Worth upgrading a 5870 (for Wow)

Monster ninja · 18 Oct 2010 at 19:11

erm i am running an athlon x2 @ 3.5ghz and a gtx260 at 60fps with full gfx setting like full AA ect at 1080*??? somthing must be wrong with your rig?

powdaman · 19 Oct 2010 at 09:08

Ok turned everything down to low or disabled with distance set to full and it is running at about 120fps (even in Dalaran). Turn all to Low and it starts to chuck.
Findings:

- The new water affect kills it
- Sunshafts kills it
- Everything else is reasonably fine

I am guessing it is bottlenecking at the graphics card due to trying to run at such a high resolution (5800x1200) and that another card would probably do the trick.

Cheers for all the feedback guys - WoW is definately a system testing game (more so than crysis in my opinion).

Powda

eddiew · 19 Oct 2010 at 09:26

Hehe, it must be said, you're chucking an absolute monster resolution at it xD

It might be worth researching whether the game renders sunshafts, water, and shadows, on GPU or CPU... WoW is renowned for doing a lot of software rendering to help it run on older PCs, and I'm not entirely sure whether the new graphics engine changes that. Maybe Blizzard's tech support forum might be worth a visit?

yashiro · 19 Oct 2010 at 09:31

It's more likely that it's a driver issue with the new patch.

Swifty on Youtube runs an eyefinity setup. He mad a a couple of vids about this setup. You should be able to get a little info on performance from his vids.

Phoenixdancer · 19 Oct 2010 at 11:02

Monster ninja said:
erm i am running an athlon x2 @ 3.5ghz and a gtx260 at 60fps with full gfx setting like full AA ect at 1080*??? somthing must be wrong with your rig?

your useing a low resolution.

Exsurgo · 19 Oct 2010 at 11:16

I think Swifty says that he has to drop the resolution a notch and turn AA off for decent frames, and he has 2x 5870's, although I don't think his CPU is overclocked.

powdaman · 19 Oct 2010 at 11:24

Does this mean that I need a new machine in less than a year of buying the new one? LOL

Normally get at least a years worth of full res everything on functionality from my new machines each time I invest....

I must say that I normally go Intel/Nvidia so this is the first main machine that is AMD/ATI... did I make a mistake??

yashiro · 19 Oct 2010 at 11:55

The mistake you made is thinking you would get a solid 60fps with eyefinity at that resolution. With some games it just wont happen.

Marine-RX179 · 19 Oct 2010 at 11:58

powdaman said:
Does this mean that I need a new machine in less than a year of buying the new one? LOL

Normally get at least a years worth of full res everything on functionality from my new machines each time I invest....

I must say that I normally go Intel/Nvidia so this is the first main machine that is AMD/ATI... did I make a mistake??

I don't think there's anything wrong with your 5870. The problem is with WOW as a game which it simply doesn't use the extra cores effectively (can't blame them since it is very old game). Your Phenom II X4 955BE at 3.8GHz is no weakling, the problem is the game only using mainly one core for the most intensive tasks, whereas the extra cores are only there to deal with the minor tasks. The reason why i5/i7 would perform much better is than Phenom II overclocked from 3.2GHz to 3.8GHz, that makes it a 19% overclock; let's assume the Phenom II X4 955BE at 3.20GHz is as fast as a i5 750 at 2.66GHz...the i5 750 overclock by 19% is around 3.17GHz, so a Phenom II X4 955BE at 3.8MHz is roughly as fast as a i5 750 at 3.20GHz at best at gaming. A decent i5 750/760 chip can overclock to as far as 4.20GHz on a decent board.

In games that support the use of extra cores properly, I would imagine the difference overclocked Phenom II X4 and i5 would be minimal on a 5870, but because WOW's don't use the extra cores that well, the i5 is significantly faster because of the extra overclock headrooms it got.

And Monster ninja clearly don't know what he's talking about...he's probably talking a building/open field with none to a few people and enemies, whereas we are talking about 20-30 people on screen in busy area.

If you want to check whether or not it is a CPU bottleneck, use MSI Afterburner to display GPU usage on screen, and go to the busy area or whereever you get huge frame rate drop and see what sort of GPU usage it is on. If the GPU usage is not at (close to) 100%, then you have a CPU bottleneck it's that simple.

Bodom · 19 Oct 2010 at 14:12

Things have changed abit in this patch, with the experimentle DX11 support the game runs a hell of a lot smoother, in most places with my 5870 and everything on Ultra i am getting a on avarage 20/30 more fps in dx11 than I do in DX9

Tbh I was prity surprised Bliz seem to have done a good job with the DX11 stuff the IQ is abit better, and you get afew extra light sources and spray comeing up from the warterfalls in the distance. Nothing really noticable untill you compare the screen shots

My fps in Dala still sucks around 25/35 when its really busy but it seems to run a lot smoother

Allmost forgot noticed it seems to be balancing the use of my C2Q better the useage sems to be more or less identical on each core

DeadMan · 19 Oct 2010 at 14:17

If battlefield bad company 2 is perfectly playable at 6076x1200 on my single 5870 I fail to see how World of warcraft cannot be, unless they have broken the game engine in some horrible way.

