PC Gaming - Graphics and Performance

[Zeusthecat]

I like to play games with maxed out graphics settings and decent framerates. Unfortunately, shit's complicated and even with a decent system, certain settings or configurations will make everything slow down to a crawl. I have found it somewhat difficult to find solutions to some of the specific graphical/performance issues I have come across in various games and I figure having a thread where people can get advice from the excellent community here on specific issues they are having is appropriate.

 

Rules:

1. If asking for help, preface your post by listing your processor, RAM, and graphic card specs.
2. Name the game(s) you are having issues with and the graphics settings and resolution.
3. Be as specific as you can about the issue(s) you are experiencing and how/when they occur.

I'll start.

 

Specs:

Processor - AMD Phenom II Hex Core

RAM - 8GB

Graphic Card - GTX 580 w/ 1.5GB GDDR5

 

Game:

Dragon Age Origins

 

Graphics Settings:

All settings maxed with 1920 X 1080 resolution

 

Details:

Generally speaking, this game runs pretty smooth and typically runs at 60 FPS or higher. However, if I enter an area with a lot of foliage or an unobstructed view of stuff in the distance, my frame rate plummets to around 25 FPS. Still totally playable but kind of annoying. I recall having similar issues with other Bioware games like The Old Republic and I seem to remember needing to tweak some setting in the NVidia control panel that caused some kind of conflict with some of the in-game settings. But so far I haven't had any luck after messing around with those settings again for this game. Considering the card and processor I have were released a couple years after DA:O was released and were at the upper end of the spectrum at the time, I would expect that I should be able to run this game maxed out without my system breaking a sweat. Has anyone else experienced similar issues with this or other Bioware games or have any advice on potential causes for framerate drops under these circumstances? I've done most of the obvious stuff at this point like making sure my PC power consumption is set to 'High Performance' and that where possible, the settings in Nvidia control panel are set to use the in-game graphics settings.

[Cordeos]

Have you tested out those areas with lower settings? If so does the frame rate drop not occur? 

 

I have played several games that have areas that lag due to something happening in the background with no relation to graphics. Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance for example, would occasionally slow to something like 50% normal speed then get back to 100% for no reason I could figure. Bad code in the game itself, not the graphics may be at fault.

[Zeusthecat]

Good thought, I'll test it out and report back. Maybe I'm just being over confident in my setup but it would surprise me if this game was so graphically demanding that it would necessitate lowering some of the settings to reduce frame rate drops in certain areas. Even with some of what I've read about Bioware games allegedly being poorly optimized for Nvidia cards, I would expect a 580 to crush this game.

[Korax]

I was having similar problems with a GTX 650, and the in-game benchmark showed almost no change between highest and lowest settings. I just upgraded to a GTX 750, and got a bump of about 15 fps.

 

I also recommend checking out the PC Gaming Wiki for any game release. It usually takes a few days for people to update it with tweaks and such, but is very useful.

[kaputt]

It's weird, I think your setup should run the game without any issues.

You could try running the game with D3Doverrider. Disable the in-game vsync, download the d3doverrider and run it (make sure vsync and triple buffering are on). It might be the case that the game doesn't have a proper triple buffering, then any dip lower than 60fps goes to 30 or less.

You can also try to run the game using borderless windowed mode, which does the same thing. If the game doesn't have an option for borderless fullscreen, you can download a program that forces it - I think it's called borderless gaming.

[BusbyBerkeley]

I've been having trouble with some games running with a black border all around the screen even though its set at my monitor's resolution and I can't seem to figure it out at all. Company of Heroes does it consistently, but that's the only one I can think of off the top of my head. I'm using a radeon hd 7870 on the newest drivers and all that. Any ideas?

[brkl]

I had that with Beyond Earth. I had to turn vsync off and back on again every time I played.

[Glotal]

I've been having trouble with some games running with a black border all around the screen even though its set at my monitor's resolution and I can't seem to figure it out at all. Company of Heroes does it consistently, but that's the only one I can think of off the top of my head. I'm using a radeon hd 7870 on the newest drivers and all that. Any ideas?

