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Bottleneck or Benchmark?

M0T

M0T

M0T

Soldato
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I wanted to play a couple of new games that are coming on (F1 2010, FFXIV) but my ageing PC couldn't really cope. I decided to stump up some money for a new GFX card as thats where I thought the biggest gain would come in.

I got the PoV GTX465 which is now a GTX470, and ran the FFXIV benchmark on low, and got 2300 marks (which is rubbish). I now know that this benchmark isn't very good, can anyone recommend a good free benchmark that I can test the system with so I can see whethere I'm getting decent results for my setup or not.

My system is:
Core 2 Duo E6300 1.8 @ 2.9 Ghz
4GB RAM
GTX470
Vista 64 bit
Gigabyte 965 based board with a pcie v1 x16 slot
 
Depends on the resolution and the game. For example Bad company 2 the CPU would struggle and your card might as well be a 50 quid card as it would hardly be used at all, whereas crysis for example at a high resolution your card will be getting a good workout.
 
The CPU is depending bottlenecking. To make the most of your GTX470, ideally you should have at least at E8400 overclock to 4.0GHz+ or a Q6600 overclock to 3.0GHz+. And not to forget the GTX470 itself can overclock to GTX480 speed as well.

From what I recall, I got just over 4000 mark on 720p (low) on the FFXIV bench with my Q6600 at 3.0GHz with just a 9800GTX+ 512MB.
 
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BigBruiserAl said:
and where did you get that gem from out of interest?
Click to expand...
While I don't have specific data for GTX470, look at the following data for different CPUs pairing with a 5870 running Crysis:
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpus/2010/03/03/overclocking-intel-core-i3-530/8
If you comparing the results of E8400 at 3.0GHz to E8400 at 4.25GHz, you can see that the it is minimum 19fps average 36fps vs minimum 27fps average 48fps. Granted not all games are as demanding as Crysis, but a fast graphic card still need to be pair with a decent CPU...and the minimum being consider as decent enough nowadays pair with cards of GTX460 1GB and above has to be either a 3.6-4GHz+ dual-core, or a 3.0GHz+ quad-core.

Do ignore the results for Q6600 on Crysis though, as the game only use two cores, and the Q6600 only has two of its four cores utilized.

Also, the CPU bottleneck is clear, since he only got 2300 mark on the FFXIV bench on low with a GTX470, while I get 4000 mark on low with just a 9800GTX+.
 
The degree of CPU restriction will vary from game to game, and can even vary strongly from scene-to-scene within a game.

Obviously it also depends on the resolution you play at, and the amount of AA. Outside of GPU-benchmarks and maybe crysis or metro2033, you would struggle to find anything other than CPU-restriction at 1280*1024. At 2560*1600 with 4xAA the GPU would always be the limiting factor on any vaguely modern game.

Anyone making statements like "xyz CPU is needed to avoid bottlenecking of of abc GPU" is talking rubbish, and trying to over simplify things.


Anyway, my feeling is that, assuming you play at 1920*1080 or similar, your system will handle most things just fine. I don't see the CPU holding you back too much. There may be a few more CPU limited scenarios than if you were to have a highly clocked i7, and in these scenarios you might lose ~30% performance compared to strong i7, but nothing too drastic. Most games do not use more than 2 CPU cores, and there isn't a massive difference in clock-for-clock performance in games.

In short: I wouldn't worry about it. Run some more games and see how they go.

That said, run some fully GPU-restricted benchmarks (like uniengine heaven for example), and post the results. This way we can ensure your GTX470 is working as expected.
 
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Duff-Man said:
The degree of CPU restriction will vary from game to game, and can even vary strongly from scene-to-scene within a game.

Obviously it also depends on the resolution you play at, and the amount of AA. Outside of GPU-benchmarks and maybe crysis or metro2033, you would struggle to find anything other than CPU-restriction at 1280*1024. At 2560*1600 with 4xAA the GPU would always be the limiting factor on any vaguely modern game.

