Should I bother Upgrading?

[ceiblue]

Hey guys,

 

I'm still gaming on my desktop i built back in 2011. Its about 6 years old now but seems to still work fine. I 've been debating weather or not to build a new system or save some dough and just upgrade the one I already have. My PC uses an old Phenom 2 hex core which I know will bottleneck any new GPU I put in but most of the games I play are old and not very graphically demanding. The other reason I was thinking of upgrading as opposed to building a brand new system is based off what I learned about Oblivion and processor performance. Please correct me if I'm wrong but due to the games architecture, Oblivion does not see a huge performance gain from newer processors (something to do with parallelism and how newer processors predict the next task). That in mind, I figured I see more of a benefit from just putting in a new graphics card for more EBN effects and maybe 4k than building a whole new PC.

 

My Specs:

Phenom 2 1055 hex core 3.2gh turbo boost

AMD Radeon 6950 1gb

8 gigs or ddr3 @ 1333

650 watt psu

 

What do you guys think? Am I wrong or missing somthing?

 

Thanks for your input.

[ibldedibble]

If you're not planning on getting new games and all your old games work fine, don't bother upgrading. Personally I waited until FO4 was released before I upgraded my 8 year old computer, because everything else ran just fine. Probably won't upgrade this one for another 5-6 years unless some major game comes out that it can't handle. :)

[ceiblue]

I guess a better questions is, are there any other hardware upgrades besides a new gpu that would make Oblivion(my favorite game) run any better at this point? I don't think a new processor or ddr4 ram would help much, which would be my only reasons for building a brand new system at this point.

[TheMastersSon]

"Please correct me if I'm wrong but due to the games architecture, Oblivion does not see a huge performance gain from newer processors (something to do with parallelism and how newer processors predict the next task)."

 

IMO it's more accurate to say Oblivion doesn't benefit quite as much from faster processors as many other games. But it still benefits, especially if you run high-res textures and other strenuous mods, all the way up to 4GHz (for Intel) and regardless of the number of cpu cores or presence of hyperthreading. Your Phenom 2 is about as powerful as a 3GHz i5, so it should be enough for the vanilla game. But as mentioned we saw drastic improvements in Oblivion going from a 3GHz Northwood P4 to a 4.4GHz i5 with our modded install.

[ceiblue]

"Please correct me if I'm wrong but due to the games architecture, Oblivion does not see a huge performance gain from newer processors (something to do with parallelism and how newer processors predict the next task)."

 

IMO it's more accurate to say Oblivion doesn't benefit quite as much from faster processors as many other games. But it still benefits, especially if you run high-res textures and other strenuous mods, all the way up to 4GHz (for Intel) and regardless of the number of cpu cores or presence of hyperthreading. Your Phenom 2 is about as powerful as a 3GHz i5, so it should be enough for the vanilla game. But as mentioned we saw drastic improvements in Oblivion going from a 3GHz Northwood P4 to a 4.4GHz i5 with our modded install.

 

Interesting, was the CPU the only thing you upgraded? What are your system specs before and after the upgrade? Texture mods should be GPU dependent, other mods could be a different story I guess.

 

 

Interesting bit of info from Striker789. Link to the thread: https://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/4753255-overclocking-cpu-for-oblivion/

 

"Modern CPUs have some features that work against performance on an older game like Oblivion.

 

In multi-core CPUs (and actually all CPUs since the GHz wars ended) there have been an increasing number of changes to how CPUs execute tasks that have put older software at a disadvantage, with the biggest culprit being execution pipelines that try to predict what the next task or operation will be. When they guess right the CPU appears faster than clockspeed alone would predict ... when the guess is wrong the whole execution pipeline needs to flush it's contents and start over, losing a large number of CPU cycles in the process. Older CPUs had shorter execution pipelines as well and as such were trying to do less "at the same time" than modern execution pipelines.

 

This Wikipedia page will probably put you into information overload ... scroll down to the part about Parallelism for more detail around the modern optimizations of CPU execution units."

 

 

By no means am I saying you're wrong or anything, I just want to make sure that if I spend a $1000 plus bucks on a brand new build, as opposed to just throwing a new GPU in my current system, the gains will be worth the expense and effort.

[Striker879]

If picking the right components to put together a kickass machine was simple everybody would do it.

 

In my opinion deciding what upgrades will lead to money well spent is even more complicated because you really need to know what your current hardware's bottlenecks are and whether or not they will affect you getting the most out of those hardware upgrade dollars.

 

I was recently forced to upgrade from my much loved WinXP (32bit). I already owned a copy of Win 7 (64bit) intended for my next new machine build, so I decided to upgrade the old box for Win 7. The WinXP version of my old computer was running on an Intel Core2 Duo 3.0GHz and 2GB RAM with a GeForce GTX275 with 896MB VRAM ... the Win 7 version upgraded to 8GB RAM and a GeForce GTX1050Ti with 4GB VRAM still using the same CPU. The game still runs from the same WD Velociraptor HD and Win 7 is on a single Velociraptor HD whereas WinXP was on a pair of older WD Raptors in a RAID 0.