My radeon card did the same thing when I first got my 1080p monitor. Those black bars are added because your video output does not exactly match your monitor. You have probably already figured this first part out, but you need to adjust the overscan setting to 0% in AMD's Catalyst Control Center. The tricky part is, it doesn't just look at your resolution, it also checks your refresh rate. What I had to do was go through every possible refresh rate for my resolution, and then adjust the overscan back down to zero. You should be able to find the option to change the refresh rate under Desktop Properties in Catalyst Control. 

[BusbyBerkeley]

Whoa, that worked! Thanks a ton!

 

Now, WHY is that overscan thing the default setting? 

[Zeusthecat]

Have you tested out those areas with lower settings? If so does the frame rate drop not occur? 

 

I went ahead and tested this out. First, I found a bushy area to stand in where I observed a steady and consistent frame rate drop. Then I started with everything maxed out and v-sync on and lowered various settings individually to see which ones had the biggest impact.

 

With everything maxed it was sitting at a steady 37 FPS.

 

With Graphics Detail set to low and everything else maxed it rose to 47 FPS.

 

With Anti-Aliasing set to 4x (8x being the max) and everything else maxed it jumped to 53 FPS. Lowering it further to 2x maxed it out at 60 FPS.

 

So it looks like for me anti-aliasing is the biggest culprit when it comes to low frame rates in Dragon Age Origins. Luckily, it doesn't ever really get below 25 FPS so it's not really too much of an issue. Just kind of irritating and a little weird that a GTX 580 can't manage to maintain 60 FPS for a game from 2009 that doesn't seem like it would be too graphically intensive.

[dartmonkey]

Thumbs, I need Personal Computer advice!

 

I've had my PC since 2008 and it's about time to start upgrading bits. It's started getting a bit dopey, refusing to boot. I got a shop to build it for me - I looked at lists and chose the biggest numbers I could afford (which led me to the nightmare of 64-bit Vista). I'm game for changing bits myself but have zero experience.

 

I want to do it over time. My assumption would be to start with the motherboard and replace from there? This is what I've got:

 

Asus P5N-T Deluxe nForce 780 SLi motherboard

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.40Ghz (overclocked to 3Ghz)

NVIDIA GeForce 8800GT 512MB GDDR3 (x2)

OCZ 4GB 1000Mhz (2x2GB)

 

The SLi thing seemed like a good idea at the time but it's flaky and seems to turn itself off. I'd like to replace it with just one card.

 

Right now it's running everything I put on it, but nearly everything comes from bundles. The most taxing thing in my Steam library is probably Batman Arkham City or Bioshock Infinite and it plays those fine. I don't need space-age stuff, but I'd like to lay a foundation for the next 5 or so years. Any advice as to good replacements and procedures would be greatly appreciated.

[JonCole]

Probably your motherboard and processor are faring a lot better than your GPU. I'd probably just dump the 8800s and upgrade to a GTX 960/970/980. Video cards are backwards compatible with previous generations of PCI Express, you'll only get a little bit of bandwidth limitation from the slower ports. I'd wait on upgrading the other stuff until the next generation of processors come out next year, unless you're dying to do everything at once. You'll see a big improvement just with the GPU, since a lot of modern games are primarily GPU-dependent (though not all)

[eot]

A 900-series GPU is going to be bottlenecked by your CPU, and you can't upgrade your CPU without getting a new motherboard. It's still going to be way faster, but those GPUs cost a lot and it's really wasted money unless you upgrade the other parts soon afterwards. Maybe buy something like a 560GTX used, it's not going to cost you much at all. CPU performance has increased at a much lower rate than GPU performance, but over eight years it still adds up. If you want to play higher end stuff like The Witcher 3 you're probably going to have to start from scratch. Good thing is that even a cheapish PC will outperform current gen consoles.

