CPU Limitations @ 1920x1200 - Results

[schumi84]

Cheers very much again for the extra benchmarks there is Crysis. So in reality then, even though 3DMark is synthetic, they are both showing that at the higher resolutions there is less call on a massively overclocked (if at all) CPU, and it is more down to having a high powered GPU (surprising that this even shows up in Crysis).

Good to see some hard evidence of this, even if it might be common knowledge in the elitist realms.

 

[sosrandom]

Giving Call of Duty 4 as an example, minium fps would be 10 when in or very close to an rpg explosion, I could be running at 60fps for 98% of the time tho. Same goes for other games.

If your average and top are very similar as another card but minium off it shows that your only getting low fps for very small percent of the time, any may only happen once, average takes the whole time into account.

I should say running at 1680x1050 85fov all high, it get 130fps indoors aronudfps 90 outdoors and 99% of the time my lowest fps would be around 50fps in smoke with explosion. I know hardops give benchmarks results in graphs over time but fortunatly they dont always run tests with the same settings.

 

[drunkenmaster]

So why is the CPU used more at lower resolutions rather than higher ones?

or is it just that the GPU is used less so the ratio between CPU and GPU moves in favor of the CPU?

Its not, CPU usage stays mostly identical throughout any resolution. This is what people somehow don't get. AI, physics, game scripting, user input, drivers, sound, none of that changes in the slightest amount even as you change resolution, resolution has no impact at all on those things. AI doesn't move more, physics don't change, user input is the same, things aren't louder or more echoed when the resolution is bigger.

IF you can run at 1280x1024 with a minimum framerate of 80fps at any stage, then you can also run 80fps minimum at 1920x1200, you just need enough graphical juice to keep that framerate up.

People talk about faster cpu's being used more at lower res. The situation is if the resolution is far below what the gpu is capable of then in some instances the cpu running faster can give slightly more frequently updated info to send to the card and the top end framerate can increase. but this is in the realms of being at such a low res and such a high framerate that you're increasing the 150fps max to 200fps.

There are games that more people on screen can create an overload on effects being done and killing framerate, but they are few and far between. Most games that slow down when multiple people are on screen are simply suffering because of a much higher volume of textures on screen and lighting effects done to characters and shadows. In general character model quality and effects are much higher than those on other items because in 90% of games while looking at pretty tree's is all well and nice, 99% of the action is focused on fighting or talking to other characters, so they are what you see up close most of the time so the default quality of those things is much higher.

THe reason people are saying basically, "and?" . Is because every game review, every graphics card review and everybody asking about how to improve gaming performance, for around the last decade, have all said, 99% of games, GPU limited. So no there really isn't a need to start a thread, well in a perfect world. However there are still lots of people who insist gaming is cpu limited so it might help to show them.

It really is akin to say the whole world realising the planet is round now, but 3 plonkers run around saying its still flat.

Gaming is gpu limited as long as you have a basic cpu thats smi capable. Frankly as of today the lowest of the low, slowest cores available should do pretty damn good in gaming. there isn't a £50 cpu that can't be overclocked right now to give TOP gaming performance, and no cpu over £170 gives any noticeable gain in framerate AT ALL, really its quite a bit lower than that but i went with a touch over the Q6600 price for the sake of it. Frankly theres only 1-2 games out of what, hundreds of thousands that would run better on a quad core than a dual core right now.