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Is this bottlenecking?

S

Space_Coyote

Gawd
Joined
Feb 2, 2007
Messages
932
I recently upgraded from a 460 GTX to the 7870 XT, and I've been very happy with it so far. I still get terrible stutter in World of Tanks, but I'm convinced that is an issue with their game or some other conflict (ongoing issue). Tomb Raider ran great on Ultimate settings, except when I decided to look down a waterfall, when it became choptastic. Hitman Absolution ran great maxed too; there were just a couple of slowdowns during those scenes with hundreds of NPC's on screen at one time.

Then I tried Bioshock Infinte, and it's stuttering every time I move into a new area, or do seemingly non-demanding things, like moving freight cars around. I tried lowering the settings all the way to Medium and it still does it. Is this a symptom of my aging CPU and mobo?

I could try and squeeze a little more out of the overclock (currently 3.6 GHz) if that would help, but there's not much headroom left. I know I'm looking at a $400 investment for a new board, CPU and RAM eventually, but I was hoping to put it off for a little while. How much performance increase would I be looking at with an i5-3570K and a new board? Any other options you can suggest, like maybe FS/T for last gen deals?
 
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Yeah that might be a sign that your CPU is no long sufficient for high-end gaming. But it could also be your 4GB of RAM as well.

But just to make sure, set the graphics down to low settings and see if the slowdowns occur then. Also, what hard drive do you have?

As for upgrades, honestly, if you can, try to wait until June/July to upgrade as thats when Intel will be releasing their new Haswell CPUs and motherboards. If you're gonna upgrade, might as well get higher performing parts for nearly the same price as the older parts.
 
(Assuming Windows 7 is your OS...)

You can use Performance Monitor to capture CPU and RAM utilization (among many other hardware counters). Just fire it up, add in the needed counters, and then do a sample gaming session. Exit out, and look at the graph over time. If you have a second monitor, then run that in the second monitor while you play your game in the first monitor.

If you're comfortable with writing a few lines of code, then a simple .Net console application can be used to poll WMI and then dump the results to console or a text file.

Hopefully these suggestions help you gather some metrics to confirm or better gauge where your bottleneck(s) may be.
 
I just tried Infinite on very low settings, and still had the same issue. I have a Samsung 830 128 GB SSD.

I've had resource monitor open before, and the RAM doesn't even seem to break 2 GB in this game. None of the cores seem to be getting stressed either, but I can try a session with performance monitor. What counters do I want to be looking at? I added the one for memory, and it put up like 20 different plots.
 
Space_Coyote said:
What counters do I want to be looking at? I added the one for memory, and it put up like 20 different plots.
Click to expand...

Offhand, I'd look at the following:
- Memory :: Available MBytes
- Logical Disk :: Disk Bytes per Second (just for the drive with the game)
- Process :: % Processor Time (this requires the game be running first so that you can select the game's process)
- Processor Information :: % Processor Time (all instances)
 
Ok I ran the plot with the suggested counters for about 20 minutes in Bioshock Inf on lowest settings. I can include the graph if you want, but here are the values:

- Memory :: Available MBytes avg 2,234,250 max 2,244,000
- Logical Disk :: Disk Bytes per Second avg 234,694 max 16,535,258
- Process :: % Processor Time (Bio Inf) avg 185.751 min 65.714 max 233.056
- Processor Information :: % Processor Time
4 cores: avg min max
51.163 34.677 53.550
55.141 28.530 73.561
31.111 3.766 48.264
32.412 4.559 56.540
 
Space_Coyote said:
I recently upgraded from a 460 GTX to the 7870 XT, and I've been very happy with it so far. I still get terrible stutter in World of Tanks, but I'm convinced that is an issue with their game or some other conflict (ongoing issue). Tomb Raider ran great on Ultimate settings, except when I decided to look down a waterfall, when it became choptastic. Hitman Absolution ran great maxed too; there were just a couple of slowdowns during those scenes with hundreds of NPC's on screen at one time.

Then I tried Bioshock Infinte, and it's stuttering every time I move into a new area, or do seemingly non-demanding things, like moving freight cars around. I tried lowering the settings all the way to Medium and it still does it. Is this a symptom of my aging CPU and mobo?

I could try and squeeze a little more out of the overclock (currently 3.6 GHz) if that would help, but there's not much headroom left. I know I'm looking at a $400 investment for a new board, CPU and RAM eventually, but I was hoping to put it off for a little while. How much performance increase would I be looking at with an i5-3570K and a new board? Any other options you can suggest, like maybe FS/T for last gen deals?
Click to expand...

