whats the bottleneck ?

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crankdoofus

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Hi guys,
I have a XFX 650i, E4400 (2GHz) with XFX 8600 GT (DDR3) with 1GB RAM (667 MHz) upgraded from a 500 MHz Katmai based system. Most of the games I used to choke earlier work like a charm on this (ofcourse :-))
I got a bit adventourus, and got myself Crysis. Now I know that its an intensive game and I would need to push up something on the system, but what I don't know is what to upgrade ?
I tried to guess things by symptoms, viz if the loading time is too much it would be the RAM, if the game play stalls and starts repeatedly, it would be GFX card, etc.
Need your advise on how to detect what the bottle neck ? Is it even possible to get this answer for sure or is it more of a guess and find game. I haven't used stuff like 3DMark, would it help ? Can I run some diagnostics when the game is running to figure out whats wrong ?
 
U havent told us wat resolution/settings ur using :)

nz, this is simple enuf. ur biggest bottleneck will simply be the GPU. grab urself a 9600GT (around 9.5k)for much much better performance
 
loading time is too much means your hdd is slow and notwithstanding the resolution i would say your processor and gfx cards are both not up to the task.
get a new gfx card,8800GT of course and oc your processor,at 3Ghz it should work like a charm in crysis.
since crysis sucks up 2gb ram of my system i would say get another stick of ram too,667Mhz ram should set you back by around 750/- but would help a lot.
did you try running the cpu and gpu benchmarks?and whats the resolution you play at?
 
Crysis is a system hog but a 8600gt ddr3 is good enough for crysis at 1024x768 (Medium-low details). Overclocking your e4400(By 50%) and 8600gt by about 25% on the core and memory would further improve game performance. Upgrade to a 8800gt or a 9600gt if you want to run games at a resolution higher than 1280x1024.
 
gamervivek said:
loading time is too much means your hdd is slow and notwithstanding the resolution i would say your processor and gfx cards are both not up to the task.
get a new gfx card,8800GT of course and oc your processor,at 3Ghz it should work like a charm in crysis.
since crysis sucks up 2gb ram of my system i would say get another stick of ram too,667Mhz ram should set you back by around 750/- but would help a lot.
did you try running the cpu and gpu benchmarks?and whats the resolution you play at?
Click to expand...

Thanks for your inputs guys.
But as I said, this looks like more like a guess and try approach. This might just work for Crysis, but eventually there may come along some other game which is eating up something else. So I was just wondering if there was a sign that I should look for or what benchmarks should I run and how do i interpret the results to figure out whats wrong. I hope you are getting me, something like a abc score of 300 points is good for a game like Crysis. Since the system is made up of a couple of components which individually might be good but one of them may be screwing up the performance, so a combined benchmark test run on the final assembled system could tell me something. Is there anything like that out there ?
 
ReNaGAde said:
Crysis is a system hog but a 8600gt ddr3 is good enough for crysis at 1024x768 (Medium-low details). Overclocking your e4400(By 50%) and 8600gt by about 25% on the core and memory would further improve game performance. Upgrade to a 8800gt or a 9600gt if you want to run games at a resolution higher than 1280x1024.
Click to expand...

I run at 1024x768 Medium-High Details. Have a Factory overclocked 8600GT. A normal 8600 GT should atleast pull a medium settings.
 
crankdoofus said:
Thanks for your inputs guys.
But as I said, this looks like more like a guess and try approach. This might just work for Crysis, but eventually there may come along some other game which is eating up something else. So I was just wondering if there was a sign that I should look for or what benchmarks should I run and how do i interpret the results to figure out whats wrong. I hope you are getting me, something like a abc score of 300 points is good for a game like Crysis. Since the system is made up of a couple of components which individually might be good but one of them may be screwing up the performance, so a combined benchmark test run on the final assembled system could tell me something. Is there anything like that out there ?
Click to expand...

well thats the problem,you can't really use benchmarks to know how good your system will perform in games in general and since games tend to differ in their requirements its even harder to predict.
but still you can try 3dmark06 for a benchmark score,above 10000 should play games well and should be able to pull out decent framerates in cysis on high.
other than the cpu and gpu performances the other system components make little difference to gaming,unless you are bugged by long loading times,and you would be wasting your time and money trying to get extra 2fps from upgrading ram and hdd.
 
