Where is my bottleneck?

msterian

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Jan 9, 2012
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Edit: Oh no, did I post in the wrong section?

Hello.
I have recently upgraded my hardware, GPU wise, from a gtx 650 to an rx 460. I have an FX-6300 CPU with turbo to 3700 MHz active, so before the upgrade I was obviously GPU bottlenecked. Now after the upgrade I'm observing something veeery strange. My observations are mostly in a specific game, World of Warcraft. There are some specific locations/moments, where my fps drops to around 30-40 fps for no apparent reason. I have osd hw monitoring, and my gpu is not fully utilized, neither is my cpu. But this is a more complex subject. Here is what I see: CPU: When around 30-40 fps, cpu is overall at around 30%, but one of the cores is varying between 60-90%(never 100%). This is mostly due to the games' poor multi-core programming, but still, it never reaches 100%.
GPU: While at 30-40 fps, gpu usage is at at about 60-80%.
So WTF. What is lowering my FPS. It's certainly not the GPU, it's... maaaybe the CPU, but I overclocked it to 4 GHZ and there was no change. Should I try 4.5? If yes, I'll need a lot of help from you guys because even at 4GHZ it was unstable. Screen was going black every few minutes. I had probably not tuned my bios setting properly for it to work at 4GHZ (bus speed, voltages, multiplier, etc).
Ok so now on the overclocking note. This video card has no additional power plug, it takes everything from the PCIx. So for that I need to make sure I have proper power on the motherboard, which I'm not sure of. Near the CPU there is an 8 pin power slot, but my PSU only had a 4-pin cord available. It worked well with my last video card but that one had additional 6-pin power socket. In the manual it says that a 4-pin should be sufficient for optimal operation, what do you think about this? Also, isn't that plug only related to CPU?
So in conclusion, I have no idea where the bottleneck is, I was thinking maybe the GDDR5 MHz, but I upped that by 300 MHz and still no change. And the CPU overclock didn't seem to have any effect either. Is it actully the GPU to blame but my readings are not correct? Or is the game just very bad and not able to take full advantage of my hardware?
So a few more things:
1st: When the fps goes low the video memory is almost maxed 1.8-1.9 GB of 2GB. But there is no disk activity so it's not caching anything to disk. But this leads me to my 2nd point. 2nd: My motherboard has a PCIx x16 slot 2.0 . The video card supports PCIx x8 V3.0 . Here's my video card: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-radeon-rx-460,4707.html Look down in the article, it specifies that it's on x8. And this would be fine if I was running a 3.0 x8. But I'm running in 2.0 x8. Could this be the issue? Could 2.0 x8 not handle the 2GB of memory the game actually fully uses? Would an overclock to my PCIx slot do anything?
Help me out guys, I'm stuck.
 
Solution
WOW dropping FPS in areas is normal, depending on your quality settings 30-40 fps in crowded areas could be fine.

I have a much faster CPU and video card, and if I set WOW to higher settings with AA it can drop down to 40s.

theyeti87

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To be sure, WoW is horribly optimized. Even with a over-the-top powerful system it isn't going to run buttery smooth with all settings cranked to high/ultra.

Is the WoW game folder being stored on a hard drive or solid state drive?
 

msterian

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It's on HDD sadly :(
And on a very slow one at that. I think I'm only maxing like 40 MB/s speeds. Btw do you know a good utility to test this? What about an utility to increase/fix the speed. I't not that old of a disk, 1TB from 1-2 years ago, 7200 rpm.

But anyway, during the slow fps there's no disk activity. And I'm not doing anything in the game either. I literally just set my character in a certain spot.
 

mcconkeymike

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MERGED QUESTION
Question from msterian : "Where is my bottleneck?"



I'm not certain about your specific issue, but I do know that you upgraded from an old GPU to a new, not real strong GPU and it has little VRAM. Also you aren't running the strongest processor. It's hard to say for certain what the issue is, but you should make sure you have the most current chipset drivers for the mobo and the video card, then make sure you aren't having any heat problems. This is tougher with AMD since not all mobos report temps correctly. You should be able to increase the fan speed on the GPU easily with MSI Afterburner or something similar. Give that a shot and see what happens.
 

msterian

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Hello. Thanks for the answer, and thanks for merge, but I would have rather have the question merged into the overclocking forum. I feel like those guys know more about this subject.
But regarding my issue, if sensors aren't showing correctly, how can I tell if anything is overheating? I monitored the GPU freq and it's stable. I'll check on the CPU freqs too but I doubt they go down. WHat about my RAM? They are 1333 but I doubt that matters. Did you also read about the PCI-E thing?
 

mcconkeymike

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You shouldn't yet be worrying about frequencies, more about temp and make sure that is not too high. GPUID is a decent program to check specs on video cards. As for the PCIe thing, what is the exact make of your motherboard and then maybe I can help you figure something out.
 

msterian

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Asrock 970 extreme3 r2.0 . Newest bios version, 2.6
 

mcconkeymike

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Ok, one of your issues could be the fact that you are only running a 4 pin CPU power cable into the 8 pin socket, could have issues with overclocking the CPU and possibly issues with enough power going to the PCIe slot. If your PSU isn't up to the task, power wise or connector wise, that could be part of the problem. With your video card not having its own PCIe power plug on it, overclocking the video card may not be possible because overclocking requires more power and the PCIe slot can only supply 75 watts. You may want to think about a new PSU, I would never run less than 600 watts on anything that resembles a gaming computer.
 

theyeti87

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I notice similar performance with an i7-950 @3.73Ghz, a 1060 6GB, and 12GB system ram.