Performance issue mystery

[snakeman65]

I, like seemingly everyone else, am having performance issues

Now my system is not exactly blazing fast, i'm running a 9800gt (512) on an athlon 64 x2 4400+, 4gb ram (which is all just above the minimum req specs) so I wasn't exactly expecting a solid 60fps but in the concrete jungle benchmark the framerate actually drops to 9 at one point with all the settings turned down/off. I'm convinced that its not a graphics issue since it has almost identical framerates at 1600 x 900, 1280 x 1024 and even 640 x 480!

Whats more, EVGA Precision tells me that the gpu usage only ever gets up to 60%, and in task manager my system memory only gets up to 80% and my cpu peaks at 73%

I've tried the latest nvidia drivers (and even the latest beta nvidia drivers).

Also, the box has a 64-bit graphic on the back and i'm running Windows 7 in 64 bit but task manager clearly shows a 32 bit process?

Is there any way to easily see what it is that's maxing out when running JC2 as if i'm going to do upgrades, I want to be sure that what I get will actually help!

[AUnjustCause]

your cpu sucks

[snakeman65]

Originally Posted by AUnjustCause

your cpu sucks

Well isn't that nice and constructive! If my cpu sucks so bad how come JC2 never uses more than 70%? Surely if it was that bad it would go to 100% and stay there?

[brain_stew]

Originally Posted by snakeman65

Well isn't that nice and constructive! If my cpu sucks so bad how come JC2 never uses more than 70%? Surely if it was that bad it would go to 100% and stay there?

You're CPU bound, end of story. Either OC your chip to ~3ghz or upgrade, a low end Athlon X2 has barely been enough for games for a long time now, it'll cause issues in a lot more than just this game.

[snakeman65]

Originally Posted by brain_stew

You're CPU bound, end of story. Either OC your chip to ~3ghz or upgrade, a low end Athlon X2 has barely been enough for games for a long time now, it'll cause issues in a lot more than just this game.

Rather looks like i'll be getting a whole new rig then! Thanks for the advice.

[Helegad]

Originally Posted by snakeman65

Rather looks like i'll be getting a whole new rig then! Thanks for the advice.

Just grab yourself a better CPU. The rest of your rig is fine.

[mixterz]

I have the same CPU as you, and it never goes below 15 in worst cases.. I think it's your graphicscard that is bad..

[snakeman65]

I've just done some experiments and found that overclocking my cpu up from 2.2 to 2.5 and overclocking gpu from 550 to 600 and gpu memory from 800 to 900 made not even a single fps difference in concrete jungle!

Something else on my system is holding this back, i'm sure of it!

[GeneralFailure]

Snake, what is your motherboard? If you're using an old system like it sounds like, more than likely you have PCIe 1.0, in which case your graphics card isn't even opening up to it's potential, I went from a 1.0 to a 2.0 PCIe motherboard recently and at first I had an 8800GT and it ran a million times better than it did before with a 1.0 slot. Of course, updating it to a 5870 and swapping the 8800GT to a slave card for physx helps a lot too

Motherboards are the backbone of a PC, people don't realize this 90% of the time when they build their system, if the board itself can't shoot data across it fast enough, the motherboard is the bottleneck. Also things like raid-0 drives, SLI/Crossfire, dual cpu's, etc, help a lot too.

[snakeman65]

Originally Posted by GeneralFailure

Snake, what is your motherboard? If you're using an old system like it sounds like, more than likely you have PCIe 1.0, in which case your graphics card isn't even opening up to it's potential, I went from a 1.0 to a 2.0 PCIe motherboard recently and at first I had an 8800GT and it ran a million times better than it did before with a 1.0 slot. Of course, updating it to a 5870 and swapping the 8800GT to a slave card for physx helps a lot too

Motherboards are the backbone of a PC, people don't realize this 90% of the time when they build their system, if the board itself can't shoot data across it fast enough, the motherboard is the bottleneck. Also things like raid-0 drives, SLI/Crossfire, dual cpu's, etc, help a lot too.

I think you might be right. My board is an ASRock 939N68PV-GLAN and while it doesn't say which version of pcie it has my gut feeling is that it does indeed have only 1.0 (also cpu-z reports the version as PCI-Express). It would certainly explain why my gpu only ever seems to get up to 60%ish and why nothing I do will make the fps any higher!

Time to get my wallet out...

[snakeman65]

Originally Posted by snakeman65

I think you might be right. My board is an ASRock 939N68PV-GLAN and while it doesn't say which version of pcie it has my gut feeling is that it does indeed have only 1.0 (also cpu-z reports the version as PCI-Express). It would certainly explain why my gpu only ever seems to get up to 60%ish and why nothing I do will make the fps any higher!

Time to get my wallet out...

Pretty much confirmed this now since I have found that raising the freq of the pcie bus from 100 to 110 gave me a few extra fps

[jeffrh115]

you could have the best rig in the world and you would still have problems. I have posted about this before, and tried everything to get my fps steady. It is ok in one place one day, bad in others, the next day ill play it again and it will be the opposite. Then you hear of people with specs that just barely meet the req. that play the game no prob.