Where's my bottleneck?

[Jedi2016]

I'm pretty sure I know where it is, but bear with me.

NVidia GTX465 1GB
Windows 7 Pro 64
4GB RAM
Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 @3.0GHz <------ That's the bottleneck, I think

There is a disparity there, you can see.. the system was built around a 8800GTS that burned up, and I replaced it about a year ago.

This is in specific regards to Deus Ex: Human Revolution, which I downloaded last night from Steam and started playing this morning.

SystemRequirementsLab tells me I exceed the recommended specs except for the CPU, which I kind of expected.

So I boot up the game today, set everything to more or less maximum. 1680x1050, MLAA, 8x Anisotropic filtering, V-sync. My video card doesn't appear to be choking on it at all, it's running cooler than it does on a lot of other games. Dragon Age Origins runs hotter, but better.

But DXHR doesn't play smoothly, and not just at a low framerate. The framerate fluctuates wildly, from near-60fps down to stop-motion, especially very busy scenes (I haven't FRAPS'd it yet). And I'm thinking this is the CPU rearing it's ugly head, trying to send all this data back and forth from the HDD to memory to GPU.

I am planning out my next upgrade, which will bring the rest of the system up to par (or beyond) the GTX465. I'm on a budget, so I'm not going all-out for the latest-and-greatest. I'm thinking Core i7 Sandy Bridge 2600K, 16GB DDR3 1333 RAM, and obviously a new mobo (eyeballing the MSI P67A-G45, but I haven't decided yet).

I heard on another board that I should wait until the next Intel chipset is released, then the prices will come down on everything else, and I could maybe get a i7 980X. I like to plan this stuff out well in advance, since I'll be using this system for at least a couple of years. Thoughts?

 

[Davros]

Where's my bottleneck?

Under your bottle head ?

shouldn't you be using fxaa with a nv card

 

[Jedi2016]

Under your bottle head ?

shouldn't you be using fxaa with a nv card

*shrugs* I dunno. What's the difference?

The game selected MLAA as the default when I loaded it for the first time. I was thinking of changing it, since it still seems to struggle a bit with vertical lines.

DX11 Tessellation is kind of funny, since the models actually improve when I go out of a pre-rendered cutscene into real-time. That strikes me as being entirely backwards.

I did read (just after posting this) that the game is pretty CPU-intensive, which pretty much confirms what I thought when I loaded it up for the first time.

Same thing happened when I went back and played Crysis after getting the 465, the framerate was fixed regardless of what video settings I used.. Low to Max, it stayed the same, so clearly the card didn't care one way or another. I get the impression DXHR is the same way, adjusting the video settings wouldn't help.

 

[Davros]

because mlaa is amd's method while fxaa is nvidia's method
so you would assume nv have optimised for fxaa

do nv drivers have a checkbox for enable fxaa
ati have one for enable mlaa

could it be that you are applying fxaa and mlaa ?

 

[Jedi2016]

I don't have anything enabled in the NV panel, I let the game do it.

I did change the setting to FXAA high, and not only does it look better, but the game runs a lot smoother too! :derp:

 

[Frank]

I use a Phenom 720 x3 Black Edition with a Radeon 4850, which runs pretty well. If I wanted to increase the fluidity, I would buy an SSD, and put the game on that.

Which is on my list.