Possible cpu bottleneck in cpu intensive games

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Krillle3

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Hi, I am having some issues with my fps in multiple games, mostly the Total war series, Medieval 2, Rome 1 and Empire, also noticed a lowered performance in Watch dogs. It happened all of a sudden with the fps getting lower in my games. Battlefield 4 and 3 plays real good though, but as I've understood they don't use quite so much Cpu as it does Gpu.
Anyway, in Rome 1 i get below 30 fps in a large battle, 6000 men, with no difference in settings, barely. Same in Medieval 2 and Empire with the fps going below 30 on lowest. I'm just wondering what i could possibly do about this issue, could it be my motherboard at fault? Or the Cpu?

Edit: Gpu temps during gaming, 65-74c during Bf4, Vsync on.
Cpu temps up to 58c socket temp with an ambient temp of 27c
Core rarely exceeds 50c.

Specs

M5a99Fx pro 2.0
Fx 8350 4.0Ghz
Msi Gtx 770.
8 Gb Ballistix 1600mhz.
 
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Krillle3

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I'm actually using Hwinfo64 and Rivatuner to monitor my temps ingame, they are stated in my previous post.

And well, Total war games are way lower it doesn't seem to use my cpu that much, usage is never above 50% in Rome 1.
 
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TheLastof Me

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First, you need to disable VSync in ALL of your games. Vsync forces your fps to cap out at 60. So any increase in demand during games will force it even lower.

Further, CPU "bottlenecking" games is the most abused, misunderstood concept on these forums. If a game is NOT using 99% to 100% of your CPU (that is the game only, not total CPU usage while gaming), then it is not bottlenecking. On the other hand, if the CPU is being used 99% to 100% and you still can't get high fps when your GPU should be able to, or if the gameplay is choppy with higher settings, then the CPU is somewhat to blame. Still, upgrading GPU is how you increase gaming performance, not upgrading CPUs.

After looking at the specs of the 770, it is equivalent to a 270x (which I own). Your GPU can not handle anti-aliasing and high/ultra textures on more demanding games. So lower your specs some and disable vsync, that should help tremendously.
 
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Krillle3

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The cpu has one core at around 97% and another at around 20% the others are not doing anything in Medieval 2, as it is a 1 core game I've heard.
Gpu is at 10%? Don't know how that's possible as in BF4 it uses around 97-98%.
 
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Krillle3

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I put the settings on lowest, no antialiasing, no Vsync. The issue is not with BF4 but with the Total war games which uses a huge amount of CPU. It's actually not even with Rome 2, I'm talking about the first Rome, from 2004..
Also the 770 is a bit more powerful than the 270x.
 
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TheLastof Me

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According to the specs they have the same memory bandwidth and VRAM, so they are not that far apart. Regarding Rome 1, crank up the settings ALL the way with the Vsync disabled, this includes anti-aliasing. Even for a game that old, you should be in the 100s fps. It could be that the game does not have the graphical "prowess" to push your GPU at all. It would not be as demanding as say, BF3. Either way, the CPU is not the issue. Today's low end processors are just as powerful and fast as the fastest CPUs in 2004. The RAM is much faster also.
 
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Krillle3

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I did this is Medieval 2 just now. And well, it's going down to below 30 fps no matter settings? It's the same with Rome 2, it ran real good previously, ultra settings in a siege battle around 40 fps a bit less sometimes when fully zoomed in, now it's 30fps just standing outside of a city.. Reinstalled windows and reinstalled display drivers, full clean.

There is barely any difference if i put my settings to lowest or highest in most any of these games.
 
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Krillle3

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Also been noticing that the game uses different cores everytime i start the game. First it was the first one, now it's the 6th core being used and the others idle?
 
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TheLastof Me

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I am stomped. Sorry, check benchmarks on the game. Does the engine allow frames past 30 fps or even 60 fps? Certain games have their game engines "locked" or a buffer in so that you cannot go past a certain frame rate. Someone else on these forums may be able to speak from personal experience with those particular games.

Even though the frames are low...is the game choppy? If I enable Uber sampling on Witcher 2, sometimes frames drop into the 20s. However, the gameplay is still so smooth that I do not even notice it. I only know they dropped because Fraps says they dropped! lol

So if the gameplay is still butter smooth then I would not worry about it. If it is choppy/laggy then there is some other issue. Maybe the game is not very well optimized. Have you seen the game at 60+ fps on other systems?...

 
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TheLastof Me

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The CPU is not the issue. The CPU will use whatever core it deems necessary at the time based upon its current workload. The decision that the CPU makes to determine which core to activate happens in nanoseconds. That is irrelevant.

