FX-6300 Problem? i need help

kebbz · Oct 18, 2013

Hi guys i have a problem. I'll just get straight to the point. My Cpu is an fx-6300 and my gpu is a HD 7790.

Battlefield 3 settings:
- High
- 1680x1050
- Vsync on

In single player my minumum framerates is around 55- 58. It is constantly buttery smooth at 60fps with vsync on. (fps is higher with vsync off but minimum frames are the same.)

In multiplayer, 64 player servers, My minimum framerates drop to 39 and at that frame rate the game is unplayable to me. I have to play low settings to maintain a 60fps mark.

CPU usage is peaking at 70 to 80%.

Has my system reached it's maximum performance?

geofelt · Oct 18, 2013

I think so.
In multiplayer, BF3 is heavily cpu dependent.
The FX cpu's are not noted for fast cores. The added cores do not make up for the lack of individual core capability.
You might do better if you can overclock your cpu.
I think you are doing as good as you can without changing to a fast intel cpu.

kebbz · Oct 18, 2013

geofelt :

I was expecting better performance based on the reviews and recommendations

geofelt · Oct 18, 2013

The problem is with benchmarking multiplayer. It is most difficult to do a repeatable benchmark. I saw one in the past for a preview of BF3.
You may have been looking at the usual bf3 benchmarks for single player which is more graphic dependent than cpu dependent.

kebbz · Oct 18, 2013

geofelt :

Thats why i posted this question.
Before i bought the cpu, i looked at multiplayer bemchmarks. Especially 64 player maps on bf3.
And watched videos of it too. They all had positive comments and feedback.

So i confidently got the fx-6300 and i am disappointed by its gaming performance. Many people also said that it will not bottleneck a 7870. It bottlenecks the 7790 i am surprised :/

geofelt · Oct 18, 2013

Another issue might be that you are using a resolution lower than the usual 1080p(1920 x 1080).
Because your graphics is not so limiting, it shifts the limit more towards the cpu. I might guess that is a 15% effect.
Can you still find a link to those benchmarks?
Perhaps we can find the reasons for the differences.

8350rocks · Oct 18, 2013

kebbz :

Well, your GPU is not a top notch GPU to be playing on high.

Your CPU is not a bottleneck at 70-80% usage, that reflects good scaling, but it's not overwhelmed.

2 questions to examine here:

1.) What is your GPU usage? Is it over 95% when your FPS dips?

2.) Are you using AA/AF? If so, try turning it off to keep FPS up.

While your resolution is on the low end of 1080p, it will put slightly higher load on the CPU. Though, your usage does not reflect a bottleneck there. This leads me to conclude, based on lowering the settings dramatically impacting FPS performance, that your GPU is simply inadequate to run the game at high on 64 man maps and maintain high FPS through out.

Your 6300 is a great CPU, and I don't think it's causing the issues. You need something like a HD 7870 to get the FPS you want on High/Ultra settings at your resolution. Believe it or not, BF3 is a pretty demanding game in MP.

EDIT: If you can afford it, the HD 7950 boost is on sale for $199 right now, and it would absolutely make a massive difference in your FPS performance in BF3 on Ultra settings.

kebbz · Oct 18, 2013

geofelt :

Hey that kind of make's sense. The benchmarks that I looked at were all using 1080p.

There are tons of benchmarks out there regarding this. I'll name a few though.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dicsCweUUyU

Here is a bench of the fx in single player. My fps is slightly lower that this.
http://www.pcgameshardware.de/FX-8320-CPU-256470/Tests/Test-FX-8320-FX-6300-FX-4300-Vishera-1032556/

Here's on a 64 player server.
http://www.pcgameshardware.de/Battlefield-3-PC-221396/Specials/Battlefield-3-Multiplayer-Tipps-CPU-Benchmark-1039293/

kebbz · Oct 18, 2013

8350rocks :

kebbz :

Well, your GPU is not a top notch GPU to be playing on high.

Your CPU is not a bottleneck at 70-80% usage, that reflects good scaling, but it's not overwhelmed.

2 questions to examine here:

1.) What is your GPU usage? Is it over 95% when your FPS dips?

2.) Are you using AA/AF? If so, try turning it off to keep FPS up.

While your resolution is on the low end of 1080p, it will put slightly higher load on the CPU. Though, your usage does not reflect a bottleneck there. This leads me to conclude, based on lowering the settings dramatically impacting FPS performance, that your GPU is simply inadequate to run the game at high on 64 man maps and maintain high FPS through out.

Your 6300 is a great CPU, and I don't think it's causing the issues. You need something like a HD 7870 to get the FPS you want on High/Ultra settings at your resolution. Believe it or not, BF3 is a pretty demanding game in MP.

