Black Sheep Posted June 1, 2011 Posted June 1, 2011 Hallo ladies, recently I’m flying Flaming Cliffs 2 with a PC with these specs: Phenom II X4 955 (3.2 ghz) Radeon 4870 512mb Win XP (my old TM HOTAS wants gameport) @ 1920x1080 with all settings at maximum, FPS normally doesn't gets lower than 30. So I’m quite happy. Anyway there is always room for getting better results. I know that FC2 (like DCS Black Shark) is very CPU demanding. Wings of Prey (let’s call it “sim”) with its astonishing graphics run at near solid 60fps (vsync ON) in my system. So it seems that my old 4870 (with only 512mb) can still do a good job with advanced graphics. It seems that the FPS gap between FC2 and WoP is due to CPU usage. So, the question is: when running FLAMING CLIFFS 2, what’s the main bottleneck in my system now? CPU or GPU? I’m thinking about upgrading my old GPU, going for a 6950 (1-2 gb). If I go for a 6950 GPU, will be the 955 CPU a bottleneck in the system? Should I better upgrade CPU or GPU? don’t answer “both “ because it’s an ovious (and expensive) answer : ) Thank you in advance. Black Sheep
Pyroflash Posted June 1, 2011 Posted June 1, 2011 Get a 6970, it will be your best bet(6950 isn't really worth your money IMO, even if you are on a budget as it still under performs the 5870 from last year). Your processor is decent enough as is. If you aim for the sky, you will never hit the ground.
Silent Warrior Posted June 3, 2011 Posted June 3, 2011 RAM, maybe? You never did specify how much you have of that. When I went from 1 to 3 Gb all those years past, I did see a marked improvement. Could've been due to a patch (I think I was mostly playing The Witcher at the time, and at almost the same time as I upgraded my RAM, they released a patch that improved loading times quite a bit), but that's always one other option.
Black Sheep Posted June 3, 2011 Author Posted June 3, 2011 RAM I have 4 Gb, that means more than WinXP can handle.
Rahvin Posted June 3, 2011 Posted June 3, 2011 I'd say get an 1156 board and one of those high end i5 dualcores, overclock the hell out of it, and get some of the cheapest dual thread high performance available today. Also, you might want to try out just OC'ing your 955 a bit (big cooler, a few extra V and give it the beans) and see if that helps with CPU performance. If it doesn'T spring for a 6950 and hope it unlocks - at the very least it'll OC to about 850 though. Might want to look out for a custom card like the PCS++ or the MSI power edition.
Pilotasso Posted June 3, 2011 Posted June 3, 2011 Your GFX doesnt have enough memory IMHO for your resolution. I count over 600MB of memory in use when my GTX 470 is running LOMAC and DCS graphics at 1680X1050. In your case it will spend even more. You may be experiencing slowdowns because of textures going through the bus all the time. .
Rahvin Posted June 4, 2011 Posted June 4, 2011 If it's a memory limitation, lowering texture detail should do the trick.
Black Sheep Posted June 6, 2011 Author Posted June 6, 2011 Thanks for support. For the moment I think I'll go for a 6950 2gb, possibly an unlockable one. This should be enough, for now. In the future may be I'll go also for an Intel CPU.
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