Bad graphics performance

Badfish

Badfish

Badfish

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Joined
12 Feb 2007
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288
Dear all,

I've recently started playing more games on my PC which I think is quite a decent PC, but even with a clean install my graphics performance doesnt seem that great. I have a few friends I play games with, some of whom have worse spec PC's than I do, yet they run the games at higher settings with better FPS.

I dont want to buy a whole new setup, the stuff I have is reasonable isnt it? Could someone maybe suggest some upgrade or something which may help? Or shall I just get a new system? :P

AMD Phenom II X4 Quad Core 955 Black Edition 3.2GHz
PC Power & Cooling Silencer 750 Quad-Crossfire 750W Power Supply
Gigabyte GA-MA770T-UD3P PCI-Express DDR3 Motherboard
OCZ Platinum 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 PC3-10666C7 1333MHz Dual Channel Western Digital Caviar Black 500GB SATA-II
Scythe Mugen 2 CPU Cooler
Sapphire AMD Radeon 6870 1GB

Edit: Obviously I could upgrade the memory, but considering the most I ever seem to use is 3GB or so I'm not sure thats worth it. I did consider a SSD too, but that wont help FPS I think. I do notice how many games nowdays are CPU intensive, so maybe I need a new CPU and then new Motherboard etc...
 
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Thanks for the replies.

The games I've been playing recently are:

World of Warcraft (just started again, but I hold my head in shame as I type this hehe :o )
Mass Effect 3
Stracraft II

I play games on 1920x1080 usually, but if I put the graphics settings high then I notice visible FPS lag. Like WoW for example, its an old game now and shouldnt require a super computer, but in general I have to play with medium settings. When I put the graphics to high or enable AA it really starts slowing down and in raids the FPS is around 15-20 with just 2x AA enabled. Mass Effect 3 gets laggy in various scenes when I set the graphics up high, and Starcraft II seems ok in general.

I've just recently reinstalled my PC and so have the latest drivers for all things. I ignored the Microsoft drivers and went to each manufacturer's website and downloaded the drivers there, so it should all be the latest.

Edit: No I havent OC'd my CPU. I tried to once and had various issues like BSOD's and some Windows errors all of which went away when I reset my BIOS. I'm an overclocking noob, not done much before.
 
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Afaik, WoW doesn't make use of crossfire, so it may be worth testing it out with crossfire disabled (it should be an option in the CCC).

Here is a review which shows that HD 6870s in crossfire playing Wow perform a lot worse than a single HD 6850 GPU.

As for mass effect 3 - that is a very new game that most likely doesn't work properly with crossfire yet. Looking here at the single HD 6850 performance in that game at 1920x1200 you shouldn't have any trouble playing the game with just one GPU until they bring out a patch.
 
Ah, that does make things a bit simpler.

For Wow raids I understand CPU performance is a really big factor. Therefore I would suggest having another go at CPU overclocking - it would be worth looking for an overclocking guide for that motherboard specifically, as well as the X4 955BE CPU. One thing to remember with overclocking, as you increase the multiplier you need to increase the Vcore to maintain stability, also do it in small stages and check the stability as you go.

As for lag in Mass effect 3 - that does sound strange since that game really isn't very demanding and your GPU and CPU should happily max it out. Therefore I would make sure you have the most recent graphics drivers (catalyst 12.2).
 
cmndr_andi said:
Ah, that does make things a bit simpler.

For Wow raids I understand CPU performance is a really big factor. Therefore I would suggest having another go at CPU overclocking - it would be worth looking for an overclocking guide for that motherboard specifically, as well as the X4 955BE CPU. One thing to remember with overclocking, as you increase the multiplier you need to increase the Vcore to maintain stability, also do it in small stages and check the stability as you go.

As for lag in Mass effect 3 - that does sound strange since that game really isn't very demanding and your GPU and CPU should happily max it out. Therefore I would make sure you have the most recent graphics drivers (catalyst 12.2).
Click to expand...

Sound advice as always :)

If nothing else simply upping the multiplier by 1 will magically give you a 965 from that 955.

WOW is intel and nvidia biased. If you were to switch to intel you would really need to be thinking about the i5K. The i3 isn't going to be a whole lot different from what you have to be honest.
 
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