Loading times is usually dependent on a combination of the memory amount and speed, hard disk performance, and level data + engine decompression (dependent on game and coding). No easy way to pinpoint one single bottleneck, is it now?

Frame rate wall is either due to a CPU bottleneck (when more powerful cards/overclocked cards yield little to no performance improvements at current resolution) or a GPU bottleneck (when game performance drops off rapidly as the resolution and/or eye candy is pumped up). The former is usually a result of the GPU waiting for the CPU to provide data (such as physics calculations when you don;t have a PhysX card), and the latter is due to internal limitations of the card.

Generally speaking, at lower resolutions the dependence is mutual, but at higher resolution the graphics card is the first to stumble. Also depends on the game you like to play and with what amount of eye candy or resolution you can tolerate.

Your question is bit like asking how you'd come to know when it's time for a new car, and what to look for in your next car. Simply put, it depends, and you'd know the answer if you knew what you wanted.

I would look at:

Target resolution

Target game

Target eye candy

Target FPS

The hardware generally becomes evident after you work out the requirements. If you wanted to play Crysis in full detail at 2560x1600, it can't be done. Not yet. If you are OK with no detail and 640x480, then a picture of your requirement emerges.

IOW, there's no easy way to answer your question, it's very theoretical.

To give you an example, I'm running a single GTS640 on my monitor below. It's enough for me because I can run my games fully cranked - but I only play older games (Oblivion, Pro Street, and a bunch of others), and no shooters at all. I know that when the next set of games is released, I'll need more juice, but for now I'm OK.

Clear as mud?
 
bro don't consider crysis a blood sucker for rig only for now!!!!....

....i think for gud more 1 or 1 n hlf yr....v can judge a rig jus by runnin crysis on it....its requirements r jus 2 stringent.....if u ve jus bought a rig den over clockin is d way to go....or jump to a nu rig wit accordance to our budget.
 
u can even try moddin 8600gt to 8600gts by tht way u can get 5-10 fps increase in differene games as told by doers..
even overclk ur proccy it can go 3gigs easily...
and also u need 2gb ram to get crysis running good..
 
i have a e2140@3ghz and a 8600gt

i get 40 fps at medium @ 1024X768

as gaymervivek found out, with his 3870 and e2140, overclocking the cpu also gives huge gains in this game

so i suggest to OC your cpu as well
 
crankdoofus said:
Hi guys,
I have a XFX 650i, E4400 (2GHz) with XFX 8600 GT (DDR3) with 1GB RAM (667 MHz) upgraded from a 500 MHz Katmai based system. Most of the games I used to choke earlier work like a charm on this (ofcourse :-))
I got a bit adventourus, and got myself Crysis. Now I know that its an intensive game and I would need to push up something on the system, but what I don't know is what to upgrade ?
I tried to guess things by symptoms, viz if the loading time is too much it would be the RAM, if the game play stalls and starts repeatedly, it would be GFX card, etc.
Need your advise on how to detect what the bottle neck ? Is it even possible to get this answer for sure or is it more of a guess and find game. I haven't used stuff like 3DMark, would it help ? Can I run some diagnostics when the game is running to figure out whats wrong ?
Click to expand...
You could have checked cryis's recommended components.

It says 1.5 GB of ram is recommended (1st bottleneck)
For optimium performance it needs atleast a 1800xt level GPU. So you need a 9600GT or 8800GT for a lag free performance.
 
try adding another gb of ram.. i notice that crysis usually eats around 700 mb so a bit more ram could make it smoother

try overclocking cpu

play around with the game settings
 
sangram said:
Loading times is usually dependent on a combination of the memory amount and speed, hard disk performance, and level data + engine decompression (dependent on game and coding). No easy way to pinpoint one single bottleneck, is it now?

[SNIP]

Clear as mud?
Click to expand...

:-)

Thanks again ! Quite valuable points there
So guess n fix is the way to go. As Sangram said, its theoretical. I agree and so the answers to my question vary as do most of the responses to this thread (ppl suggesting GPU / CPU / RAM upgrades all at the same time :-) ) I wanted to confirm my thoughts that the symptoms would define what I need to upgrade and you guys helped me do that.

Thanks for your inputs, let me get back to working around the logical bugs in Crysis, GAWD, there are so many of them !
 
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