A Potential Cpu Issue? FPS In Games

[cactusgod]

Hey guys,

I've been having a pretty annoying problem.

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/311141-33-radeon-5850-potential-issue-inevitable-issue

I posted it here, originally thinking it was my video card that was causing my problems. The fantastic dudes in the thread have helped me greatly and I'm not so sure it is anymore. So, I've been trying to figure out what's been going on. It seems like, all of a sudden, I've started to get fps drops while playing games. It generally seems to happen with things like...waterfalls in Crysis 2, particles and spell effects in League of Legends...things like that. For instance, in League of Legends, I'll be running a solid 60fps most of the time, but get random drops during times of higher activity. This is something that I generally am not used to experiencing and it's been bugging me quite a bit. I went and replaced my new video card with my old one to make sure it was still happening and..lo and behold, it is.

The post I listed above goes through a lot of extensive information that I have been documenting over time regarding my fixing process. I just recently wiped out my computer, installed windows 64 bit (fully updated), video drivers, and games. So far, I'm still having issues.

I have:
-Windows 7 64 bit
-G.SKILL 2GB (4 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400)
-ASUS P5N32-E SLI LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI ATX Intel Motherboard
-Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 Conroe 2.66GHz LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Processor
-ASUS EAH5850 DirectCU 1gb ddr vid card. 1680x1050 max res on my monitor (BTW, nothing I use is overclocked..yet...No idea how to do it x_x)

So, naturally, my assumption is that SOMETHING has gone wrong in the computer that I simply CANNOT identify. My GUT tells me its the RAM, but I have absolutely zero indication that it is...it's kind of a mother feeling their child's pain ;p haha. Seriously though, I feel as if something is no longer performing optimally. Naturally, I've been getting recommendations to Overclock my CPU, which I have no idea how to do but would GLADLY do, but I feel as though this problem I've had has come out of nowhere, so overclocking may not necessarily be the solution.

At any rate, I do have programs like CPU-Z, PC wizard, and things like that. If anyone here is bored enough (and in for a challenge) , please toss your hat into the ring with me and see if we can beat this thing down or at the very least, please help me eliminate some potential ideas ;p

Thank you very much for any and all help. I will try and post back anything someone posts ASAP, though tonight I'm going to have to leave for a few hours and wont be back till the AM.

 

[cactusgod]

Just as one more aside..I've been noticing, just using the task manager, that I seem to have 30-60% cpu usage when watching say...a stream, or something of that nature but it goes up and down. Opening up a website spikes that up real high for a second or two, but I THINK that always happens. Sometimes just watching a video seems to have a similar effect. Not sure if its relevant but I figured I'd post that, incase it may just be my CPU dying of all age.

 

[cactusgod]

I generally use AVG free or malwarebytes to check AVG. I dont usually have them running or on when I'm playing. I generally disable vsync as well, though depending on the game it has mixed results.

Is there any guide I can follow to overclocking my specific CPU? I didnt realize it put more strain on the graphics card!

 

[cactusgod]

Ok so you're saying I should turn on 2x's AA from the catalyst control center for ALL applications? Theres three options for filter: box, narrowtent and widetent. Which should I use?

I'll try AA first and then put on triple buffering with vysnc if it doesnt change, thx. We'll see what happens ;p

 

[cactusgod]

Hmm. I havent tested it in all my games yet, but AA seems to be helping a bit. I'm gonna keep testing it out and report back.

 

[cactusgod]

disable tripple buffering and vsync. Play with AA
BUT UNINSTALL AVG!!!! GET RID OF IT

hahahha yes master! AVG IS GONE. I installed what you said! Also, I disabled triple buffering and vsync in the game I was talking about. I definitely think I saw some improvement. I'm installed battlefield bad company right now to see what happens.

Also, I do have a thermaltake heatsink with arctic silver on my CPU, so I THINK I'm good to overlock.

 

[cactusgod]

Oh Wow I just realized this was the UK site.

 

[cactusgod]

Ok. I'm a little confused. I was reading online and every website seems to suggest that AA would actually decrease performance...but I think its actually working out pretty well for me. Whats the difference between 2x,4x,8x? Does it get better and better? or..


I will def turn it off when I overclock.