[JonCole]

But why buy an old GPU at all when the long-term goal is (seemingly, correct me if I'm wrong) upgrading everything? Sure it'll be bottlenecked by the current CPU, but a GTX560 will be woefully outmatched by a current gen Core i5 or i7 and practically irrelevant when most games will be asking for 2GB+ of VRAM.

[kaputt]

Thumbs, I need Personal Computer advice!

I've had my PC since 2008 and it's about time to start upgrading bits. It's started getting a bit dopey, refusing to boot. I got a shop to build it for me - I looked at lists and chose the biggest numbers I could afford (which led me to the nightmare of 64-bit Vista). I'm game for changing bits myself but have zero experience.

I want to do it over time. My assumption would be to start with the motherboard and replace from there? This is what I've got:

Asus P5N-T Deluxe nForce 780 SLi motherboard

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.40Ghz (overclocked to 3Ghz)

NVIDIA GeForce 8800GT 512MB GDDR3 (x2)

OCZ 4GB 1000Mhz (2x2GB)

The SLi thing seemed like a good idea at the time but it's flaky and seems to turn itself off. I'd like to replace it with just one card.

Right now it's running everything I put on it, but nearly everything comes from bundles. The most taxing thing in my Steam library is probably Batman Arkham City or Bioshock Infinite and it plays those fine. I don't need space-age stuff, but I'd like to lay a foundation for the next 5 or so years. Any advice as to good replacements and procedures would be greatly appreciated.

The ideal thing would be replacing your GPU and processor/motherboard. For immediate gains though, the GPU first is a better upgrade.

I had a good GPU paired with an old CPU in the past and the result wasn't great, of course it was an improvement, but not as great as I thought. Everything got better when I bought a Core i5, it doubled the framerates in some really demanding games, like Crysis 2.

But if you can't afford a full upgrade right now, begin with your GPU, like Jon suggested. The GTX 970 has the best price for the performance I think, I probaly would buy this one. The only downside of it is the RAM, I think, maybe 4gigs won't be good enough for future AAA super demanding games.

[eot]

But why buy an old GPU at all when the long-term goal is (seemingly, correct me if I'm wrong) upgrading everything? Sure it'll be bottlenecked by the current CPU, but a GTX560 will be woefully outmatched by a current gen Core i5 or i7 and practically irrelevant when most games will be asking for 2GB+ of VRAM.

My thinking was that if he's not going to replace the other parts relatively soon (1 year) then he'd be better off waiting to buy that high end GPU until he can afford to build a new machine from scratch, because there's a decent chance new cards will be out by then. A 560 is just a very cheap stopgap.

[Badfinger]

You are going to be better for longer if you just buy a processor "whenever" as opposed to a video card. At this point, all video cards that we would be talking about are PCI-E of some variety, and those scale fine, i.e. you can use a PCI-E 2.0 card in a 3.0 and vice versa. I am shocked at how few computer parts I've bought since 2010. I am checking my Amazon and Newegg history, and I bought my processor four years ago today. Happy Birthday i5 2500k! I have no intentions on upgrading in the near future. If my video card hadn't died, I'd have only upgraded from that this past month (bought a stopgap when it kicked the bucket last year) from a 2011 purchase as well because nVidia sweetened the pot with two games included at retail price.

 

My suggestion for "future proofing", which doesn't exist but is as viable as it's ever been, would be to upgrade your processor and motherboard to a modern-style architecture and get at least 8 gigs of RAM and THEN work on the graphics card. You still might want to bump it up (hey I have a GTX 750ti I might be willing to part with for not a ton of money...) but at that point instead of trying to drag all your components up with one big purchase you're just optimizing. They just rolled out the GTX 980ti, which (for us, especially talking about an 8800GT) is for all intents and purposes a Titan's worth of graphics power at 60% of the cost. Presumably in the next 6 months they'll roll out the 970ti, and you could grab that or take advantage of the price drops for older cards that would come with that new rollout.

[dartmonkey]

Thanks for your suggestions everyone. It's extremely useful just to have some card numbers to reference. Relatively eye watering prices here in the EU, it's definitely gonna be something that happens over the next year or two.