 

So the total upgrade was RAM, video card plus boot drive and OS (actually all I needed to buy was RAM and video card as I had the hard drive in stock too).

 

Before the upgrade I was down to mostly about 15 to 30 minutes playing time before I needed to save exit and restart the game. I've know the reason for this for quite a while ... over 250 Blockheaded NPCs (some just PerNPC mesh replacement, some PerNPC mesh and texture replacement). I'd monitor my video card memory usage in my Logitech keyboard display and go through a restart cycle when I got close to or over 800MB VRAM usage ... if I didn't I knew I'd shortly get a crash or lockup.

 

After the upgrade I can regularly get over an hour gametime, sometimes pushing closer to two hours. Nothing has changed in my load order, maybe a handful more NPCs Blockheaded but that's it. Nothing done to make the game more stable or to increase playtime (though I did run the 4GB patcher to take advantage of the increased RAM).

 

The game runs about the same as it did before performance wise (I've never been a slave to watching my FPS ... it still "feels" the same to me though). That is about what I expected going in ... the upgrade was driven by something not game related but the components were selected with the game in mind. You would perhaps think that the video card upgrade should have got me more than the ability to handle my Blockheading but remember I'm plugging it into that same old version 2.0 PCI-E slot so it still is communicating with the rest of the system no faster than the old card.

 

There will always be a bottleneck.

 

- Edit - Jumping from 3GHz to 4.4 GHz will "cover up" a lot ... that is a major speed increase (which will shift the bottleneck to somewhere else).

Edited May 30, 2017 by Striker879

[TheMastersSon]

"Texture mods should be GPU dependent"

 

The answer to your first question is that we kept our video card through the cpu upgrade, so the improvements were definitely cpu related. I'm referring to overall program speed, everything from game/level loading to animations during heavy combat etc, most of which are cpu and/or disk dependent and the fastest gpu in the world won't help. So for a Phenom 2 system I think even a 9-series Nvidia card would be more than enough to cpu-limit almost any game.

[ceiblue]

If picking the right components to put together a kickass machine was simple everybody would do it.

 

In my opinion deciding what upgrades will lead to money well spent is even more complicated because you really need to know what your current hardware's bottlenecks are and whether or not they will affect you getting the most out of those hardware upgrade dollars.

 

I was recently forced to upgrade from my much loved WinXP (32bit). I already owned a copy of Win 7 (64bit) intended for my next new machine build, so I decided to upgrade the old box for Win 7. The WinXP version of my old computer was running on an Intel Core2 Duo 3.0GHz and 2GB RAM with a GeForce GTX275 with 896MB VRAM ... the Win 7 version upgraded to 8GB RAM and a GeForce GTX1050Ti with 4GB VRAM still using the same CPU. The game still runs from the same WD Velociraptor HD and Win 7 is on a single Velociraptor HD whereas WinXP was on a pair of older WD Raptors in a RAID 0.

 

So the total upgrade was RAM, video card plus boot drive and OS (actually all I needed to buy was RAM and video card as I had the hard drive in stock too).

 

Before the upgrade I was down to mostly about 15 to 30 minutes playing time before I needed to save exit and restart the game. I've know the reason for this for quite a while ... over 250 Blockheaded NPCs (some just PerNPC mesh replacement, some PerNPC mesh and texture replacement). I'd monitor my video card memory usage in my Logitech keyboard display and go through a restart cycle when I got close to or over 800MB VRAM usage ... if I didn't I knew I'd shortly get a crash or lockup.

 

After the upgrade I can regularly get over an hour gametime, sometimes pushing closer to two hours. Nothing has changed in my load order, maybe a handful more NPCs Blockheaded but that's it. Nothing done to make the game more stable or to increase playtime (though I did run the 4GB patcher to take advantage of the increased RAM).

 

The game runs about the same as it did before performance wise (I've never been a slave to watching my FPS ... it still "feels" the same to me though). That is about what I expected going in ... the upgrade was driven by something not game related but the components were selected with the game in mind. You would perhaps think that the video card upgrade should have got me more than the ability to handle my Blockheading but remember I'm plugging it into that same old version 2.0 PCI-E slot so it still is communicating with the rest of the system no faster than the old card.

 

There will always be a bottleneck.

 

- Edit - Jumping from 3GHz to 4.4 GHz will "cover up" a lot ... that is a major speed increase (which will shift the bottleneck to somewhere else).

 

 

Hey striker...I was hoping you would reply...:)

 

First off, If you could explain exactly what blockheading is? Thanks.

 

"The game runs about the same as it did before performance wise"

 

That's kinda what I was afraid of, I actually first started playing Oblivion back in 2008 on my then brand new 2.2ghz Core 2 Duo with 3gb DDR2 ram and a NVidia 8800gt to now on my current Phenom 2 1055t 8gb DDR3 and 6950 system...and honestly noticed very little difference in Oblivion's performance despite the fact I'm running it on much better hardware. In all fairness though, I only ran a handful of mods back then compared to the 200 plus mods in my load order now.

