Am I cpu bottlenecking?

lynmachine

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Jan 4, 2011
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I recently purchased a MSI gtx 560 ti, and I am having some troubles with it, when playing crysis I will get around 30 or so frames per second on max quality at 4x aa, sometimes it will jump up to the low 40's but as soon as there are more then 3 or 4 enemies it goes down to 17-19 fps making it almost unplayable for me, I find that dropping the settings doesn't help and still as soon as some action happen's my frames drop below 20. Also I noticed overclocking does nothing to stop the dip in action.

I am running windows 7 64 bit, 550w OCZ psu, amd phenom 2 x4 920 2.8 ghz my motherboard is a gigabyte ga-m68m-s2p. I am wondering if having a very old motherboard and a not so powerfull but still decent cpu that is not overclocked may be the promblem. In dirt 2 the frames are very nice at above 50's on max. but while playing games like rome or garry's mod where many things are moving no matter what i have the settings on they dip very low.

Thanks.

also id like to note that while playing crysis, the frames would go very low when locking at a new area then go back to normal then when I look somewhere else they would go low and back up, and when I closed almost everything running on my computer and set crysis to high in task manager for my cpu, and then close iexplorer.exe im getting far less dropping of frame rates and uneven flow of gameplay, probably doing this increased my gameplay performance by 25% or more. GPU is not overclock as this does not increase my fps for some reason.
 
Yes that CPU is the bottleneck.It's a quad core but a slow quad core.Crysis 1 and 2 likes really fast CPU's.If your playing Crysis 1 it only utilize's 2 cores anyway.
I'd also like to add that Crysis 1 is still very demanding by todays standards.It's only been in the past 6 months with all these new cards that people have been able to max out Crysis.

Are you playing Crysis 1 or 2?
 
Thats normal.First the GPU is processing jsut the enviornment.Then when bad guys start getting into the picture it puts more strain on the GPU.This is typical even for high end GPU's in Crysis.

In order to max out Crysis you will need a dual card setup.SLI/Crossfire.
 


One of the tasks that the CPU performs in most games (or all), is to calculate the A.I., motion and physics. All of which increase load on the CPU with the more NPC's that show up.