EDIT: If you can afford it, the HD 7950 boost is on sale for $199 right now, and it would absolutely make a massive difference in your FPS performance in BF3 on Ultra settings.

Gpu load is always 50 to 60%
If my 7790 is not capable of High settings in Bf3, i wouldnt be getting constant 60fps in single player with vsync on.

Maybe your right about the resolution. Is there any research information regarding "lower resolution" = Higher cpu strain?

8350rocks · Oct 20, 2013

kebbz :

8350rocks :

Gpu load is always 50 to 60%
If my 7790 is not capable of High settings in Bf3, i wouldnt be getting constant 60fps in single player with vsync on.

Maybe your right about the resolution. Is there any research information regarding "lower resolution" = Higher cpu strain?

AHA!!! The single player mode is about 1/3 as demanding on your GPU and CPU as 64 man multiplayer.

So that's the culprit. You can run it fine on single player mode...however, when there are 63 other people with explosions and all kinds of things going on, your GPU cannot simply keep up with all of that.

kebbz · Oct 20, 2013

8350rocks :

kebbz :

8350rocks :

Gpu load is always 50 to 60%
If my 7790 is not capable of High settings in Bf3, i wouldnt be getting constant 60fps in single player with vsync on.

Maybe your right about the resolution. Is there any research information regarding "lower resolution" = Higher cpu strain?

AHA!!! The single player mode is about 1/3 as demanding on your GPU and CPU as 64 man multiplayer.

So that's the culprit. You can run it fine on single player mode...however, when there are 63 other people with explosions and all kinds of things going on, your GPU cannot simply keep up with all of that.

Do you suggest a gpu upgrade?

geofelt · Oct 20, 2013

I doubt that the gpu is the culprit, I think the cpu.
The gpu is local, and needs to render only on your own monitor.
That load changes little in single vs. multiplayer mode.

As you demonstrated, in multiplayer, the cpu load goes up, and the fps goes down.
Even though what appears on your monitor is not much different.
That each core is less than 100% does not give the cpu a pass. Many things are single threaded, and are being dispatched on different cores.

Gaidax · Oct 20, 2013

Well it is easy to check if it's CPU or GPU, drop the graphics quality to lowest and see what fps you get. If it's still low - CPU is what's holding you back

8350rocks · Oct 20, 2013

geofelt :

Considering that the TFLOPS required to run single player and calculate the physics of the explosions are 64 orders of magnitude less than what they are for 64 man multiplayer...I think you're not taking all factors into consideration.

From a multiplayer standpoint, every time you add 1 additional player to a multiplayer match, you are adding an exponent to the number of calculations the GPU must do. While BF3 may not be the most graphically demanding game, it is ridiculously demanding of the physics TFLOPS that a GPU can calculate. Crysis 3 mitigates this somewhat by offloading some of that work to the CPU, hence why it is so CPU demanding.

So, TL;DR:

Single player mode is X^1, while 64 man matches are X^64 for physics calculations. It is not that the GPU cannot run the graphics, it's that the explosions and physics calculations are killing the raw compute capability of the GPU and hence the dips in FPS. Want to bet the FPS dips every time there is an explosion or event that causes a physics calculation on many players?

cmi86 · Oct 20, 2013

Kebbz. Your 6300 is not the problem. As many have said already the 7790 is not a high end GPU and not intended to play intensive games such as BF3 at high settings with all the added variables of online play. I can personally attest to the capability of the 6300 to perform in BF3 as I own this chip and BF3 is one of my most frequently played titles. In 64 player maps ultra/4X AA/1080P my CPU runs at about 70~% when clocked to 4.5Ghz, same settings at the stock 3.5Ghz it runs at about 85-90~%. Try getting a basic aftermarket cooler such as the 212 Evo and overclocking your chip a bit. That ought to help a tad with the minimum fps but all in all if you really want FPS stability at higher settings you need to get a better GPU. The 7950 that 8350 suggested is a great choice especially at it's price. The performance of my overclocked 7870 LE is almost identical to that of a stock 7950 and due to that I can very confidently say that you should have no issues pushing 60+ on ultra as I do not with a very similar hardware set-up.

Gaidax · Oct 20, 2013

8350rocks :

geofelt :

Considering that the TFLOPS required to run single player and calculate the physics of the explosions are 64 orders of magnitude less than what they are for 64 man multiplayer...I think you're not taking all factors into consideration.

From a multiplayer standpoint, every time you add 1 additional player to a multiplayer match, you are adding an exponent to the number of calculations the GPU must do. While BF3 may not be the most graphically demanding game, it is ridiculously demanding of the physics TFLOPS that a GPU can calculate. Crysis 3 mitigates this somewhat by offloading some of that work to the CPU, hence why it is so CPU demanding.

