New To PC Gaming Questions

[Goodtwin]

I have recently purchased a PC with an AMD Athlon X4 840 CPU, AMD R7 360 GPU, 8GB of DDR1600 RAM and a 500GB 7200RPM hard drive.

So far I have played Batman Arkham Asylum GOT edition, which ran maxed out 1080p 60fps most of the time. There were some weird drops in framerate that didn't really to be fixed by lowering resolution or settings. There was one area in particular that dropped down to 10fps until I completed the objective. Not sure if its common for this game to have some areas of bad code or not.

The other game I have been playing is Half Life 2. I am having some issues with Vsync on this game. If I leave it uncapped, the game will run between 150-300fps and never lower, but for some reason when I apply Vsync, the game will still dip into the 40fps at times. Very strange that I am having dips when the hardware is capable of churning out framerates far exceeded 60. Any ideas?

 

[milk]

Have you been in contact or close proximity to orangpelupa? If so, you are better off staying in quarantine isolation before manipulating any new electronics device. That's just standard procedure.

 

[Goodtwin]

Have you been in contact or close proximity to orangpelupa? If so, you are better off staying in quarantine isolation before manipulating any new electronics device. That's just standard procedure.

Inside joke?

 

[homerdog]

I have recently purchased a PC with an AMD Athlon X4 840 CPU, AMD R7 360 GPU, 8GB of DDR1600 RAM and a 500GB 7200RPM hard drive.

So far I have played Batman Arkham Asylum GOT edition, which ran maxed out 1080p 60fps most of the time. There were some weird drops in framerate that didn't really to be fixed by lowering resolution or settings. There was one area in particular that dropped down to 10fps until I completed the objective. Not sure if its common for this game to have some areas of bad code or not.

The other game I have been playing is Half Life 2. I am having some issues with Vsync on this game. If I leave it uncapped, the game will run between 150-300fps and never lower, but for some reason when I apply Vsync, the game will still dip into the 40fps at times. Very strange that I am having dips when the hardware is capable of churning out framerates far exceeded 60. Any ideas?

Your CPU is quite weak, that's probably why you get low FPS in some games regardless of settings. Also the R7 360 is a refresh of a refresh of a chip that came out in early 2013 and was not a fast card even then. It won't get you very far in modern games. Though in HL2 it should be completely fine even at max settings so long as you leave vsync off. Your PC probably can't do 60fps *all* the time and when a frame takes longer than 16.7ms to render your framerate will drop dramatically. You need a better GPU or lower settings for 60fps vsync.

The things you describe aren't really problems per se, that's just what you get with a slow computer. The AMD FX-8320 is only $135 at newegg right now. The AMD FX-6300 is even cheaper and still much better than what you have. If your mobo and PSU can handle it I suggest upgrading to one of those and then save up for an RX480 or GTX1060. <Edit: WRONG SOCKET> The RX480 4GB is a steal at $200 if you can find one.

If you can't upgrade just stick with older or indie games and you should be fine.

 

[Goodtwin]

Your CPU is quite weak, that's probably why you get low FPS in some games regardless of settings. Also the R7 360 is a refresh of a refresh of a chip that came out in early 2013 and was not a fast card even then. It won't get you very far in modern games. Though in HL2 it should be completely fine even at max settings so long as you leave vsync off. Your PC probably can't do 60fps *all* the time and when a frame takes longer than 16.7ms to render your framerate will drop dramatically. You need a better GPU or lower settings for 60fps vsync.

The things you describe aren't really problems per se, that's just what you get with a slow computer. The AMD FX-8320 is only $135 at newegg right now. The AMD FX-6300 is even cheaper and still much better than what you have. If your mobo and PSU can handle it I suggest upgrading to one of those and then save up for an RX480 or GTX1060. The RX480 4GB is a steal at $200 if you can find one.

If you can't upgrade just stick with older or indie games and you should be fine.

I'm good for now, not going to upgrade anything till down the road. I bought a budget PC with the intent of playing mostly last gen games. I have always been a Nintendo only guy, but since I needed a new PC for general usage anyway, I decided to get one that can do some gaming. I got this PC for $400 on sale from Best Buy(Syber Vapor), I knew I was getting a budget PC, but for the money, the specs looked pretty darn good for the dollar. Came with a wireless Xbox 360 controller too. Anyway, I could see the bottleneck in Batman AA being CPU, not sure how well that game scales across multiple cores. When I ran Fraps, I got an average of 52FPS during an extended play session, and that felt better than capping the framerate at 30fps, even though that was a locked framerate. However, in Half Life 2 when I ran Fraps, I averaged 250fps, with a high of 300fps and a low of 152. That's why I find it so odd that Vsync causes dips below 60fps. I suppose its possible that most frames are taking only a few milliseconds to render, and then occasionally a spike to just over 16ms? Still seems weird to me.