Also, it seems that you either want to or are already convinced that your CPU is "bottlenecking" a ten-year old game. You have a GREAT CPU. Regardless of what you may read online from others who never owned it or are just young kids talking trash.
 
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Krillle3

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I'm not convinced it's my cpu bottlenecking, but I'm just trying to figure out what this would depend on, guess it could be that these games aren't optimized for these new computer parts. Could it actually be something with my motherboard causing these issues somehow? Sounds odd though when BF4 works like a charm. But as said it doesn't use as much CPU as the total war games.
 
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Krillle3

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Indeed it gets laggy/choppy at those low frames.
 
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TA3696

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That tends to reduce GPU load more than CPU load. Since your CPU is the bottleneck here, no.
 
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JOOK-D

JOOK-D

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+1.

As suggested earlier measure the load on each core. If it is as you stated heavily dependent on one core, and your GPU is being utilised very little, then the CPU is the bottleneck.

You could alleviate it with a healthy overclock. http://www.overclock.net/t/1348623/amd-bulldozer-and-piledriver-overclocking-guide-asus-motherboard Make sure you have a decent aftermarket cooler if you try this.

I looked up a few benchmarks of the other total war games, as there are very little resources on medieval 2.

55133.png


The 770 is clearly very capable, as expected.

4409e0d6_rome1.jpeg


Rome 2 does use more than just one core, from what I've seen. Probably up to 4 going by these benches. If medieval 2 is any older then I'd expect it to be even more heavily dependent on a single core.

57930.png


Here in shogun 2, the 8350 is shown to fall behind quite a bit.

Ultimately I'd suggest you overclock the 8350. You have a decent motherboard, so 4.5GHz should be achievable as you also have some temperature headroom there. Else, you might want to hop over to intel.
 
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Krillle3

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Will try to overclock it a bit. It's just odd that it seemed to be working much better previously, and now it's like mediocre in all strategy games.

I just played some Men at war - Vietnam, and the fps is around 30 fps with dips to 19, with settings on default, which sets them quite high though.

Just been having issues since i built my new computer, I guess that's the beauty of electronics! lol
Anyway just having a feeling that there is something wrong with my computer but will first of all try to overclock the CPU a bit.
 
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bmacsys

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He cpu isn't even at 50% usage. So how one earth do you figure it is a bottleneck?
 
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Brian van den Berg

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That bold text sir, is complete bullcrap. I don't even know how you came up with it:

If it is on Vsync it has a slight overhead in OVERALL performance, because of the way the buffering works.

But if a game is at 120FPS with vsync off with 100% GPU load it will be ~50%ish with vsync on, so any increase in 3D rendering activity will just increase the GPU load without affecting FPS as long as the GPU doesn't hit the 100%(also not completely true again, just for example).

As i said if you can't hold the 60FPS and it doesn't go higher than ~70FPS most of the time just keep it disabled since the fact it wont help with tearing so much anymore.

The italic text sir, is even more bullshit. Never a game will use 100% CPU unless it's set to Realtime, and not even then because of this:

Alot of games aren't optimized so much that it is able to make good use of CPU power, making it less effective to draw horsepower from the CPU, making it never use 100% at all times, and always trying to draw power from cpu0(single-threaded games, or badly optimized multithreaded games) in the second case it will still draw horsepower from all cores but making it not use it effectively making it waste its power.

 
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JOOK-D

JOOK-D

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Not the person who posted that, but I'd guess that even if the overall CPU load is at 50%, it could be the first few cores maxing out if the others aren't being utilised by the game - it probably doesn't use upwards of 4 threads/cores. It can still be a bottleneck.
 
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Krillle3

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Actually tried to overclock the cpu and it went fine until I was starting Rome 2 and the core temp went from 50 to 98 in an instance and the computer froze 4.4 Ghz? I just set voltage manually to 1.30 and changed the ratio, but still doesn't that just seen like something is wrong with the motherboard as it could be started right up?

ALSO i had the GPU put in a x4 2.0 port and it was just as fast as in a x16 2.0? How?
 
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pit_1209

pit_1209

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If it is in the stock cooler then forget about overclocking that cpu until you get something better like an 212 EVO at least.
Well, if those ports are pci-e 3.0 the bandwidth will be enough for not to bottleneck much the gpu but if it´s 2.0 then it will be noticeable in gpu dependent situations but not much.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/pci-express-scaling-p67-chipset-gaming-performance,2887-10.html
 
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