mhz (boost speed of 1072Mhz)

RAM: 8GB DDR3 G.Skill Ripjaw RAM at 1600Mhz

CPU: AMD Phenom II 955 X4 at 3.2Ghz

HDD: 1TB Hitachi at 7.2Ghz

Motherboard: Asus M4N68T-M V2

PSU: 750w Antec Earthwatts EA-750 ATX12v and EPS12v Power Supply

 

 

I play at 1080p, usually with 2X SSAA and 16X Anisotropic Filtering.

I have abnormally low performance in the following games on ultra settings. I doubt I should be dropping below 60 fps in any of them, at least not often.

 

Oblivion (not modded): 35-60 fps

Mass Effect 1: 25-55 fps

Dragon Age: Origins: 40-60 fps

Skyrim (not modded): 25-60 fps

Dark Messiah: 30-60 fps

 

Does anyone have any ideas what might be causing me to drop to such low framerates in these games? I know they're not new, but I didn't think compatibility would degrade that quickly.

Edited September 9, 2013 by Rennn

[ZeroKing]

Perhaps all that overclocking you did on your CPU? The games you listed are CPU-bound, so it may be due to your CPU giving out.

 

Another thing you might want to try is turning off SSAA via the drivers, as it may be causing abnormal performance drops in the game engines that do not support driver-enabled SSAA method.

[Rennn]

Perhaps all that overclocking you did on your CPU? The games you listed are CPU-bound, so it may be due to your CPU giving out.

 

 

I was worried about that, but my performance has been low since before I OC'd my CPU, and the OC was quite minor (0.3 Ghz, or 10%).

It's possible that I'm CPU limited, I'm just hoping to find some kind of confirmation or other problems that might be contributing.

 

Normally I might just replace my CPU to be safe (it is getting dated), but I don't want to replace it with another AMD CPU, so that would mean replacing my motherboard as well.

Edited September 9, 2013 by Rennn

[Beriallord]

Corrupted graphics drivers can cause issues. I personally had a similar problem recently on my rig with games running @ subpar performance, and doing this fixed it. You might want to do an uninstall of all graphics drivers, then use drivesweep to make sure all traces of the said drivers are removed. Then reinstall. Google drivesweeper, its a freeware program.

 

#1 uninstall the drivers & run drivesweeper

#2 reboot and reinstall drivers

#3 reboot again.

 

Be sure to install the latest Nvidia drivers as well.

 

Also, something else you might want to check is how many programs you got running in the background. They could be using CPU resources and slowing your gaming down. There is a program called Razer Game Booster, that shuts down non-essential processes in the background while gaming:

http://download.cnet.com/Razer-Game-Booster/3000-18512_4-10913645.html

 

I used it on my older PC and got a decent FPS boost. You might want to try that. It may or may not work depending on what is causing your problems.

Edited October 9, 2013 by Beriallord

[Lord Garon]

I have an issue related to my dual core Pentium G2030. It turns in great performance on older and poorly threaded games, especially Oblivion and Skyrim. On well threaded games, my dual core suffers. The issue is single core performance. Your Phenom is a more powerful CPU than my Pentium, in general. In particular, though, the Pentium does 30% better in single core benchmarks. If a program (game) launches only two dedicated threads, I suspect my little G2030 will outperform your Phenom. If the program launches many threads, your Phenom will execute 4 of them, while my Pentium has to rely on relatively inefficient Windows thread scheduling.

 

I've monitored Skyrim on my sister's Core i7 machine for comparison and there is a definite tendency for Windows to max only two cores when Skyrim runs. It's a little hard to be definitive because many things are happening at once, but I have read countless times that the Gamebyro engine (Oblivion) and the slightly modified Gamebyro engine (Skyrim) utilize two main threads to run games. Just because your Phenom has a lot of combined processing power, it doesn't mean all games take efficient advantage of it.

 

I would suspect, if the above has merit, that your Phenom runs more modern and complex, but better threaded, games faster than older ones. The opposite is certainly true of my machine. I run maxed out Skyrim (and FCOM Oblivion) at monitor refresh rates up to 75 FPS no problem. BF 3 puts a severe load on it and Crysis 3 bogs my machine down to a crawl.

[Rennn]

I have an issue related to my dual core Pentium G2030. It turns in great performance on older and poorly threaded games, especially Oblivion and Skyrim. On well threaded games, my dual core suffers. The issue is single core performance. Your Phenom is a more powerful CPU than my Pentium, in general. In particular, though, the Pentium does 30% better in single core benchmarks. If a program (game) launches only two dedicated threads, I suspect my little G2030 will outperform your Phenom. If the program launches many threads, your Phenom will execute 4 of them, while my Pentium has to rely on relatively inefficient Windows thread scheduling.

 

I've monitored Skyrim on my sister's Core i7 machine for comparison and there is a definite tendency for Windows to max only two cores when Skyrim runs. It's a little hard to be definitive because many things are happening at once, but I have read countless times that the Gamebyro engine (Oblivion) and the slightly modified Gamebyro engine (Skyrim) utilize two main threads to run games. Just because your Phenom has a lot of combined processing power, it doesn't mean all games take efficient advantage of it.

 

I would suspect, if the above has merit, that your Phenom runs more modern and complex, but better threaded, games faster than older ones. The opposite is certainly true of my machine. I run maxed out Skyrim (and FCOM Oblivion) at monitor refresh rates up to 75 FPS no problem. BF 3 puts a severe load on it and Crysis 3 bogs my machine down to a crawl.

 

That sounds likely. Oblivion, Fallout 3, Dark Messiah, Mass Effect 1, Skyrim, etc, are all single or dual threaded games, and they drop my framerate much lower than BF3 or Crysis 3.