I know that I will be limited with my current setup to run the latest games, but I knew that I would have to make some sacrifices when I bought it. My thought process was that I am fine with 720p on Wii U, so I can live with it on PC for a game here and there, and cap the framerate to 30. Digital Foundry had a good video on making the most of a budget PC, and capping the framerate to 30 just like most console games seemed to be the ticket.

 

[Malo]

There are no "generations" in PC gaming. Only which version of Crysis you can run and at what resolution and min fps.

 

[orangpelupa]

That problem with half life is weird. Maybe disable vsync from the game, and then manually enable triple buffering vsync from amd control panel?

Or change the half life render from direct X to opengl and vise versa.

@milk I think the disease has spread into the Internet and it took B3D as its first step.

 

[homerdog]

I suppose its possible that most frames are taking only a few milliseconds to render, and then occasionally a spike to just over 16ms?

Yes this is likely the case. Could be both GPU and CPU limited at different times, but probably mostly CPU bound. That CPU is comparable to a really low end Intel i3 overall, but in single thread performance (which is very important for games) it is truly pathetic, on par with higher end Intel Core2 processors (10 years old). Not saying you can't enjoy some light gaming on it, just keep in mind your CPU is a major bottleneck.

 

[Goodtwin]

That problem with half life is weird. Maybe disable vsync from the game, and then manually enable triple buffering vsync from amd control panel?

Or change the half life render from direct X to opengl and vise versa.

@milk I think the disease has spread into the Internet and it took B3D as its first step.

I will try that. I have always enabled Vsync through the in game options.

For a game as old as Half Life 2, it looks great. I know Valve updated the game years ago with DirectX9, and those enhancements really make it look nice. Sure, character models are dated, but overall the package looks nice.

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[Rodéric]

I will try that. I have always enabled Vsync through the in game options.

For a game as old as Half Life 2, it looks great. I know Valve updated the game years ago with DirectX9, and those enhancements really make it look nice. Sure, character models are dated, but overall the package looks nice.

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There's a free "Half Life 2 Update" mod on steam, officially endorsed by Valve.
(It's on my playlist just after finishing Deus Ex Human Revolution Director's Cut.)

 

[Goodtwin]

Yes this is likely the case. Could be both GPU and CPU limited at different times, but probably mostly CPU bound. That CPU is comparable to a really low end Intel i3 overall, but in single thread performance (which is very important for games) it is truly pathetic, on par with higher end Intel Core2 processors (10 years old). Not saying you can't enjoy some light gaming on it, just keep in mind your CPU is a major bottleneck.

Just out of curiosity I looked at what my options for a CPU upgrade down the road might look like, and not good apparently. The motherboard has a FM2+ socket for the CPU, and the only processor I found that was better was the AMD Athlon X4 880K, and the performance bump was pretty modest. Probably not worth the money. No big deal for me, I knew what I was buying and all is good. My PC should be comparable to the Pentium G+ AMD R7 265 that digital foundry did some test on.

Looks like I should be able to play "some" modern games at console like settings at 30fps.

Like I said before, I am targeting a lot of somewhat older games that I missed out on over the years. I think Hitman Blood Money will be my next game after I finish Half Life 2. I also have Star Wars Force Unleashed 1 & 2 in my Q as well.

 

[homerdog]

Just out of curiosity I looked at what my options for a CPU upgrade down the road might look like, and not good apparently. The motherboard has a FM2+ socket for the CPU, and the only processor I found that was better was the AMD Athlon X4 880K, and the performance bump was pretty modest. Probably not worth the money. No big deal for me, I knew what I was buying and all is good. My PC should be comparable to the Pentium G+ AMD R7 265 that digital foundry did some test on.

Looks like I should be able to play "some" modern games at console like settings at 30fps.

Like I said before, I am targeting a lot of somewhat older games that I missed out on over the years. I think Hitman Blood Money will be my next game after I finish Half Life 2. I also have Star Wars Force Unleashed 1 & 2 in my Q as well.

Oh lol I'm sorry I'm not very familiar with AMD sockets. On FM2 you're right there aren't really any good upgrade choices for you.

Anyhow there are tons of games on Steam that will fun just fine on your rig. Enjoy!

P.S. you can also run Overwatch fairly well. If you ever get that or Diablo 3 it hit me up, I'm homerdog on b.net.

 

[DuckThor Evil]

In Batman, you don't happen to have the GPU Physx-effects enabled in the menu? It's an nVidia proprietary tech and AMD cards can't run it, instead of the the CPU tries to run them and cannot really do it thus terrible slow downs.

 

[Goodtwin]

Nope, I knew to keep PhysX off. I had read about the horror stories with AMD users trying to run Batman with PhysX enabled. I doubt PhysX doesn't much to really change the experience in a game like Batman anyway.

