[Performance] Help diagnosing my bottleneck?
Weedbean
Denmark Join Date: 2014-12-14 Member: 200054Members, Reinforced - Supporter
Denmark Join Date: 2014-12-14 Member: 200054Members, Reinforced - Supporter
Hello,
I've played NS2 on and off for a couple of years and I always just put up with the bad framerates. But now that I've started playing it increasingly more and more, I've had enough and I want to see if I can find out where the culprit is. There are images of dxdiag which show my system stats in the album I've linked to below.
What bothers me is, I have low FPS while my CPU, seemingly, is not at full load and my GPU is at anything from 30% to 90% utilization (depending on my graphics settings). My temperatures are looking fine and also my RAM isn't fully used. You would think that when all components aren't fully utilized, that you could squeeze more FPS out of the system? (I know that more components than these 3 make up a computer but still?)
I've read all over the forums and internet, experimented with all kinds of settings and advices but nothing seems to really make any difference. I am experiencing some weird scenarios in NS2 and I will try to describe them below aswell as provide some screenshots:
When I lower the resolution it doesn't seem to have much effect, which, from reading various posts, leads me to believe that it is my CPU that is the bottleneck?
Sometimes in ready rooms, I will have high GPU use (90-98%) and relatively low CPU use (like 60%), while getting 100+ FPS. Other times, in ready rooms (it can be the same map), I will only have 40% GPU use and still like 70% CPU and only get 50-60 FPS. It seems weird to me, I thought it might have something to do with the CPU not having much physics to calculate on in a ready room and therefore the GPU isn't being held back? I'm not sure and don't know much about how a game works like that.
I've tried using the r_stats aswell as the profile tool, and noticed that a lot of times there is no wait on the "render" thread but 4-10 ms on the "world update" thread. Also sometimes the frames in profile are red and some times yellow? The game also crashes with the profile tool on on initial game load. I've uploaded an album of images in different situations below. There are descriptions on each image to say a little about the given scenario.
So overall, not utilizing CPU, GPU or RAM 100% and getting low FPS and spikes. I hope someone with a better understanding could take a look and help me out.
Link to Imgur album
Kind regards,
Weedbean
I've played NS2 on and off for a couple of years and I always just put up with the bad framerates. But now that I've started playing it increasingly more and more, I've had enough and I want to see if I can find out where the culprit is. There are images of dxdiag which show my system stats in the album I've linked to below.
What bothers me is, I have low FPS while my CPU, seemingly, is not at full load and my GPU is at anything from 30% to 90% utilization (depending on my graphics settings). My temperatures are looking fine and also my RAM isn't fully used. You would think that when all components aren't fully utilized, that you could squeeze more FPS out of the system? (I know that more components than these 3 make up a computer but still?)
I've read all over the forums and internet, experimented with all kinds of settings and advices but nothing seems to really make any difference. I am experiencing some weird scenarios in NS2 and I will try to describe them below aswell as provide some screenshots:
When I lower the resolution it doesn't seem to have much effect, which, from reading various posts, leads me to believe that it is my CPU that is the bottleneck?
Sometimes in ready rooms, I will have high GPU use (90-98%) and relatively low CPU use (like 60%), while getting 100+ FPS. Other times, in ready rooms (it can be the same map), I will only have 40% GPU use and still like 70% CPU and only get 50-60 FPS. It seems weird to me, I thought it might have something to do with the CPU not having much physics to calculate on in a ready room and therefore the GPU isn't being held back? I'm not sure and don't know much about how a game works like that.
I've tried using the r_stats aswell as the profile tool, and noticed that a lot of times there is no wait on the "render" thread but 4-10 ms on the "world update" thread. Also sometimes the frames in profile are red and some times yellow? The game also crashes with the profile tool on on initial game load. I've uploaded an album of images in different situations below. There are descriptions on each image to say a little about the given scenario.
So overall, not utilizing CPU, GPU or RAM 100% and getting low FPS and spikes. I hope someone with a better understanding could take a look and help me out.
Link to Imgur album
Kind regards,
Weedbean
Comments
If you are able to then I recommend you buy a CPU cooler and overclock your system a bit.
I realize my system is old. I'm currently running an CM Hyper 212 Plus and have already OC'ed from 2,66 to 3 GHz. None of my cores ever reach 100%, is it more like 75% one two of the cores and occasionally core1 will reach 85%. So there should be a little headroom still?
But I guess I'll try and see if I can OC it any more and still keep my system stable.
Also, could anyone clarify which/if any of the graphics setting affect my CPU use? So that I could max out the ones that might only use my GPU and keep down the ones that use CPU? Also, with an AMD GPU, the PhysX setting will have no effect, right? And that option to "use more CPU" (don't remember the exact name), will that help me to utilize more cores?
Yeah, that's a great budget cooler. I use one myself in my server system. If you can OC your CPU even more then it should help. (No guarantees though.)
Could you check how much CPU utilization the NS2.exe process uses in the Task Manager?
I don't think the GPU PhysX option works, but just in case turn it off since you don't have an Nvidia GPU. And yeah, multithreaded physics should be on for your system.
Apart from that Anisotropic Filtering and Anti-aliasing should be purely stressing the GPU. I can't really help with the other settings though.
And even when the profiler shows rendering taking 80% usage, its the _internal_ renderer, meaning your CPU still.. And infact usually is stating "waiting on update world job to finish", which is the LUA that your CPU processes.
Now.. your GPU is old and poor performing (idk if its the 6850 or 6870) and could still do with an update - but you won't notice that bottleneck until you fix your CPU clockrate
And unfortunately your CPU is not going to be overclocked past 3.2 and since you've already gotten to 3 ghz and aren't seeing the difference.. well.. all i can say is that your CPU was a "mid range" CPU when released, 8 years ago. You are definitely due for an upgrade.
So to fully answer your question: Your bottleneck is your old, mid-range CPU that doesn't have a lot of OC room. But your GPU isn't far behind, either..
Ah, the woes of PC gaming
Personally, I own an i7 920 which is old, but I have overclocked it to 4 Ghz with water cooling and have disabled hyperthreading, with great results - I am only ever GPU bottlenecked by my 570 GTX.
Thanks for the help.
Good luck, and if you'd like any advice on purchasing components feel free to ask, people in these parts love to chime in / price things out