 

As a comparison, in Oblivion on ultra (with no mods) I average 25-55 fps (outdoors), and it ofc can only use 1 core. In Battlefield 3 on ultra, I average 55-80 fps (64 player multiplayer) or 75-100 fps (single player), and it uses 4 cores.

[Lord Garon]

I remember when Skyrim first came out and people were surprised by how CPU intensive it seemed. Many Core i3/i7 users found extra performance by disabling Hyper-Threading. They reported around 15-20% improvement in frame rates on full physical cores vice shared logical ones. Actually, I think that modest improvement speaks to the efficiency of Intel Hyper-Thread technology more than anything else. It only costs them 20% in raw performance to "double" their core count and processor speeds.

 

Multi-core, multi-threaded is here to stay. Can't wait till I can afford that i5. I'm certain that Crysis 3 is actually a fun game to play.

[Werne]

@Rennn Phenom II's are still damn fine AMD CPUs, the Black Edition quad-core Phenoms are on-par with the FX 4xxx series Bulldozers, with the high end sex-core Phenom (yes, it's said that way) being on-par or even faster than FX 6350. But due to AMD's low per-core performance, they have problems with older games, like most (if not all) AMD CPUs. With newer games that take advantage of all those Phenom cores, they are pretty good.

Can't wait till I can afford that i5.

If i5 3570K, trust me, get a decent aftermarket CPU cooler or that thing will boil. Not sure for Haswell but I'd get a new cooler for that one as well. I had a 3570K (mobo fried it) and I immediately replaced the cooler because temps went sky-high. Then again, I deserved it for putting a crappy stock cooler on it.

The stock cooler is crap and the thermal paste that's pre-applied on it is crap too, when set to 3.8GHz Turbo and it gets under load, it will go above the manufacturer maximum temperature and shut down. Max temp is 67^oC and mine got to 73^oC on a stock cooler and stock 3.4GHz frequency.

It only costs them 20% in raw performance to "double" their core count and processor speeds.

Yes, but the gain of using hyper-threading is not as great as people think. If I recall correctly, when hyper-threading is on, the CPUs lose about 10-20% when running programs that do not use the extra threads. But they only gain around 30-35% performance when running programs that fully utilize their threads, as opposed to running those same programs with hyper-threading turned off.

So they sacrifice 20% performance on programs that can't utilize extra threads in order to bring 35% greater performance in multi-threaded programs that utilize all of them. About the same performance penalty is applied to AMD's K10 architecture with CMT, with Intel's hyper-threading performing much better due to CPUs having a much greater per-core performance.

Edited October 12, 2013 by Werne

[Rennn]

@Rennn Phenom II's are still damn fine AMD CPUs, the Black Edition quad-core Phenoms are on-par with the FX 4xxx series Bulldozers, with the high end sex-core Phenom (yes, it's said that way) being on-par or even faster than FX 6350. But due to AMD's low per-core performance, they have problems with older games, like most (if not all) AMD CPUs. With newer games that take advantage of all those Phenom cores, they are pretty good.

 

Can't wait till I can afford that i5.

If i5 3570K, trust me, get a decent aftermarket CPU cooler or that thing will boil. Not sure for Haswell but I'd get a new cooler for that one as well. I had a 3570K (mobo fried it) and I immediately replaced the cooler because temps went sky-high. Then again, I deserved it for putting a crappy stock cooler on it.

 

The stock cooler is crap and the thermal paste that's pre-applied on it is crap too, when set to 3.8GHz Turbo and it gets under load, it will go above the manufacturer maximum temperature and shut down. Max temp is 67^oC and mine got to 73^oC on a stock cooler and stock 3.4GHz frequency.

 

 

I thought 6-core CPUs were termed Hexa-cores?

 

I agree with you, my Phenom II performs well in any multithreaded game. I can usually keep 60 fps in Metro LL and Planetside 2, as a comparison.

However, most of my favorite games rely on only 1 or 2 cores. I need to dramatically increase single-core performance. Overclocking doesn't work too well, unfortunately. It's proving almost impossible to keep stable on my mobo.

 

What do you think of this CPU as a replacement? 8 cores is a bonus, but mostly I'm looking for improvements in single core performance.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113284

Edited October 12, 2013 by Rennn

[Werne]

Hexa-core is boring, sex-core sounds much more fun, just like quint-core for penta-cores, my favourite is enneadeca-core.

 

Actually, now that I think about it, sex-core sounds like some porn channel, I should stop calling it like that. :laugh:

 

What do you think of this CPU as a replacement? 8 cores is a bonus, but mostly I'm looking for improvements in single core performance.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113284

You need a new mobo for that one, BIOS wasn't updated for your mobo (the one in OP) so it doesn't support any of the FX series and won't recognise them.

 

Anyway, FX 8350 should have about 20-25% increase in single-core performance over the Phenom II X4 955, I was comparing those back when I wanted to buy a new CPU (though I was looking at a 955 BE). FX 8350 is a pretty good CPU, similar to my 8320 but with 400MHz higher clock, freakin' fast when you utilize all it's cores, hell of an overclocker too. Per-core performance still lacks when compared to Intel (it's pretty much on-par with similarly priced Intel CPUs though, like the Pentium and i3), but it's a formidable CPU and should be a decent upgrade from the Phenom 955.

 

Just make sure you get a decent mobo to go along with it, an 8-phase mobo is recommended, 6-phase one can pass, 4-phase is crap, and 16-phase is overkill but it'll last longer. VRM cooling is very much recommended so you don't explode it, mobos don't work to well when they burst in flames.

Edited October 12, 2013 by Werne