GTS 450 Running very slow in some games

[hitmanino]

Hi everyone

I recently upgrated my gpu from an nvidia 9500GS to an Msi GTS 450 Cyclone,but i'm a little disappointed by the performance,in some games actually..some demanding games are running great like i was expecting (Bad Company 2 max settings 35 fps avg,Crysis 2 on very high 45 fps avg,Dead Space 2 80 fps avg..) eving Metro 2033 performance is decent,the resolution i use is 1680*1050. My unigine Heaven benchmark and 3DMARK Gpu score are also ok like in all the reviews i saw on the net..
But some other games are running horribly with an fps drop very annoying, Darksiders is running at 28 fps avg and it drops to 18 when i have a long distance view ,AC Brotherhood in some crowded places is about 20 fps and others at 40 avg and GTA IV is the worst one,very laggy.. i don't know if i'm cpu limited or the motherboard is crap or not enough power from the psu? i did a clean instal,deleted old drivers with driver sweeper and installed new drivers from nvidia web site.Now i'm using the new Beta drivers and still no improvements.

I know it's a mainstream card and not really powerful,but it's supposed to have much better results.And what's bothering me is that it perform better in more demanding games

here are my specs :

Core 2 Quad Q9300 @2.5
Packard bell mobo
4 Gb DDR2
Gts 450 Cyclone
Corsair Cx400w psu
Win 7 64bits

Any help will be appreciated

 

[rolli59]

Have you tried getting a little higher clock on your CPU to see if it is the CPU creating a bottleneck?

 

[jjb8675309]

your C2Q is holding you back, 2.5ghz is not enough in some games oc that friggin chip

 

[hitmanino]

That's the problem i can't overclock with my motherboard,just like Dell or Hp we can't overclock with those motherboards
but i saw that people with the same cpu or even worst getting better performance than me!and how a quad core will limit a gts 450 btw?it's not a powerful card i picked this one because it's a mainstream card and i've been told that it will perform well in my rig!is there other possibility other than the cpu bottleneck?Does Darksiders use more cpu than Crysis 2 or Metro 2033?

 

[jjb8675309]

well the problem is that regardless of the fact that its a quad the clock freq per core is low by todays standards and it is holding your graphics card back, plain and simple

 

[jjb8675309]

but at the same time you can't expect it to play super demanding games afterall, its not even as fast as a 5770 which I use to power a 720p rig with a 240 regor @ 3.5ghz

 

[nforce4max]

Have you cleaned out old configuration files in some games? This was a common problem when Fermi based cards first came out and some solved the problem by removing certain settings/configuration file(s) in certain games that enabled better performance. As for hardware I do suggest that you upgrade your board when you can afford to do so when there is a good one around. What chipset is this board? Find another board that has the same chipset and swap it out. It should run without needing to reinstall windows. Windows xp/vista/7 doesn't always have to be reinstalled to work when moved to a different board but there have been some issues in my past experience but when moving from one board to another that is in the same generation problems are very few and far between.

 

[hitmanino]

yeah i know i'm not asking too much from this card,but i want it to work properly!demanding games like Crysis 2 and Bad company 2 are running great and less demanding games like Darksiders are giving bad results that's what i don't understand :/ this oc gts 450 cyclone is on the levels of a hd 5770 btw it's a decent card

 

[nforce4max]

:lol:

 

[hitmanino]

Have you cleaned out old configuration files in some games? This was a common problem when Fermi based cards first came out and some solved the problem by removing certain settings/configuration file(s) in certain games that enabled better performance. As for hardware I do suggest that you upgrade your board when you can afford to do so when there is a good one around. What chipset is this board? Find another board that has the same chipset and swap it out. It should run without needing to reinstall windows. Windows xp/vista/7 doesn't always have to be reinstalled to work when moved to a different board but there have been some issues in my past experience but when moving from one board to another that is in the same generation problems are very few and far between.

No i just deleted the old drivers,but i installed Darksiders few days ago for example so there is no old configuration files!For now i can't change the board,in a few months maybe.I guess i have to deal with those performances i'm getting now,i hope all games will use the cry engine 3 it suits me well

Thanks for the help guys

 

[jjb8675309]

psshh cry engine 3 is crap lmfao :lol:

 

[jjb8675309]

:lol:

hey man do you have any info on sli'ing on an am3 board that does not support it? I remember you mentioning something about this before do you have a link or somewhere I could go to read about it?

 

[hitmanino]

hey i just benchmarked far cry 2 on my rig,32 fps avg,i did the same bech on a win 7 32bits partition and i had 38 fps avg with the same settings,weird..oO'
my original OS was vista 32 bits,does my system runs better on 32bits OS or it's something else??

 

[nforce4max]

hey man do you have any info on sli'ing on an am3 board that does not support it? I remember you mentioning something about this before do you have a link or somewhere I could go to read about it?

SLI is software only and can run on ati and intel chipsets with only a simple hack to fool the driver into thinking that it is installed on a sli certified x58 board. AM3 can run sli just fine and I have my self ran sli on a am2 790x board last august till I got my gtx 460.

http://xdevs.com/e107_plugins/content/content.php?content.30

 

[jjb8675309]

thanks can you use it with current nvidia driver versions?

 

[nforce4max]

thanks can you use it with current nvidia driver versions?

Yes just give it a shot. If it works you will see an option come up during start up like you were going into safe mode or not but the default option is the one that enables the sli in the drivers. I have updated drivers before after applying the hack and it still works. Do you have two old sli capable cards on hand to test things out?

 

[jjb8675309]

no i don't but I am more or less pondering the move, thanks for the info

 

[mightymaxio]

I would say the 450 is the bottleneck not the quad, because most of those games require some beefy graphics cards in battlefield bad company 2 i get about 60-70 fps with 2 470gtxs running in sli. But GTA 4 is based heavily on the CPU, generally i7's can max it out without lag otherwise you need like a 3.4ghz or higher quadcore.

 

[iam2thecrowe]

i agree. a core 2 quad is basically the same performance clock for clock as a phenom 2 x4. you could overclock to 3ghz but i dont think itll help much with a gts450.

 

[jjb8675309]

^yeah the 450 is still being held back a small amount by the lowly clock freg of the c2q, but with a higher gpu there is no doubt that the C2Q will bottleneck the system, the C2Q at 2.5 ghz is nowhere near a the performance of a p2 955 @ 3.9ghz though

 

[nforce4max]

The gts450 is a weak card for what some expected. On the low end it barely competes with a gts 250 and on the high a gtx260 but not sure which but likely on par with the 65nm core 192 version.

 

[iam2thecrowe]

^yeah the 450 is still being held back a small amount by the lowly clock freg of the c2q, but with a higher gpu there is no doubt that the C2Q will bottleneck the system, the C2Q at 2.5 ghz is nowhere near a the performance of a p2 955 @ 3.9ghz though

I guess your right in a way. particularly the many games that dont benefit from quad core cpu's (most of them) will suffer with the lower clock frequency. 3ghz is easily achievable with that cpu and more with better cpu cooler. disabling vsync or enabling tripple buffering and vsync may also help the problem. Something to check also, that i had an issue with is fraps. The default hotkey for recording and locking the fps back to 30fps is F9. This is also the key many games use to load game. Took me a while to figure out why fallout 3 was dropping fps to 30 and running erratically, this was the cause. disable hotkeys in fraps.