PC Bottleneck - Please advise

[Krupi]

At present I am not happy with the sims performance on my rig and hope you guys could give me some advice on what I should replace to improve my fps.

 

My issues atm are low fps at ground level ~20 fps and firing guns reduces my fps from ~40 to below 15fps.

 

So my rig:

 

Gigabyte X58a-UD5

i7 930 @2.80GHz

Radeon HD 5970 (Crossfire card)

6GB (IIRC Kingston HyperX)

Windows 7 professional 64bit

160GB SSD

 

So there you have it whats killing my FPS?

 

P.S.

If you want more details I can post them later...

Edited March 7, 2013 by Krupi

[Wolf Rider]

What are your ingame and vga profile settings?

[locoidal]

Disable crossfire

water --> low

civ traffic --> low

res --> 512 single frame

MSAA --> 2x

 

The other options can be on high

[BIGNEWY]

don't worry to much about the hit you are getting, most people are getting the same, dust, smoke, and some objects ( especially airfields) give a hit.

 

I am sure with time it will be addressed by ED probably when we move over to the new EDGE engine

[Foul Ole Ron]

DCS is CPU intensive as well so might be worth having a go at overclocking. I bumped my 930 up to 3.3GHz without any issues.

[Madone]

+1 for Foul Ole Ron. If you can overclock your CPU, it would be helpful, DCS doesn't need a sh*tload of cores but frequency, the highest as possible.

[Ali Fish]

a 670 card would do you good i think. and a little OC to 3 gig at least.

[Foul Ole Ron]

Throwing money at the problem always helps :) But I'm assuming from the above that he's trying to improve performance without having to spend £300 on a 670. A CPU overclock is the easiest way way to get a free speed improvement. The 930 overclocks easily as well - it'll go to 3.3GHz without any heat issues once you've a reasonable air-cooling setup.

 

If there's a little budget to go around the Club 3D HD 7870 XT can be had for £170 and that'll deliver performance close to a 670.

[TZeer]

Since the FPS hit comes when you fire the gun etc, it seems to be a GPU issue. I support the others that upgrading your GPU would probably give you a good boost :)

[blkspade]

As mentioned earlier, Crossfire has the negative scaling effect with DCS world, so that needs to be disabled. As FC3 became more of what I played the most, this prompted me to give one of my 6950s to my girlfriend until I could afford the 7970 I have now. On the ground at most airfields you can probably expect mid 20s regardless. An OC can help but I still get around 26-32 FPS at airfields with my CPU at 4.5Ghz. 4.5ghz is the max I can put on my CPU without water-cooling.

[locoidal]

A 5970 is a good card for the graphics in the sim... here the point is the CPU frequency...

There are good news .. in another thread..a moderator has said that they are declouping GFX engine into a separate threard

;)

[Rhinox]

Download "AMD System Monitor", unzip, and let it run. Start DCS, play for a while, and then check diagrams (or files, if you selected output to file).

 

This software can monitor cpu-load, main memory-usage, gpu-load (only for amd/ati graphics cards), and gpu-memory usage. The curve close to 100%/full is your bottleneck. If none of the above mentioned, then your cpu/gpu is waiting for data and either RAM-speed or HDD-speed is the bottleneck...

[Krupi]

Thanks for the advise guys, I have tried overclocking a few times to 4GHz but could not get around heat issue even with a H70 radiator, interestingly I didn't see much of a improvement at 4GHz but I will give 3.3GHz a try :)

 

I do plan on buying a 680 3GB at some point but only once the 780 has arrived ;)

 

Rhinox that sounds interesting I will give it a try, I had hoped someone would mention RAM as it seems quite cheap to get a decent 16GB pack.

 

Any advice on what RAM to get, I used to hear corsair was always a good bet, is that still the case?

[TZeer]

Thanks for the advise guys, I have tried overclocking a few times to 4GHz but could not get around heat issue even with a H70 radiator, interestingly I didn't see much of a improvement at 4GHz but I will give 3.3GHz a try :)

 

I do plan on buying a 680 3GB at some point but only once the 780 has arrived ;)

 

Rhinox that sounds interesting I will give it a try, I had hoped someone would mention RAM as it seems quite cheap to get a decent 16GB pack.

 

Any advice on what RAM to get, I used to hear corsair was always a good bet, is that still the case?

 

Since you are not getting much improvement with overclocking it's most likely the GPU.

 

To confirm this, run a monitoring program to check your CPU usage and CPU usage.

 

For the CPU you can just take up task manager and look at the utilization.

 

For the GPU, do as suggested above and check the CPU usage there. And disable crossfire.

[Krupi]

I will double check this but I think I have already turned off crossfire

[Krupi]

Okay so I ran the AMD System Monitor with some pretty interesting results!

 

CPU hovered around 20-25%

 

GPU Both Chips were running around 60% so crossfire is clearly on, but I did not expect it to be running so high, normally a non crossfire game run both chips very low!?

 

Memory went to 60% and stayed there.

 

Will test with crossfire disabled.

 

P.S. Yes I just checked I was testing the Crossfire using the TwoWorlds 2 Dx10 profile. Forgot about that.

Edited March 7, 2013 by Krupi

[SkateZilla]

60/60 Xfire is terrible scaling, which means it's NOT working, try a different Xfire Profile.

 

But anything below 75/75 isnt good.

[Krupi]

Okay so turning off crossfire caused the GPU to max out at 100% (surprise surprise ;) ). However my fps is now ~40 at all altitudes though and shooting (P-51 Btw) it goes down to ~25.

 

It turns out I had selected the wrong file when testing the crossfire profiles so I am off to do some testing.

 

Thanks for your help guys very much appreciated, I will give you all some well deserved rep ;)

 

P.S. I am still using CCC 13.1 is 13.2 good to go?

[Krupi]

Thanks for the info Skate I was not aware that 60/60 was deemed terrible scaling.

 

I tried some other profiles but nothing gave as good a result as just turning off crossfire altogether like everyone said :music_whistling:

[SkateZilla]

if you find a good profile that offers better scaling, make it known, cuz alot of people are looking for Xfire to work.

[Mojeaux]

As Stated throwing money at it always helps

 

My Frame rates went to the single digit leval and made past missions impossiable to fly now with the 123....We have this great ME but, with the one step forward and 3 step backward approch...I can't express my frustration on this forum enough without getting kicked in the teeth, as to how ED keeps chasing it's tail! Muti play and squad co-op play is now non-exixtent, not many people wanting to have to deal with the growing amount of problems with the DCS and disgruntal issues that we feel necessary that are now never addressed.. nuff said for now...

[16th Widowmakr]

Big frame rate hits when black smoke appears! What's up with that?