1. Everyone gets that Bioshock Infinite stutter. It's just the game loading new areas. There's a lot of "fixes" floating around but none of them truly eliminate the stutter. I have 680 SLI and still get it. People with SLI Titans still get it. So don't worry, it's just the game. Note that I'm talking about the relatively slight stutter that occurs at predictable points in the game, usually near doorways or other transition areas. If you're trying to optimize performance in Bioshock, I'd recommending setting Shadows to High (tiny difference compared to Very High and Ultra, but big FPS boost, plus the Very High and Ultra settings are bugged and have severely shadow detail pop-in issues that are much less noticeable on High). Setting Ambient Occlusion to Normal or Low also gives a huge FPS boost at a tiny, basically imperceptible decrease in image quality. Alternate post processing obviously costs a lot but that also changes the image greatly, so if you like it, it wouldn't be the first thing I'd turn off. Finally, if you are using vsync, download D3Doverrider and force Triple Buffering. That way the FPS won't be tied 20, 30, 60 so it won't drop to 30 the moment it can't maintain 60.

2. Your CPU is holding you back a little, but it won't be the difference between playable and unplayble. Games that are stuttering severely or are unplayable are that way because of the software or possibly some type of driver issue (like Tomb Raider with nVidia cards in the first week of release for example).

3. If I were you, I'd hold out 2 more months, and pick the next-gen Intel CPU Haswell in June. It won't be a huge performance increase, probably no more than 10 or 15%, but for the same price why not wait 2 months? Plus there's some rumors floating around that it might be much better at overclocking than Ivy Bridge with FSB oc'ing brought back and improved thermal characteristics.
 
Thanks for the reassurance about the stuttering. I'll try the options you mentioned and see if it improves.
 
The tweaks that geralto suggested helped, and the stuttering in Infinite is lessened. Now if I could figure out what the hell is going on in World of Tanks I'd be happy. I've been back and forth with their tech support for over 2 months now, tried everything they suggested, and performance still sucks.

I'm getting around 35 FPS no matter what the graphics settings are at, and the stutter makes it very hard to play well at times. I can drop to low everything, even lower the resolution, and nothing helps. I noticed almost zero increase when I moved from the 460 to the 7870, and it was bad before.
 
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Space_Coyote said:
The tweaks that geralto suggested helped, and the stuttering in Infinite is lessened. Now if I could figure out what the hell is going on in World of Tanks I'd be happy. I've been back and forth with their tech support for over 2 months now, tried everything they suggested, and performance still sucks.

I'm getting around 35 FPS no matter what the graphics settings are at, and the stutter makes it very hard to play well at times. I can drop to low everything, even lower the resolution, and nothing helps. I noticed almost zero increase when I moved from the 460 to the 7870, and it was bad before.
Click to expand...

Try turning HPET on. HPET can be on/off in the BIOS and in Windows. You want to try three combinations: BIOS-on/Win-off (default), BIOS-on/Win-on, and BIOS-off/Win-off. Please google this for more info, but in a nutshell:

Open elevated command line, then type to turn HPET in windows on:

bcdedit /set useplatformclock true

To revert back to default, use:

bcdedit /deletevalue useplatformclock

(You'll need to reboot for changes to take effect).

You're on your own for turning HPET on/off in the BIOS because each motherboard is different. Note this is sort of a semi-advanced tweak so you may want to skip the BIOS part if you're not comfy with this stuff. Just trying the command-line settings above, on SOME BUT NOT ALL systems, had has an improvement in FPS particularly in online games like BF3. It seems your system is capable of getting more than 35 fps in WoT, hence why I recommended it. There's no potential harm because you can always easily go back to default.
 
I appreciate the suggestion. I don't see any options for HPET in the BIOS, and googling for the P5Q SE2, or Asus in general wasn't much help. While I was at it, I disabled C1E, speedstep, and set CPU Margin Enhancement to performance. Someone said that APCI 2.0 was Asus' version of HPET, but some search-fu indicated it's for power saving. I went ahead and enabled it anyway for giggles.

I tried the first command to enable HPET in W7 and there was no change, so I tried turning it off. I did seem to help when I first made the change, but after a few games I'm still dropping below 30 frames on modest settings. Maps in WoT vary with FPS, so it's hard to gauge accurately sometimes.

Edit: I should also mention that I'm getting audio chop, things like "Let's _ove out!" at the start of a battle.
 
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Does anyone have any other ideas of things I can check? WoT tech support takes over a week to respond to my ticket each time, and none of their suggestions have improved performance in the slightest.
 
Do you have a spare system where you can test that GPU in?
 
I do, but the PSU probably can't handle it, and I'm 99% sure it's not the GPU. It's an ongoing issue back from when I had the 460 GTX. Upgrading to the 7870 XT got me only a couple more FPS in WoT, but all my other games play great.

It's odd, because it was running great up until February. I installed Logitech Gaming Software for my G15 and that's when the problem started. Some googling indicated that the software caused problems with WoT, so I took it out. The problem didn't go away, and I've since upgraded to an SSD and even formatted a couple of times. This morning I tried to reinstall Logitech, figuring what the hell, but it crashes at launch. Some issue with W7 64-bit it seems.
 
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