Noob question: is there any appreciable difference between the same GPU from different manufacturers, and if so, who's reliable?

[JonCole]

There are some broadly agreed-upon tiers of manufacturers. I'd say that Asus, MSI, EVGA, and Gigabyte are considered the top. Also, I have personally bought Sapphire, Zotac, and HIS in the past with no issue but they're generally considered second rung. I think that some of these considerations have more to do with warranty fulfillment, as the bigger manufacturers are a little quicker and more generous than the second-tier budget guys.

[eot]

Also worth noting that some cards are overclocked out of the box, they often have other coolers too.

[Lu]

They also have cool names like the TwinFrozr X-TREME ULTRA COOL MARK II. And Sometimes they have a cool dragon or maybe even a jet fighter on the box!

[Badfinger]

Even with all the lasers and frozrs, like 99% of the Nvidia cards on the market are just reproducing and branding the Nvidia reference spec card. There was a time when they'd take the pipeline and chip architecture and some companies would actually design their own board, but for the most part now all the cards with the same model number are the same thing with different icing on top of the cake. So you can just pick the best price or the coolest dragon and be reasonably secure with your decision.

[dartmonkey]

Wow, it's been a year! Today I finally updated a bit of my PC! I've been running Windows 10 for a couple of months. Of course installing it was a ballache (although, happily, I don't actually regret it yet.) After balking at the price of half-decent GPUs, I put off upgrading until now. My PC continued to flake away and would generally crash after a minute or so of playing any video content, windowed or fullscreen. On Monday I spotted a GTX 960 secondhand for 160 euros and got it today. The 8800s came out, the 960 went in. Some new drivers and a handful of restarts later and I'm now at 54% of a Titan according to some benchmark or other (up from 7%!!). More importantly, I can watch shitty facebook videos without crashes. I can also play all the games I already own that were giving me gyp (like Sonic All-Stars Racing - man that's fun!). Plus it'll keep me in Humble bundles for the time being. I may do some research and invest in some RAM as that seems dirt cheap, but in a year or two the motherboard and the CPU will need overhauling. In the meantime, games!

 

Thanks to all. Any specific RAM recommendations?

[Gaizokubanou]

Even with all the lasers and frozrs, like 99% of the Nvidia cards on the market are just reproducing and branding the Nvidia reference spec card.

 

kekkekeke eh hmm

 

Indeed.  I choose over warranty more than anything.  One exception is my latest card, Zotac's 970 because it is physically like 2~3 inches shorter than the rest.  That slight difference prevents so much headache when it comes to managing the inside of my PC.

[eRonin]

Wow, it's been a year! Today I finally updated a bit of my PC! I've been running Windows 10 for a couple of months. Of course installing it was a ballache (although, happily, I don't actually regret it yet.) After balking at the price of half-decent GPUs, I put off upgrading until now. My PC continued to flake away and would generally crash after a minute or so of playing any video content, windowed or fullscreen. On Monday I spotted a GTX 960 secondhand for 160 euros and got it today. The 8800s came out, the 960 went in. Some new drivers and a handful of restarts later and I'm now at 54% of a Titan according to some benchmark or other (up from 7%!!). More importantly, I can watch shitty facebook videos without crashes. I can also play all the games I already own that were giving me gyp (like Sonic All-Stars Racing - man that's fun!). Plus it'll keep me in Humble bundles for the time being. I may do some research and invest in some RAM as that seems dirt cheap, but in a year or two the motherboard and the CPU will need overhauling. In the meantime, games!

 

Thanks to all. Any specific RAM recommendations?

 

Whoa you went almost 10 years without a graphics card upgrade? That's insane!! Your GTX 960 should be able to play all current-gen games at medium settings at least. But anyway, in terms of RAM; speed doesn't really matter much, and these days you want at least 8GB of RAM. Good brands for RAM are Corsair, Kingston, and I kinda like G-Skill too (they look silly but I like that, lol). DDR4 came out recently but I'm guessing your motherboard doesn't support that.