In Half Life 2, some settings can be set from the Radeon control panel, but Vsync doesn't seem to one of them. I can set a framerate cap, but Vsync only engages through the game settings. I upped to my AA to 8X MSAA to see if that caused my framerate drops to become more common, or dip lower, but it had no effect. So perhaps Half Life 2 runs heavy on a single/main thread, and occasionally spikes for a frame or two. Not sure. The game plays really well, so its not like its unplayable. I doubt I ever played a shooter on console that was this stable to be honest.

I do think the perception of PC gaming is starting to change. The days of needing a very expensive PC to play games are over. A budget PC like I purchased limits the games and certainly the settings that you can play with, but take a game like Batman AA for example, I was able to enjoy the game at far superior settings than what was released on console years ago. 1080p 60fps(mostly) compared to 720p 30fps. Multiple GTA games that can be experienced the same way. Steam offers so much for PC gamers to choose from, even on a very inexpensive PC. I will always be a Nintendo guy, I love Zelda, Mario, and Metroid, but I think PC is going to be an awesome way to round out what my Nintendo consoles simply don't offer. Not to mention Steam sales make creating a large library of games to play very easy and inexpensive.

 

[Davros]

Check out B3D's free game list if you want to increase your library
https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/free-games-list.44233/

 

[Deleted member 13524]

Your CPU is quite weak, that's probably why you get low FPS in some games regardless of settings.

Half Life 2 is a 12 year-old game. The highest end CPUs back then were the first-gen Athlon 64 that ran at ~2GHz.
That Athlon 840 is a dual-module/quad-core Kaveri with the GPU disabled, that goes up to 3.8GHz.

Batman is a whole other beast (especially if PhysX is turned on), but I find it really hard that this CPU is keeping HL2 from running at rock-solid 60FPS with V-Sync, even if he had modded the game to death.

Just out of curiosity I looked at what my options for a CPU upgrade down the road might look like, and not good apparently. The motherboard has a FM2+ socket for the CPU, and the only processor I found that was better was the AMD Athlon X4 880K, and the performance bump was pretty modest.

You can also get the very recent Carrizo Athlon X4 845, which is based on the newer Excavator cores. It should have about the same performance as the 880K but at a fraction of the power consumption (and heat and noise). Though it's not as overclockable because the mutliplier is locked.

FM4 is right around the corner, so there isn't anything really new for the platform. The fact that AMD decided to sell a Carrizo Athlon with the 845 was a pretty big surprise for most. There isn't even any Carrizo APU in the desktop market.

I do think the perception of PC gaming is starting to change. The days of needing a very expensive PC to play games are over. A budget PC like I purchased limits the games and certainly the settings that you can play with, but take a game like Batman AA for example, I was able to enjoy the game at far superior settings than what was released on console years ago. 1080p 60fps(mostly) compared to 720p 30fps. Multiple GTA games that can be experienced the same way. Steam offers so much for PC gamers to choose from, even on a very inexpensive PC. I will always be a Nintendo guy, I love Zelda, Mario, and Metroid, but I think PC is going to be an awesome way to round out what my Nintendo consoles simply don't offer. Not to mention Steam sales make creating a large library of games to play very easy and inexpensive.

Consider yourself ascended.
@Davros will provide you with the Lord Gaben-baptized digital sceptre that you now have the right to use.

 

[homerdog]

Half Life 2 is a 12 year-old game. The highest end CPUs back then were the first-gen Athlon 64 that ran at ~2GHz.
That Athlon 840 is a dual-module/quad-core Kaveri with the GPU disabled, that goes up to 3.8GHz.

Batman is a whole other beast (especially if PhysX is turned on), but I find it really hard that this CPU is keeping HL2 from running at rock-solid 60FPS with V-Sync, even if he had modded the game to death.

Based on his post I think HL2 runs pretty much fine for him with only the occasional stutter due to vsync being on. If even 1 frame takes 16.8ms to render instead of ≤16.6666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666667ms his game will noticeably stutter for a moment, which probably happens every now and then. That's just the nature of the beast rather than a failing of his PC.

 

[Goodtwin]

Yep, it's solid 60fps most of the time, just stutters here and there. The flashlight does seem to be a factor. Who knows, either way I am digging half life 2.

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[homerdog]

Yep, it's solid 60fps most of the time, just stutters here and there. The flashlight does seem to be a factor. Who knows, either way I am digging half life 2.

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HL2 is one of my favorite (if not my absolute favorite) games of all time. Make sure you pick up Episodes 1 and 2 as well.

 

[Goodtwin]

I already have episode 1, it was part of the Steam package for Half Life 2 that I purchased during the summer sale.

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