Anyone making statements like "xyz CPU is needed to avoid bottlenecking of of abc GPU" is talking rubbish, and trying to over simplify things.
Click to expand...
Sure it vary from game to game, but a faster or more cores CPU will deliver better frame rate than a lower one in games and scenes that the hit the CPU roof before hitting 100% usage on the GPU- mmorpgs would be good example, especially when the game is no written to use more than two cores, or the game use more than two cores, but you only got an average speed dual-core.

I'm playing Japanese mmo, which the frame rate dive below 20fps at busy area, and a friend of mine which got a Phenom II 965 at stock speed with a 5850, and his frame rate is barely better than mine in that game. My GPU usage in that game only max at 23-25%, so the game is probably written as single or dual threaded game.

Anyway, a dual-core at 2.9GHz with a GTX470, I would imagine the limitation would be more on the CPU side than GPU in actual game environment, while Benchmark like the Heaven Bench stress the GPU more than the CPU, so not sure if that's really good representation for actual gaming.

I'm not arguing with the points you are making, I'm just saying if I was to buy a GTX470, I would expect it to run as a GTX470 in demanding games/scenes at 100% usage, not running at 80% usage as GTX460 1GB speed because of the CPU holding me back (I'd be better off saving £60 and get a GTX460 1GB instead). I believe the OP would have higher frame rate for gamings in general (takeing both CPU demanding and not so CPU demanding games into account), if he can overclock his CPU higher, or upgrading to a quad like Q6600 and overclocked to 3.0GHz+.
 
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Hey, just reading this I think there might be something up with your CPU as I also have an e6300 and stock is 2.8ghz not 1.8ghz? Unless I'm missing something that's only a 100mhz OC your running? Mines does 3.2ghz easily with 305fsb. Can run that benchmark with my 460 gfx later and let you know
 
discobiscuits said:
Hey, just reading this I think there might be something up with your CPU as I also have an e6300 and stock is 2.8ghz not 1.8ghz? Unless I'm missing something that's only a 100mhz OC your running? Mines does 3.2ghz easily with 305fsb. Can run that benchmark with my 460 gfx later and let you know
Click to expand...

The E6300 was one of the first core 2 duos released (july 27 2006) at 1.8ghz, I am running an overclock of 1.1ghz. I would be interested to compare your benchmark results with mine.

Thanks
 
... That seems a little low to me.

What was the average framerate? I'm guessing around 20fps for that score? I would have expected at least 50% more from a GTX470 at that res...

(quick random checklist):

- What drivers are you using?
- Did you fully remove old drivers before installing these (i.e. run driver sweeper)?
- Do you have any non-standard things enabled in nvidia control panel (eg have 8xAA as always on by mistake?)

Check you are not getting thermal throttling; try running furmark and watching the temperature. Also take not of the average fps, as this should be one of the least CPU-dependent programs you can find.
 
I will check all the settings when I get in from work but I ran driver sweeper, running the 258 drivers (off the nvidia website) and MSI Afterburner recorded 84 degrees and 99% GPU usage.
 
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There will always be a limiting factor somewhere in your system, depending on the app being run.

If you really want to see what is bottlenecking your system then you need to run, GPU, CPU, RAM, Disk etc montors, then run your app.

If you can see your GPU is laughing the load off and CPU is going between 80-100% you can be pretty sure where the bottleneck is for that app.


As a very simple test just run task manager in the background then when you come out of the app take a look at the historic CPU usage.
 
I just re-ran the FFXIV bench. It seem that I remember the mark for my system wrong. Although it is not 4000 marks on 720p (low), I still got 3400 mark. So I still think with your mark being as low as 2300, either the CPU is bottlenecking the card, or other factor making the card not running properly.
 
forgot the 4ghz+ overclock, 3.4ghz would be enough and 3.6ghz would be recommended. However I don't know how much further you can overclock that proc.
 
Just got 1070 on the unigine benchmark, is that any better for the gtx470?

Edit: Scored 810 with 32FPS on 1680x1050 with tesselation at extreme.
 
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