Thx

 

[HEXiT]

well for a start theres no need to oc that cpu just yet as the 5850 is actually not much better than a 4870 performance wise on dx10 games.

using the ccc pannel to overide the fsaa settings in games may not help, what you need to adjust is the catalist ai settings and the smoothvision settings, these 2 may well be the source of the problem...

if not then

what you may have run into is the more core's problem that has recently appeared.

games like battlefield bad company 2 are speced as dual core games but really do need a minimum of 3 cores (a typical new game needs 2.7 cores) just to use more than 50 percent of the gpu power, even if you oc'd to 4ghz it wouldnt make any difference.

so b4 you go off trying to oc the cpu. just check with gpu-z that your actually getting 100 percent gpu usage, if its at 50% or less then you have the problem i described above.
upping the details will help a little, it will lower your top fps and increase your minimum but not by enough.
another way to tell is fraps.
if the fps drop is from say 50 down to 10 but never hits 0 even at max settings. its not enough cores and you may want to considder an upgrade to say a q8400 or better.

 

[HEXiT]

he's not American, that would be to easy. dadiggle is south african... and as usual he's replying to questions that were not asked.


FSAA is not to emulate higher rez, is used to avoid aliasing (or "jaggies") and smooth Edges of high and mid contrast polygons.
Full-scene anti-aliasing by supersampling usually means that each full frame is rendered at double (2x) or quadruple (4x) the display resolution, and then down-sampled to match the display resolution. So a 2x FSAA would render 4 supersampled pixels for each single pixel of each frame. While rendering at larger resolutions will produce better results, more processor power is needed which can degrade performance and frame rate.

there you go dadiggle thats what it is and why we use it... if your gonna give advice or pass on the fountain of knowlage at least make sure its correct.

 

[cactusgod]

Oh boy. So now i don't know what the heck is going on.

"catalist ai settings and the smoothvision settings, these 2 may well be the source of the problem... "

Which settings are these and what should I change them to?

 

[HEXiT]

you can increase resolution all you want it will make no difference if you don't change the dot pitch/pixel size on the actual monitor. meaning an average 23in is 1920/1080 if you increase that screen to say 5000/2000 you will end up with a 90inch +screen going by your half baked logic.
if you increase the rez and dot pitch then you can have the same size 23 inch but with a true higher resolution.

and erm no1 pissed on my battries. i came on her to have a look. seen that you were up to your old B.S. and decided to join... and show you how its done...

for instance i know that them 3dmarks aint yours.
because you still have a Pentium based pc, and your still using your phone as a modem. (its easy to ask a mod what your basic config is as your browser tells them in your headers)
you deliberately don't use the over-clocking part of the forum as you don't actually know how to oc. as jay mack says, you have only ever read about it, and is why you tend to answer questions that you were never asked. hoping to hide your lack of knowledge behind a wall of B.S.


you think im B.S'n? whats the bet he cant produce a valid cpu-z banner with the specs he claims to have... oh thats rite he will troll there forums untill he finds 1 and claim it as his own.

 

[cactusgod]

;(

 

[iam2thecrowe]

Oh boy. So now i don't know what the heck is going on.

"catalist ai settings and the smoothvision settings, these 2 may well be the source of the problem... "

Which settings are these and what should I change them to?

Disable catalyst AI and try it, it often causes issues. Smoothvision is just anti aliasing. Are you sure the FPS drops arent due to hard drive activity? over time as hard drives fill up they become fragmented and slow. If your in the middle of the game and things need to load from the hard drive you will see dramatic drops for 1/2 a second. I suggest either a clean install of windows, or defragment your hard drive and delete any unneccesary crap from it.

 

[cactusgod]

I did wipe out my hard drive. I was actually thinking of running one of the games off of my 16 gb flash drive just to see if it still happened.

 

[gamerk316]

...Lots of bad information in this thread...

1) You have a classic CPU bottleneck. The CPU is simply not able to keep up with the load placed on it, resulting in the entire system slowing down. Overclocking may help, but with more and more applications using multiple cores well, its getting really hard to justify a C2D.

