Friday, June 26, 2009

The curious case of the CPU Bottleneck: Part 2

In continuation of my earlier blogs about the CPU bottleneck in games, today I will look at how the slow CPU affects some of the FPS and strategy titles out there.

As a refresher, here is the system configuration:

Opteron 144 @ 1.97 Ghz, 1 GB DDR RAM @ 425 Mhz, MSI GeForce N9800GT 512MB, Core: 715, memory: 800x2, shader: 1680 Mhz

Stalker: Clear Sky : 19 FPS in towns, 30-35 FPS in the wild.
The fps reported above is at slightly lower than maximum texture detail.
Note that this game, at ultra high detail lags big time on my machine because of the lack of RAM (I have 1 GB DDR memory). A lot of time is spent in swapping from disk, which explains why one of my hard disks is dying :) . Reducing the texture detail to a little above medium really helps fix that problem.

Crysis:
Here we will look at 3 different configurations:
1. Ultra High, 1440x900, 4xAA: 5 to 12 fps
2. Shaders, Postprocess, Water, Volumetric Effects are Ultra High, rest High, 1440x900, 4xAA: 12 to 15 fps
3. Shaders, Postprocess, are Ultra High, rest High, 1024x768, No AA: 19 to 25 fps.

Note that the major issue with this game is that there is a lot of disk IO when everything is set to ultra. This reduces the actual FPS due to a lot of loading delays. In the second configuration, this disk IO is reduced, but still a problem, which leads me to think that lack of enough main memory is the problem here. If I can find a few cheap DDR ram modules, I can put this theory to the test. In the third setting, the game is actually playable, and by that I mean you can take headshots with a pistol from quite some distance :)

Unreal Tournament 3: 35 FPS
This game is highly sensitive to CPU speeds, and is the only game that seems to scale very well with increased number of CPU cores. So, the framerates that we see here are considerably lesser than what is expected of a 9800gt when coupled with a core i7 for example (around 105 fps).
UT3 engine games like gears of war and mass effect, run well, which is good because this is a quite popular engine these days.

World in Conflict: 50 FPS in non combat, 20-30 fps in heavy combat.
This is at ultra high detail, including cloud reflections etc.
Sadly, this is the only RTS that I have right now. Maybe later, I can do a small test on Company of Heroes, Dawn of War 2 etc...

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