Is my CPU bottlenecking my GTX680

horrorxpunk · 2 Nov 2012 at 00:23

Hey there guys I have a Crosshair formula V with a FX8150 bulldozer I bought last october. I just upgraded from a GTX580 to an Asus GTX680 DirectCU II TOP. It's a stonking card but I don't know if I am getting the full performance out of it; considering the margin which intel lead by; and by benchmark comparisons. Is the FX8150 really enough to harness the full power of the GTX680 especially as I am looking at jumping from the 1201mhz core boost to 1480mhz core boost clock.

Gregster · 2 Nov 2012 at 00:26

When running games, check in CPU-Z and GPU-Z if the CPU is at 99% or if the GPU is at 99%.

What jump from 1201Mhz to 1480MHZ is this bud ?

horrorxpunk · 2 Nov 2012 at 01:23

I am overclocking the 680 based on the "boost clock" so the gpu's default "boost clock" is set to 1201mhz and I will be pushing it to around ~1450mhz mark hopefully. I have run the Nvidia New Dawn benchmark aswell as Unigine Heaven and the card seems to be running at upto 99% and I am using MSI Afterburner to monitor the card.

passey89 · 2 Nov 2012 at 06:25

horrorxpunk said:
I am overclocking the 680 based on the "boost clock" so the gpu's default "boost clock" is set to 1201mhz and I will be pushing it to around ~1450mhz mark hopefully. I have run the Nvidia New Dawn benchmark aswell as Unigine Heaven and the card seems to be running at upto 99% and I am using MSI Afterburner to monitor the card.

If the card is running at over 95% for the majority of the time then you have no bottleneck.

Marine-RX179 · 2 Nov 2012 at 06:32

horrorxpunk said:
I am overclocking the 680 based on the "boost clock" so the gpu's default "boost clock" is set to 1201mhz and I will be pushing it to around ~1450mhz mark hopefully. I have run the Nvidia New Dawn benchmark aswell as Unigine Heaven and the card seems to be running at upto 99% and I am using MSI Afterburner to monitor the card.

Custom bench doesn't tell you anything useful that would identify CPU bottleneck under actual gaming environment. I'm not sure about New Dawn, but for Heaven it is pretty much a pure graphic stress test, which even some like an old Core2Duo can most likely max out the GPU usage on the GTX680.

Getting 99% GPU usage on Heaven Bench that's not CPU dependent at all doesn't even remotely mean you would get the same usage on games. You need to run some actual games and look at GPU usage to see if there's huge dips.

The games you play is also an important factor, as some games is much more CPU demanding than your everyday bread and butter FPS games that would use 4 cores or more. For example I recently started playing World vs World on Guild Wars 2, and with 60-100 people duking it out at each other plus the rendering of world environment...even with my i5 2500K overclocked to 4.5GHz, it was bottlenecking my 5850 and with frame rate dropped to around 30fps and GPU usage down to 50%. Bulldozer or PD would probably be crying at this situation with the frame rate dropped down to around 10-15fps and GPU usage down to around 25%, considering Guild Wars 2 only usage up to 3 threads max.

andybird123 · 2 Nov 2012 at 09:30

oh here we go again, lets cherry pick a single recent poorly coded game and try to use it as justification for bashing whatever the OP has...

CAT-THE-FIFTH · 2 Nov 2012 at 09:52

Most modern engines thread well and actually can be very CPU heavy,ie,try using a dual core against a quad core in a MP scenario in some games and see where it leaves you.

OTH,any PC game released in 2012 which can barely use two cores is indicative of two things:
1.)Cost cutting during development.
2.)Very poorly optimisation, indicative of cost cutting at a management level,especially if there is a console version(a console version would have to use multiple threads well).

Basically most of your CPU is idle when playing the game which means most of the CPU is not being pushed. If you don't overclock(the vast majority of PC gamers),going from a Core i3 to a Core i5 does not yield much improvements,which is pathetic.This means additional costs pushed onto the consumer,or worse gameplay. Such companies are holding back PC game development.

Older games which have been around for years,might be understandable,but not ANY game released in 2012.

All the modern engines tend to use multiple threads effective - Frostbite 2,CryEngine 2,id Tech 5 and the forthcoming Source2 and UE4. Engines such as Frostbite 1.5,later versions of the UE3 engine and Source all use multiple threads effectively. In fact most engines which can be used across multiple platforms now thread reasonably well.

OptimaLnrg · 2 Nov 2012 at 10:14

I don't think you'll see north of 1300 mhz on that 680 tbh
/offtopic

Marine-RX179 · 2 Nov 2012 at 10:36

CAT-THE-FIFTH said:
Most modern engines thread well and actually can be very CPU heavy,ie,try using a dual core against a quad core in a MP scenario in some games and see where it leaves you.

OTH,any PC game released in 2012 which can barely use two cores is indicative of two things:
1.)Cost cutting during development.
2.)Very poorly optimisation, indicative of cost cutting at a management level,especially if there is a console version(a console version would have to use multiple threads well).

Basically most of your CPU is idle when playing the game which means most of the CPU is not being pushed. If you don't overclock(the vast majority of PC gamers),going from a Core i3 to a Core i5 does not yield much improvements,which is pathetic.This means additional costs pushed onto the consumer,or worse gameplay. Such companies are holding back PC game development.

Older games which have been around for years,might be understandable,but not ANY game released in 2012.

All the modern engines tend to use multiple threads effective - Frostbite 2,CryEngine 2,id Tech 5 and the forthcoming Source2 and UE4. Engines such as Frostbite 1.5,later versions of the UE3 engine and Source all use multiple threads effectively. In fact most engines which can be used across multiple platforms now thread reasonably well.

