• Competitor rules

    Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.

GTX 480 SLI & Q6600 for BF3

Associate
Joined
30 Dec 2008
Posts
759
Location
A Pale Blue Dot
Another BF3 related question. :o

I have my Q6600 oc'd to 3.2. When i was using one card my CPU usage was around 85% - 95% and my GPU usage varied from 35% - 65%. (most things on high)

I just bought a second 480 for SLI.

I just ran a game of BF3 there and the usage is about the same with the SLI indicator on screen maybe using 30% of the 480's.


I need to look into it more and post some screenshots later but is it just that i am CPU limited?

Anyone's thoughts on the matter would be appreciated!


Res: 1920x1200


I am holding out patiently for x79 :)
 
Last edited:
Tbh, i wouldnt hold out much hope for getting anymore from a 680i board. Theyre notoriously poor quad clocking boards.
 
That's a classic cpu bottleneck. Can't you get any more out of your Q6600?

Not even slightly, thats a classic VSYNC enabled bottleneck ;)

Or something along those lines, largely because if you look around at BF3 reviews you'll see an i7 with 2 cores disabled, or clocked at 2Ghz has NO framerate difference at all to the same i7 with all 4 cores at 4+Ghz, a 3.2Ghz Q6600 IS faster than a dual core i7 or quad core i7 at 2Ghz.

If you've got vsync on I'd actually guess you'd be hitting 60fps most of the time with the single card at whatever settings being used, and with another card, still at 60fps, its taking even less power.

So two things, firstly have you got vsync on, either in game or forced through driver settings, because that would very much likely be the answer here, and secondly what is your framerate.

You WILL be cpu limited if you're running at ultra low settings at 150fps on one card, and only 160fps in sli.

If you're running ultra settings and FXAA or MSAA then realistically you shouldn't be gpu limited, not to the extent you seem to be showing anyway.

What most people are aiming for(with a 60hz screen anyway) is 60fps minimums at the highest quality settings, not 150fps in sli, with a screen that will only show 2/5th's of the frames.

Two things you can do, clock the cpu down to 2Ghz, see how performance changes, secondly, overclock further if you can, see if performance improves, and whack the settings up, double check vsync isn't enabled anywhere(just for testing purposes though I wouldn't imagine you'd need it enabled with sli, most people would anyway, it will save you power frankly.
 
Not even slightly, thats a classic VSYNC enabled bottleneck ;)


Many thanks for the replies guys and the in depth reply from drunkenmaster.

I have v-sync enabled.

I would average around 35fps when in the middle of one bigger maps with lots going on (60 fps or close when not much going on). (Operation Firestorm)

I am getting around 35-50% GPU usage here.

YM5iu.png
 
Last edited:
What drunkenmaster said...

"We can take plenty from our testing of Battlefield 3, and some of it’s really quite surprising. Perhaps most notable is the game’s lack of reliance on the CPU or memory; we found performance at the Ultra preset was the same when using a 3.2GHz quad-core CPU with 6GB of DDR3 memory as when using a 2GHz dual core chip with 2GB of DDR3 RAM, at least in our single-player benchmark."

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2011/11/10/battlefield-3-technical-analysis/8
 
What drunkenmaster said...

"We can take plenty from our testing of Battlefield 3, and some of it’s really quite surprising. Perhaps most notable is the game’s lack of reliance on the CPU or memory; we found performance at the Ultra preset was the same when using a 3.2GHz quad-core CPU with 6GB of DDR3 memory as when using a 2GHz dual core chip with 2GB of DDR3 RAM, at least in our single-player benchmark."

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2011/11/10/battlefield-3-technical-analysis/8

Interesting read kissenger. Thank you. I wonder why i am only averaging 35fps when there is a lot going on?

I ran Metro there and SLI was running at full and also when running the Heaven benchmark.
 
Maybe other factors are having an effect, the bit-tech review was using a much better mobo with far great data throughput potential than yours.

PCI-E 2.0 x16 against your 1.1 x16

Ram - triple-channel at 1,600MHz compared to your DDR2 @ 800MHz?

Guess that must have some sort of effect? :)

But you do need to try with v-sync disabled.
 
But you do need to try with v-sync disabled.


I have tried it disabled, with the same results. when looking away from the battle at main spawn for example it will go above 60 with v-sync disabled but in most cases it averages 35-40 fps.
 
Back
Top Bottom