Porcelina · 19 Oct 2010 at 14:19

DeadMan said:
If battlefield bad company 2 is perfectly playable at 6076x1200 on my single 5870 I fail to see how World of warcraft cannot be, unless they have broken the game engine in some horrible way.

Because WoW draws on different resources than BFBC. Obviously it is an old game by anyone's standards these days as well, so it makes sense it would be less optimised than newer games.

Marine-RX179 · 19 Oct 2010 at 15:03

DeadMan said:
If battlefield bad company 2 is perfectly playable at 6076x1200 on my single 5870 I fail to see how World of warcraft cannot be, unless they have broken the game engine in some horrible way.

If you are curious enough, try dropping your CPU down to 1 or 2 cores and run BFBC2, and see how much performance hit you get getting with the CPU bottlenecking

NVM, I'll spare you the trouble:
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpus/2010/07/05/how-many-cpu-cores-do-games-need/5

powdaman · 19 Oct 2010 at 17:18

It is a shame though when a game that looks as amazing as Crysis on full runs flawlessly and yet Wow which is cartoon-ish runs like a dog. I understand that it doesnt use all cores yada yada but the amount of money pumped into it you would think that it would be improved quite considerably from that perspective (I think first quarter this year the game has brought in $205 Million pure profit).....

hedgey · 20 Oct 2010 at 03:29

forget it. youll never get single screen fps with eyefinity. in wow i get 20fps in Lagoran when its full on ultra 1920x1200. 60fps in every other place. not tried dx11, I tried opengl and its slower but loads a hell of a lot faster, zones instantly.

Exsurgo · 20 Oct 2010 at 11:54

With the majority of WoW players suffering from significant performance drops in the major cities since classic, but especially since outlands and TBC, you you think that they could have updated the engine to put more load on the GPU and less on the CPU. There is probably a myriad of issues, from the outdated server code to a graphics engine that was designed for graphics cards with no unified shaders.

ThomasTheTankEngine · 20 Oct 2010 at 12:27

powdaman said:
It is a shame though when a game that looks as amazing as Crysis on full runs flawlessly and yet Wow which is cartoon-ish runs like a dog. I understand that it doesnt use all cores yada yada but the amount of money pumped into it you would think that it would be improved quite considerably from that perspective (I think first quarter this year the game has brought in $205 Million pure profit).....

It's not really optimised for high-end pc's. They're much more concerned about getting it working well on average/crappy systems. That way everyone can play, and they can earn $205m in pure profit.

Marine-RX179 · 20 Oct 2010 at 12:44

Exsurgo said:
With the majority of WoW players suffering from significant performance drops in the major cities since classic, but especially since outlands and TBC, you you think that they could have updated the engine to put more load on the GPU and less on the CPU. There is probably a myriad of issues, from the outdated server code to a graphics engine that was designed for graphics cards with no unified shaders.

The not going to happen. Update and patches ain't gonna increase the support for the using extra cores better, and in the game's root design it is simply not with Quad-core in mind (bare in mind that when WOW first release, we were still at the stage of transitiion from single-core over to dual-core). To use Quad properly, they would most like near to alter/rebuild the CPU usage for the game from ground-up. I really think the best soloution is they should just release WOW 2 or something with updated graphic engine and CPU support, while accounts can be transfered over from the WOW. But I doubt they are bothered to go through that hassle of spending the effort of doing something so huge, only improving the gaming experience for the end-users. Existing WOW players will continue to play on the WOW on the existing outdated engine, and whereas I doubt there will be too many new players to join the game this late in stage.

Rather than relying on Blizzard, we should instead hope for that Intel or AMD would eventually release a CPU that can spread light-threaded application/game across the cores, so a 3.0GHz Quad-core will truly works like a 12GHz CPU, no matter how many thread an application/game uses.

Bodom · 20 Oct 2010 at 13:31

CPU useage seems a lot better when running in the DX11 mode, well I say a lot better I mean more even seems to be roguhly identical performance on all 4 cores, but its still prity low though roughly useing about 30/40% when there is a lot going on.

Marine-RX179 · 20 Oct 2010 at 13:49

Bodom said:
CPU useage seems a lot better when running in the DX11 mode, well I say a lot better I mean more even seems to be roguhly identical performance on all 4 cores, but its still prity low though roughly useing about 30/40% when there is a lot going on.

If you are refering to CPU usage on Windows, it doesn't really have accurate indication on how the threads are run. I'm playing Japanese mmo which is single-threaded, but I get activities reading across the 4 cores on the CPU usage as well. The proper way to compare is to compare the frame rate on 1 core vs 2 cores vs 3 cores vs 4 cores at a low res. If 3 cores and 4 cores deliver no higher frame rate than 2 cores, then the game is simply not using the 3rd and 4th core properly, or not optimised for them.