Am I CPU limited? 2070 super but "poor" performance

[tongue_of_colicab]

Hi,

With the corona thing and upcoming holidays I decided to replace my R9 290 with a 2070 Super.

I did some quick benchmarks but performance is worse than I thought. I'm playing at 1080p and for example in Rise of the Tombraider on very high even in some random empty area I get drops into the 50 fps just by running around a bit. But I cannot figure out why. If I drop the settings considerably it is slightly better but still some drops even though with lower settings the GPU isn't even going above 1200Mhz so there is plenty of headroom it seems.

But my CPU isn't nearly maxed out either. Afterburner shows it at 40 ~ 60% during gaming. Its a i7 4770 btw.

I also noticed that Steam in home streaming performance has an enormous performance hit. Initially I thought that was just due to the R9 being old but the 2070 super has the same. Nvidia's gamestream seems to work better though.

Long story short; how come I get such frame drops in a 4 year old game with a GPU that should easily be able to run this game? Or maybe its just this single game? RE2 remake seems to run a steady 60fps though I only checked the opening scene.

 

[AlNom]

Are you running on an SSD

 

[tongue_of_colicab]

Ah yes I do, forgot to mention. It's not blazing fast but loading is fairly quick, don't think that's the issue. Also got 16gb of ram.

 

[orangpelupa]

could be driver conflict. Try doing a clean uninstall of all drivers related to display driver using DDU (including non-nvidia drivers). then install nvidia driver again.
Also check the clocks using task manager and MSI afterburner

But my CPU isn't nearly maxed out either. Afterburner shows it at 40 ~ 60% during gaming. Its a i7 4770 btw

how about the per core usage?

 

[jlippo]

Drop resolution to very low and disable v-sync, if problem persists it is most likely not GPU performance problem. (Modern GPUs shouldn't be maxed at 640x480.)

When going toward low resolutions GPU should be mostly idling and CPU and other parts will become limiting factor and FPS will not rise anymore.
Basically CPU determines maximum possible FPS, amount of work for GPU reduces from that maximum. (IO and others can sometimes stall CPU briefly, should not happen very often though.)

 

[Malo]

There are levels in the modern Tomb Raider series that are very CPU intensive. That your CPU overall is running 40-60% is quite indicative IMO, given you have an aged Haswell. Check per-core usage on your CPU either in Afterburner or Task Manager, maybe one of the cores/threads is running quite high which would confirm.

Also regarding drive speed, I wouldn't count it out either. Many games are designed to batch stream assets rather than load entire levels so at certain points during levels it might be chunk loading data where a non-SSD could really impact performance.

 

[iroboto]

Hi,

With the corona thing and upcoming holidays I decided to replace my R9 290 with a 2070 Super.

I did some quick benchmarks but performance is worse than I thought. I'm playing at 1080p and for example in Rise of the Tombraider on very high even in some random empty area I get drops into the 50 fps just by running around a bit. But I cannot figure out why. If I drop the settings considerably it is slightly better but still some drops even though with lower settings the GPU isn't even going above 1200Mhz so there is plenty of headroom it seems.

But my CPU isn't nearly maxed out either. Afterburner shows it at 40 ~ 60% during gaming. Its a i7 4770 btw.

I also noticed that Steam in home streaming performance has an enormous performance hit. Initially I thought that was just due to the R9 being old but the 2070 super has the same. Nvidia's gamestream seems to work better though.

Long story short; how come I get such frame drops in a 4 year old game with a GPU that should easily be able to run this game? Or maybe its just this single game? RE2 remake seems to run a steady 60fps though I only checked the opening scene.

DX12 version of the game?

 

[AlNom]

Ah right... forgot that there might be issues with geforces in dx12.

 

[Davros]

Do you have to play on very high is high a noticeable downgrade ?

 

[homerdog]

That 4770 is definitely holding you back. Even a 6700K would be quite a nice upgrade, not to mention something with 6+ cores.

 

[Rootax]

Have you the cooling capacity to overclock it a little ?

Here, my 5820k was the best cpu choice of my life years ago. It's still going strong, and it's run very well @4.2ghz all cores. I'm still gpu limited in most games (granted I play at 1440p and max details most of the time). And when I'm cpu limited, it still very decent. I've a Vega FE, watercooled. It's run at 1600mhz all the time, I've a 50% power target.

Now, I would like more performances in handbrake, and some compilation stuff, but nothing urgent. I can wait zen3 and, maybe, intel futur arc at 10nm.

 

[tongue_of_colicab]

I got the non k version so can't overclock it.

I've been playing RE2 remake for over 6 hours now and it's a solid 60fps with everything pretty much maxed out. Maybe Rise of the Tomb Raider is simply a bad example.

I'm sure my CPU isn't great but it will have to soldier on for another one or two years. I don't want to upgrade with the new consoles around the corner.

 

[Rootax]

I got the non k version so can't overclock it.

I've been playing RE2 remake for over 6 hours now and it's a solid 60fps with everything pretty much maxed out. Maybe Rise of the Tomb Raider is simply a bad example.

I'm sure my CPU isn't great but it will have to soldier on for another one or two years. I don't want to upgrade with the new consoles around the corner.

Btw are you using dx11 or dx12 ?

 

[pjbliverpool]

I'm running Shadow of the Tombraider from a HDD on a GTX 1070 at max settings (aside from Raytraced shadows), 1440p and a constant >50fps. So it's certainly not your GPU or drive performance. I'm running a Ryzen 3700x though so definitely not CPU bound.

 

[tongue_of_colicab]

Btw are you using dx11 or dx12 ?

Dx11. I ran the benchmark with both and didn't notice any difference but remote play works much better with dx11.

 

[Rootax]

Ok.

On paper, and in gameplay situation (I don't know If the benchmark is a right gameplay representation), DX12 is supposed to be lighter on the cpu.

 

[homerdog]

I got the non k version so can't overclock it.

I've been playing RE2 remake for over 6 hours now and it's a solid 60fps with everything pretty much maxed out. Maybe Rise of the Tomb Raider is simply a bad example.

I'm sure my CPU isn't great but it will have to soldier on for another one or two years. I don't want to upgrade with the new consoles around the corner.

RE remakes are easy on CPU.

I'm in the same boat, rocking a 3770K that I'll hold on to for a while longer probably until new consoles are here. Right now it still handles most games just fine.

 

[tongue_of_colicab]

Yes I don't really see it go above 20%. It sucks the consoles have such good cpu's, makes upgrading now not a good time.

I never really benchmarked this PC or changed much in the way of bios settings but just for fun I enabled XMP. Looks like a got a couple of GB more bandwidth and a slightly better cpu score in Novabech. Doubt it will make much difference if any but I guess it can't hurt.

 

[Malo]

It sucks the consoles have such good cpu's, makes upgrading now not a good time.

How is now not a good time? We have fantastic competition for pricing, lots of cores and high frequencies across both CPU vendors.

 

[Rootax]

How is now not a good time? We have fantastic competition for pricing, lots of cores and high frequencies across both CPU vendors.

In a sense that we need to wait to gain a "gap" over consoles cpu and be "safe" performances wise ?