Bottleneck is where?

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fasterthanlight

Gawd
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I have a C2D 3.0ghz, AMD 5850, 4GB DDR2 800, and a 640GB HDD with 16MB cache. I use a Dell 30" which runs at 2560x1600. Here is the question.
When I play ARMA2, single player, or multi player it seems to run very well at that res. Once I get into a battle with a Bradley, several men, choppers, and the game is drawing the distance, I notice a large drop in frames. Usually from 25+ to about 5-10. When I switch from a 2D map to the 3D vehicle outside view or 3D soldier 3rd person view, it takes 5 seconds or so to re-render the models. The 5850 seems to be a sweet card, but I want to eliminate this and make it a lot more fluid. So frames, and drawing models are the issue at that high res.

Where is the bottleneck do you think?
 
Arma is a pretty graphics intensive game so at that high a resolution, youre 5850 is gonna run out of steam. That card is best suited for 1920x1080. Your CPU is dated but still plenty capable and at that high a resolution the GPU is doing most of the work anyway. At 2500x1600 and games like Arma, Metro and Crysis, youre gonna need dual cards or something like a 5970 to run those at max settings and still get good frame rates.
 
5850 is not enough at that resolution. Time to pick up a GTX580 or two or wait for AMD 6900 series.
 
When talking specifically about ARMA 2, both the CPU and GPU are bottlenecks. If you're dead-set on playing at that resolution with all high settings with no slowdowns, you should look at getting a Sandy Bridge processor(heavily overclocked) and a 6990 when released. Also, the game streams a lot of data from the HDD, so getting a cheap SSD will help quite a bit.
 
Thats a High res for the 5850 especially with Arma. By the way what HDD do you have Currently Model. If you dont get an SSD grab a Samsung f3 spinpoint 500gb or 1tb. Very fast mech drives for cheap.
 
I have a Black WD 640GB. I was thinking of an OCZ PCI. No Trim, but wicked fast SSD.


What is better, Dual 6870's or a5970? I think I understand that the 6xxx series is NOT faster, but rather more efficient.


:confused:
 
I played this game for a bit (didn't keep my interest) when it came out. It's a very demanding game. At the time I was running a 5870 and on my system struggled to run smoothly at 25x16. I can't tell if it's cpu limited (have a quad core anyway) but you will want to play at 19x12 if you want closer to max settings otherwise at this time to play it smoothly at your native resolution you'll need to use a multi-gpu setup like SLI GTX470+/5870 2GB CF. You need that extra VRAM.
 
Do you have a Vantage score to look at to tell how your system is preforming? if the 5850 is a ref card then it can be flashed to the Asus unlocked bios for some monster overclocking as some can hit 1000Mhz core..

Also your cpu can be overclocked as well as i ran my e5200 at 3.9Ghz with a single 5850 in Eyefintiy playing BC 2 ..
 
fasterthanlight said:
What is better, Dual 6870's or a5970? I think I understand that the 6xxx series is NOT faster, but rather more efficient.
Click to expand...

Wait for the 6900 series. But in that case the 6870's are faster, even two 6850's are faster, the crossfire scaling on the 6x00 cards is just insane.
 
ARMA II is still a fairly buggy unpolished mess, and I'm a huge fan. You want all the throughput you can muster, CPU, GPU, disk, memory, FSB, everything. The game doesn't discriminate and will get performance increases (of different varieties) for each upgrade. Forget Crysis, ARMA II is a real system benchmark.
 
Your bottleneck in this case is easy to identify: ARMA 2.

:)

More serious reply: you are probably vRAM limited more than anything else. Load up MSI Afterburner, enable monitoring of vRAM consumption, and see how much data the game is loading onto your video card.
 
Matrices said:
Your bottleneck in this case is easy to identify: ARMA 2.

:)

More serious reply: you are probably vRAM limited more than anything else. Load up MSI Afterburner, enable monitoring of vRAM consumption, and see how much data the game is loading onto your video card.
Click to expand...

AMD cards don't report VRAM usage like Nvidia. One thing I truly do miss.
 
I'm running the machine in my sig and playing the same game. My performance isn't that great. The level of detail Fasterthanlight has while playing even at his jacked up resolution is way greater than mine running at 1650x1080

Would a video card upgrade be something to look into or should I re-purpose my current rig and start fresh. The cheaper option would be video card obviously and I'd prefer that but if I'm too far behind with my current setup, I might take the plunge.
 
I say just get another 5850. Isn't that the cheapest option?
 
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