Dont upgrade your CPU
OnosFactory
New Zealand Join Date: 2008-07-16 Member: 64637Members
Please ... for the love of the gods, do not ever listen to the spam-jump-pink-skin-mod-[NAUGHTYWORDSAREBAD] muppets that play this game and upgrade your CPU .... it won't do shit.
If you must, just take a holistic approach and upgrade *everything* - I can promise, (I mean it: I will say it in front of any lost bastard: PROMISE) after a near $NZ600 on CPUs - this game is just warped beyond reason with respect to FPS - do a CPU and Gfx and HD and RAM overall upgrade, or just don't bother.
It's not skill, it's : MODS and OVERALL HARDWARE, spend $1000 or just find a new game.
Certainly it isn't: CPU Ghz. Going from 3.6 to 4.2 gave me : 2.5 extra frames in the menu mode. 0 in game. Just don't bother.
If you must, just take a holistic approach and upgrade *everything* - I can promise, (I mean it: I will say it in front of any lost bastard: PROMISE) after a near $NZ600 on CPUs - this game is just warped beyond reason with respect to FPS - do a CPU and Gfx and HD and RAM overall upgrade, or just don't bother.
It's not skill, it's : MODS and OVERALL HARDWARE, spend $1000 or just find a new game.
Certainly it isn't: CPU Ghz. Going from 3.6 to 4.2 gave me : 2.5 extra frames in the menu mode. 0 in game. Just don't bother.
Comments
Because 3.6 to 4.2 should give you a noticable jump in later game performance and minimum FPS as long as you are CPU bound. I can only imagine that your GPU cannot keep up.
Moreover a Cpu upgrade can improve your framerate by 1-30 fps but that depends on the complete rig. If your gpu is also low end only a cpu upgrade won't change a thing. Also doing a good cpu upgrade cost you 300-500 $ as you have to change cpu, motherboard and rams ....
Some people just put a $400 gpu into a 5 year old machine and expect good performance.
The game does heavily use the CPU, more than most games, so upgrading a CPU should not be ignored but I agree that upgrading just the CPU won't help, in most cases.
@Dictator93 if he saw no performance boost when upgrading his CPU, he clearly wasn't CPU bound! He didn't do any research himself and just took people's words for it, so he deserves what he gets. It's dead easy to see if your PC is CPU bottlenecked or not.
But going from a modern 3.6ghz upwards, seems like you have more money than sense. You'd most likely be video card bottlenecked. Now by far my only bottleneck is my old video card AMD 6770. But get really high and stable FPS under DX11 with a full team on team battle.
I guess my SSD may help as well tho.
Implementing luaJIT did lessen the CPU bottleneck considerably for almost everyone but it's still going to be the biggest hurdle for most setups, especially if you're already disabling many graphics options. Things like shadows and ambient occlusion are of course going to still tax the GPU quite heavily.
lol! 50%-100% gains? yeah right, keep dreaming. you would be lucky to get a 10-15% gain out of an overclock.
My CPU was the bottleneck, and I had previously underclocked it because of a heat problem. I probably should have mentioned that part. It's not an exaggeration though.
This was also before luaJIT. Since then my CPU is rarely the bottleneck. Users with older GPUs should start with disabling AO, shadows, bloom, atmospherics, and then go from there.
Quote I made last night in another topic, it does not take a super computer to run NS2, if done right you can do it on a $400-450 build easily.
It doesn't work that way. This game obviously is gpu intensive. Maybe you should have realized that before you went and bought parts you didn't need in the first place.
When it comes to upgradeing you should always research and review everything.
For a sec I thought it was gonna be one of those stupid rants saying that I dont have to pay extra money on pc to play a game (and I always say if u dont upgrade, then u cant play.
Just meet the recommended requirements and u should be fine.
As for what I recommend, any mid-range cpus OF THIS GENERATION (i5 sandy bridge and up) should play the game fine (not gonna account for older cpus) I say at least 4 GB of RAM with speed of at least 1600 Mhz, and a geforce 560 Ti or better. Generally, if you have these you wont need an overclock. (of course, for the better settings I suggest better components/overclocking)
now get yourself a good GPU and you shouldn't have to upgrade for some time and your game will play like freaking butta mang!
Your problem was you weren't CPU bottlenecked, but this game isn't GPU heavy either. I have an extremely crap GPU and I'm able to run the game acceptably if I drop everything to minimum and tone the resolution down a lot.
This game doesn't ultilize multicore well. 6 of your 8 cores are going to waste. A high performance per CPU will do better then many cores as for NS2.
I can promise you 6 of 8 cores are not wasted. I see heavy activity on 2 cores (70-90%), medium on another 2 (50-60%) and light (5-10% cpu) on 2-3 more. So yes a higher cpu speed is better than more cores but you are giving false information to say this game cannot use more than 2 cores.
Mine never drops below 70 (although im in a stupidly low resolution with all details on low) but it feels way worse than bf4 does at 50 FPS in ultra HD >.<
I used to hit 40fps max (end game) with a 1st gen QuadCore clocked to 3.4 (at 720p - low settings). I was really happy with it (since it ran almost any game with a 560Ti at 1080p - high settings except NS2). Then one day I've had enough and got a cheap z77 mobo and a i5 3570K (the unlocked one because for gaming, 4 cores are enough. if you want to stream too, get something with more processing power). I was able to get 55fps @ 1080p with shadows on only. Then I paired it with a proper cooler and clocked it to 4.2. I also clocked my GPU to the 560Ti TOP level (from 830/4000 to 900/4200). Now I see 70fps minimum at end game. No hiccups whatsoever.
I don't have a uber system but (you can see it here, under comp. tab) but in my experience, cpu upgrade changed my life. Load times are insane, the responsiveness is off the charts and most of all, my fps won't go down to 40s like it used to when I get into a combat in a dense section of the map.
I still can't get over the fact that I need to clock my cpu to an unbelivable level to get a decent fps but for NS2, I think it's worth it.
ssd is amzing for precaching load also used to take ages :P
Well, 4,2 ghz is hardly unbelievable... it is actually a piece of cake on such CPUs with unlocked multipliers..
although I agree, this need of power is pretty frustrating, considering the era of multithreading we're in.