So, TL;DR:

Single player mode is X^1, while 64 man matches are X^64 for physics calculations. It is not that the GPU cannot run the graphics, it's that the explosions and physics calculations are killing the raw compute capability of the GPU and hence the dips in FPS. Want to bet the FPS dips every time there is an explosion or event that causes a physics calculation on many players?

Physics is mostly CPU bound though, besides, 64 players BF3 is known to depend on CPU a lot exactly because of what you said.

8350rocks · Oct 20, 2013

Gaidax :

Yes, it will use all 6 cores on the FX 6300 in 64 man multiplayer matches, but the 6300 is not a bottleneck, as noted by the cmi86 above. Physics are somewhat offloaded onto the CPU in multiplayer, however, your CPU is incapable of running the physics calculations required for something as intricate as BF3, or even Borderlands 2. Look at people trying to run BL2 running PhysX on the CPU, even with a well overclocked 3770k they can't get the same FPS that they can when PhysX is run on the GPU. Because GPUs are extremely good at physics calculations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPGPU

That should enlighten you a bit as to what I am referencing. All of the last 3 generations of architecture have the capability to process general compute instructions. They've improved with each generation to be more effective, however, they will all run physics on the GPU, and it's vastly more effective.

That is the logic behind using GPGPUs to run massive protein synthesis calculations, or fluid dynamic calculations. The physics for those are so massive, that you need GPGPUs to accomplish the desired task in any reasonable time frame.

Consider that a 4770k can do 99.72 GFLOPS of calculations (or 99,720,000,000 Floating Point Calculations per second), while the HD 7990 can do 8.2 TFLOPS of calculations (or 8,200,000,000,000 Floating Point Calculations per second).

Now, if you were going to do massive amounts of FLOP calculations (which is how Physics is handled in a PC), would you use something that can do 99 billion per second, or something that can do 8 trillion per second?

Gaidax · Oct 20, 2013

You are mixing things here, mate.

Battlefield 3 is not using GPGPU physics at all, it's not capable of it - all of the physics used by Frostbite 2 are handled solely by CPU. There are 2 ways in which GPGPU can be implemented - OpenCL or CUDA - Battlefield 3 supports none and I think BF4 neither does it. The closest it does is doing some lighting with DirectCompute.

We all know that GPU physics rocks, but the problem is that it is not merely some checkbox that a dev can just set and it runs - you need to actively code it into your engine for it to actually work, I believe you should be aware of this fact.

Lessthannil · Oct 20, 2013

I think the bigger problem is the 7790 rather than the 6300.

Gaidax · Oct 20, 2013

Lessthannil :

I think both of them are trouble here, honestly.

geofelt · Oct 20, 2013

Here is one way to see how sensitive your game is to your cpu:
1. reduce the clock rate of your cpu by some percentage, say 25% Do this by reducing the multiplier in the bios, or by setting the max cpu % in windows at 75%. If this causes a major decline in your fps, then you know your game is sensitive to clock speed.
2. In the bios, reduce the number of cores/threads from 6 to 5. If the fps drops , then you know that the game is sensitive to the number of threads.

8350rocks · Oct 20, 2013

Gaidax :

It is coded into the engine, the Frostbite engine uses a proprietary physics engine developed by DICE and EA called Destruction 3.0 in Frostbite 2, and Destruction 4.0 in Frostbite 3.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frostbite_(game_engine)

Deferred Shading used in the Destruction engine is how they partly offload physics to the CPU, as the CPU and GPU both first calculate what the effects being done in the engine do to the players (the physics calculations), and on the second pass it actually renders the frame with the effects.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferred_shading

The engine also uses DirectCompute to run the physics calculations on the GPU.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectCompute

So, it is entirely capable of doing everything I said it was...

8350rocks · Oct 20, 2013

geofelt :

Of course that's going to reduce some performance in the game, it has been proven BF3 runs on as many as 6 cores in multiplayer.

The bigger question here is, does lowering the settings from High/Ultra, to medium or even low give a dramatic increase in minimum FPS.

If that is truly what happens, and the FPS drops are less severe, then it's raw compute power from the GPU that is the bottleneck.

8350rocks · Oct 20, 2013

Gaidax :

cmi86 :

I guess you missed the post from the guy who owns the CPU with a significantly better GPU who gets 60+ FPS on Ultra settings in 64 man matches then...

Their builds are *VERY* similar...however, one of the OPs components is not like the other...

kebbz · Oct 20, 2013

cmi86 :

8350rocks :

Hey guys i've learned so much from this.

8350rocks, to answer your question. Yes my fps increase when settings are set lower. Especially the mesh and shadows.

I will try and sell my gpu and get a 7870. I'll come back to this thread when all goes well

FX-6300 Problem? i need help

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