Guild Wars 2 ain't a console port though. It is one of the most popular mmo today...while running 3 threads instead of 4 or above does left much to desire, it is not as bad as old games that use 2 or even 1 thread....the game simply is THAT demanding on CPU side. Even with 3 threads running fully, today's CPU is STILL not fast enough for delivering 60fps when playing World vs World. So while only 30fps with an overclocked i5 2500K ain't great, it is definitely far more playable than whatever AMD CPU can deliver in this situation.

Anyway it's really down to the games being played as I always say...this is not directed at you CAT, but I think sometimes that message that some of the people around these forum put acrossing seem to be implying "Why you would want to go play on some stupid RTS/MMOs which your CPU would bottleneck the graphic card, when you can play FPS games scaling so well with multi-thread which the CPU wouldn't be much of a bottleneck?"

So people should adjust their gaming preference to their hardware, rather than hardware to their gaming preference? That sound quite ridiculous to me...

Either way, OP's question was:

horrorxpunk said:
Is the FX8150 really enough to harness the full power of the GTX680 especially

Simply answer would be no, and the same would probably even apply for an overclocked i5 in some gaming situation...but the fact remains that Bulldozer's best case scenerio is it would deliver "equal" performance as the i5 when GPU is the limitation, however there are lots of situations which the Bulldozer would do worse, while it wouldn't the other way round.

CreateNPlay · 2 Nov 2012 at 10:38

Guise y dus gtaiv run bad hlp fx plz.

I remember when people posted that all the time, giggles.

Gregster · 2 Nov 2012 at 10:40

OptimaLnrg said:
I don't think you'll see north of 1300 mhz on that 680 tbh
/offtopic

+1

Having looked about, your expectations of 1400+ is a little OTT unless you put the card under water and use a custom BIOS with ABX or some other form of volting tool.

OP. If you have BF3, use this as a test. If @ 1080P multi player you are seeing your CPU above 80% I believe, this will cause your GPU to slow down.

horrorxpunk · 2 Nov 2012 at 12:54

OptimaLnrg said:
I don't think you'll see north of 1300 mhz on that 680 tbh
/offtopic

It's an Asus DirectCU II TOP it reaches 1218mhz on the default clock. An adjustment of 150mhz core and 500 mhz memory should be a piece of cake I could manage that a breeze on my GTX580 I had that clocked at 952mhz with 4674mhz memory.

horrorxpunk · 2 Nov 2012 at 12:56

Marine-RX179 said:
Custom bench doesn't tell you anything useful that would identify CPU bottleneck under actual gaming environment. I'm not sure about New Dawn, but for Heaven it is pretty much a pure graphic stress test, which even some like an old Core2Duo can most likely max out the GPU usage on the GTX680.

Getting 99% GPU usage on Heaven Bench that's not CPU dependent at all doesn't even remotely mean you would get the same usage on games. You need to run some actual games and look at GPU usage to see if there's huge dips.

The games you play is also an important factor, as some games is much more CPU demanding than your everyday bread and butter FPS games that would use 4 cores or more. For example I recently started playing World vs World on Guild Wars 2, and with 60-100 people duking it out at each other plus the rendering of world environment...even with my i5 2500K overclocked to 4.5GHz, it was bottlenecking my 5850 and with frame rate dropped to around 30fps and GPU usage down to 50%. Bulldozer or PD would probably be crying at this situation with the frame rate dropped down to around 10-15fps and GPU usage down to around 25%, considering Guild Wars 2 only usage up to 3 threads max.

I am having the same problems with Guild Wars 2; I regularly find whatever graphics card I am using the FPS on Guild Wars 2 in player heavy areas such as lion's arch is dipping up and down greatly; but in usual areas it will run smoothly at 60fps must be very CPU intensive.

Gregster · 2 Nov 2012 at 12:56

horrorxpunk said:
It's an Asus DirectCU II TOP it reaches 1218mhz on the default clock. An adjustment of 150mhz core and 500 mhz memory should be a piece of cake I could manage that a breeze on my GTX580 I had that clocked at 952mhz with 4674mhz memory.

Good luck with that

horrorxpunk · 2 Nov 2012 at 14:26

gregster said:
Good luck with that

Why so much doubt from you guys

This is the card by the way; will post results and benchmarks.

http://www.asus.com/Graphics_Cards/NVIDIA_Series/GTX680DC2T2GD5/

Gregster · 2 Nov 2012 at 14:29

horrorxpunk said:
Why so much doubt from you guys

This is the card by the way; will post results and benchmarks.

http://www.asus.com/Graphics_Cards/NVIDIA_Series/GTX680DC2T2GD5/

Hehe, I hope you can reach those clocks and I will be very impressed if you can. Do a 3dmark11 run as we can compare it to other cards.

horrorxpunk · 2 Nov 2012 at 14:32

Right your on; will start burn-in and stress testing when I get back from work at midnight and will upload photos so y'all can see some overkill from the GTX680

horrorxpunk · 2 Nov 2012 at 14:39

http://postimage.org/image/3uw88uqat/

Gentlemen start your engines ;-)

off to a good start.

Kaapstad · 2 Nov 2012 at 16:01

horrorxpunk said:
http://postimage.org/image/3uw88uqat/

Gentlemen start your engines off to a good start.

Gosh and the power slider is still on 100% thats a golden chip you have there sir.

horrorxpunk · 2 Nov 2012 at 16:16

Kaapstad said:
Gosh and the power slider is still on 100% thats a golden chip you have there sir.

At default clock it rarely sees sights past 70% and it will be running at 1218mhz I am going to jump it up to 159% and bring it down anyway I have not started benching and burn-in yet as I had to run out to work. I did get 3D Mark 11 running at 1300mhz though.