Is it time to upgrade the i7 920?

In multi GPU systems, the Vram doesn't add up. You only get the amount on the card with the lowest amount of vram. In your case 2GB vram. Since star citizen is still in it's early stages can you tell us what you get in other games?

As long as you are content with the performance of your current PC's performance then you do not need to upgrade your CPU. However, "want" and "need" are to different things. At stock speed and just from a gaming perspective, the i7-920 and the FX-8350 both give the overall same performance.

However, Star Citizen uses Cry Engine 3, the same engine in Crysis 3 and that is one single game where the performance difference between the i7-920 and a more modern FX-8350 is the greatest. Cry Engine 3 is pretty demanding, but Star Citizen is also a very graphically demanding game. Most games may devote 10,000, - 25,000 polygons to render characters; I think Star Citizen uses 100,000 polygons per character. The more polygons, the more details you can see. Capital ships in that game have up to 7 million polygons. Due to the shear number of polygons used in the game you need to lower your graphic settings until graphic card performance can catch up to Star Citizen... which is still in the alpha development stage. It's not expected to hit beta testing until the end of 2014.

Your graphic card is definitely holding you back because each card only has 2GB of VRAM. You cannot simply assume you have a total of 4GB of VRAM because the same textures are loaded to both cards. I would suggest you get two high end graphic cards with at least 4GB of VRAM on each card. I have seen benchmarks of GTX 680 with 4GB and 6GB and there is not much performance difference between the two. However, the polygon count in the games benchmarked is nowhere near what the polygon count can be in Star Citizen. Is the extra cost of having 4GB vs 6GB of VRAM make a difference in Star Citizen, I don't really know. Since the game is still in alpha stage I don't even know if multiple cards are supported yet. You need to go to their official forum to find out more info on that.

As for the CPU, you should see better performance if you upgrade to a current generation Intel CPU because the older 1st generation Core i7 does not perform as well as more modern CPUs. Star Citizen uses realistic physics where damage to different thrusters can make your fighter / freighter fly through space differently since those thrusters affect how your ship yaw, pitch and roll. The use of realistic physics can be pretty CPU intensive so CPU performance can be lower compared to Crysis 3.

Below are some benchmarks of Crysis 3 to help drive home the points I made. There is no benchmark for 5040x1050 resolution:

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/EVGA/GTX_780_Ti_SC_ACX_Cooler/12.html




http://www.techspot.com/review/642-crysis-3-performance/page6.html