2) Anti-Alising is a measure to reduce alising in images. Essentially, because pixels are essentially square, looking at any stright lines off-center will result in a jagged image, as theres no way to draw a smooth direction line using squares. AA attempts to solve this problem by using various techniques to smooth out the image as best as possible, but these techniques use a good amount of GPU horsepower.

You MAY be seeing a situation where the increased AA load on the GPU is actually causing the system to average out at a more steady rate, resulting in a slight hit to FPS, but less drops. AA results in lower overall performance though, and trying to use it to hide a weak CPU will only cause headaches in the long run. Trying to INCREASE PERFORMANCE by doing MORE WORK is an idiotic practice.

The "Best" solution would be to upgrade to at least a Core 2 Quad, although even those are somewhat aged these days. If your mobo is capable though, even an upgrade to a 8000 series quad should help out performance wise a bit.

 

[HEXiT]

jaymac did you come all the way from Prodigits.co.uk to come and flame me? You must be bored to go through all the trouble to create a user account here just to come on a trolling spree? your one sad case. If you have nothing useful to add to the OPs post please leave it.

And you can't increase the of resolution of a LCD above its native you mong.

:lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:
wasnt it you that said i should come here and get my ass handed to me by the guys here, REAL techys who know there stuff?
funny i have been here a while and guess what... it looks like i fit right in.... maybe because i do actually know my apples, and for that matter actually have apples (change the word apples to pc, just so you dont get confused)

as usual you have trouble reading... or even interpreting.... i didnt come to flame you i came to help guys that you confuse with B.S.
what i ment when i said if you take that screen and make it 5000x2000 is if you take the actual physical screen and instead of cutting it to 23inches to get a 1920/1080 you cut it to 90inches and get the 5000x2000 but hey it doesn't really matter as i aint here for you, the others here seemed to understand what i was saying so its all good....

now if you wanna claim im trolling prove me wrong.
lets see your specs on a valid cpu-id ...
coz i know you dont have a x980 ans tri sli gtx580's i know you still have a pentium based pc...

yet you talk like you actually own decent hardware ie: your B.S'n

im not the 1 telling people about systems i have no actual experience of but going by what iv'e read... and as ive shown you don't read very well nor do you comprehend on any meaningful level...

you were banned from pro for this and other reasons, because your a danger to other pc users...
when you were caught lying you claimed every 1 was a troll and you did nothing to deserve it, but we know that you cost at least 1 person his i7 setup when you told him how to oc his cpu. when you were told off and proven wrong you couldn't handle it and flipped out got banned and decided to harass members of the forum by creating multiple ids (over 30 in 1 month alone)... :lol:
so please get off that high horse as you know fine well that if we are talking harassment your in a league of your own.

so daddigle you now know im here. and im giving the forum notice that you aren't who you claim to be and your as fake as your 3dmarks if any of the site mod's want more info just pm me

 

[HEXiT]

...Lots of bad information in this thread...[/quotemsg] exactly!

 

[cactusgod]

For my Catalyst AI I have the option :

Texture Filtering Quality : It has a slider from like performance, to quality, to high quality. I turned it to performance, don't see an off option.

I also see a box that says Enable Surface Format Optimization. I unchecked that.

I also see SMOOTHVISIONHD: Anisotropic Filtering. Thats set at "use application settings" Should I do anything to that?

I'm trying to last on this CPU for a few more months at least, because I dont really have the money right now to upgrade

 

[HEXiT]

catalist ai has 3 options your best off just trying them all.
basicaly they will enable basic texture, intermediate texture and hi quality textures.
also when you run at high quality textures your also using some amd optimizations (cheats) to get higher quality with out a performance hit.
if you disable surface format optimization it will decrease detail on the surface of complex textures but this only works if the game supports it specifically iso 3d games like starcraft and daw 2 use it. so would affect performance in them games. on other games that barley use it then enabeling or dissabling it will have little or no effect.

Enable Surface Format Optimization checked along with Texture Filtering: Performance/Quality = Cat AI Advanced

Enable Surface Format Optimization checked along with Texture Filtering: Quality/High Quality = Cat AI Normal
i know its odd but thats how it works on the new panel.

either way its douptfull that any of these will completley eradicate your problem.
and if i were you i would reset everything back to default and see if the problems persist. then start adjusting the ccc panel turning on 1 item at a time starting with a.i settings. good luck.