 

"You would perhaps think that the video card upgrade should have got me more than the ability to handle my Blockheading but remember I'm plugging it into that same old version 2.0 PCI-E slot so it still is communicating with the rest of the system no faster than the old card"

 

If I remember correctly, GPU's at that time were not fully utilizing the transfer speeds of PCI-E 2.0 ports even if they were 2.0 designed cards. I remember reading up on it at the time debating whether or not to wait for PCI-E 3.0 or just buy a 2.1 motherboard I'm using now. The argument at the time was not to wait to upgrade or waste money on PCI-E 3.0 when brand new cards at the time(like your 275) weren't even fully using 2.0 bandwidth limits. I'm pretty sure that's not the case for a newer card like your 1050, so you should still expect to see a increase in performance, obviously not as much as you would get with a newer motherboard/cou. Otherwise, if there was no transfer speed/ performance increase, why bother spending $150 bucks on a fully handicapped 1050?

[ceiblue]

"Texture mods should be GPU dependent"

 

The answer to your first question is that we kept our video card through the cpu upgrade, so the improvements were definitely cpu related. I'm referring to overall program speed, everything from game/level loading to animations during heavy combat etc, most of which are cpu and/or disk dependent and the fastest gpu in the world won't help. So for a Phenom 2 system I think even a 9-series Nvidia card would be more than enough to cpu-limit almost any game.

I not exactly sure what you mean by cpu limit, but if you're referring to bottlenecking than yes, I'm already aware of that. However, from my research, my Phenom 2 can be used with anything up to a 760 without any bottlenecking or performance loss. Anything above that i.e. a 960 or 970, depending on the game, there will be about a 10-25% bottleneck/performance loss. I would still see a dramatic improvement over my 6950 in most if not all modern games, older games like Oblivion are a different matter though.

 

I'm glad you saw such a dramatic improvement from your cpu upgrade but I 'm not sure I will have the same performance increase in Oblivion as you did. First off, you were upgrading from a 15 year old cpu to a modern one, I will be upgrading from a 6 year old cpu, less than half the time gap. Second, as I stated above, the last time I upgraded my cpu and gpu, I saw little to no performance increase in Oblivion. Also, clock speeds are not always the determining factor of how well a processor performs. For example: both my former E4500 Core 2 Duo and my current Phenom 2 are clocked at 2.2 and 2.8ghz, yet both are vastly superior to your former P4 clocked at 3.0ghz. If it were just a matter of clock speeds, I could easily overclock my cpu to 3.8-to 4.0ghz with the aftermarket cooler I already have installed on it.

 

I guess at this point, the question isn't will I see an improvement with a brand new system, its whether or not it will be enough of a performance leap forward to justify $1000+ buck cost. If I were to do it to play all the new Call of Duty and Modern Warfare games at 4k, then It would be worth it I guess. But for all the old s#*! I play like Oblivion, Neverwinter 2 and emulators like MAME and Dolphin, its probably money better spent else ware.

 

At this point, I'm thinking of just getting a new lower end GPU (like strikers 1050) just for more VRAM to add more hi res textures and shaders/ENB effect...

[Striker879]

The main reason I went with the 1050Ti was because any alternatives that were available at the closest Canada Computers store to me (still an hour's drive away) were all 2GB VRAM and not all that much cheaper. I was sort of under the gun time wise for the upgrade (would you believe that tax software forced the WinXP dinosaur to his knees ... after all those years). From what I have seen in my keyboard display I'm not even scratching the surface of the 4GB (highest I've seen is just shy of 1.4GB used) but I haven't done anything to my load order that would use more (my load order is still designed for that 896MB card).

 

Blockheading is one of my Strikerisms used to describe how I've used Blockhead to give diversity to all those NPCs who wind up losing their gear to my guy after the battle is over (so primarily bandits, marauders, conjurers and necromancers). I rarely kill anymore ... have a well developed strategy of disabling, then destroying their armor, "befriending" them and "collecting" them in Ayleid ruins or player owned houses. For example Trumbe is a necro "safe house" and probably has in excess of 50 necro NPCs "stored" there (I have also learned a trick to give them a new "editor location" of sorts).

 

That strategy evolved as I learned to exploit the tools I'd included in my current guy's load order, and as it evolved the number of NPCs present in any particular cell I was using kind of got well out of hand and pushed the old hardware to it's knees. Even though I'm not currently utilising the full potential of the 4GB card I'm confident in the autumn, when I get back from my summer's break from Oblivion, I'll find ways to push hard at the new limits.

 

When I say that it performs about the same as before I mean that I don't notice anything like smoother play etc ... that's because it played smoothly before, as long as I monitored my VRAM usage and didn't allow it to hit the max. The only thing I've noticed with the new video card is that sometimes I'll get a sort of hitching, that I can only describe as a fraction of a second jump ahead (so not a freezing and then jump ahead, it's like my guy jumped ahead by a half a stride). When I get back into things in the fall I'll delve into it and see if I can figure out what's going on.