Morning all, Been a while since I have posted on here so I hope you're all well? I have been running the core of my existing Rig now for around 5 years now and bar GFX, cooling and HDD upgrades it has remained largely unchanged. The machine can handle pretty much anything I throw at it however, with the release of BF1 in my opinion It's starting to show its age. I was considering just upgrading the memory from 6gb to 12gb and giving the machine a short term boost but wondering if I should just hold off and do a processor, motherboard and RAM upgrade in one? Currently running.... 1366 i7 920 OC @ 4.2 Ghz MSI R9 290 6Gb DDR3 funds available are absolutely minimal due to house move but would appreciate comments and flames. Cheers Ric
Buy Xeon 5650 or better which gives you two more cores and two more threads, ideal for Bf1. Up memory to 12gb as you said. I would go 1070 though. 1060 is not a big upgrade at all.
Given I can only do one or the other would you say memory is the priority at the moment? I just need 1080p gaming.
Yes, I would say memory is the priority but if you already have BF1 installed then there's no need for guesswork: you can run a monitoring program like MSI Afterburner to see how much RAM BF1 is using, along with CPU usage, GPU usage and VRAM usage. Check the graphs after a few rounds and see what you run out of.
Is it really likely that a game is using 6GB of RAM? I've never experienced that before but I guess newer games are making better use of hardware than before. As for actually upgrading to 12GB of RAM you'd be able to get 6GB pretty cheap on ebay but it'd be preferable to get 3x4GB kit instead so that you're still only using three banks of memory and all your modules are matched. I ran 6x2GB for a while and it was a nightmare to keep my overclock at the same level because of the extra strain on the IMC, so my uncore voltage needed to be higher and I eventually had to downclock my CPU. I'm running 24GB of mem now and it doesn't like it very much... no crashes or anything like that as my system is rock solid, but it does take the motherboard two or three attempts to POST for whatever reason. Old-ass technology #ForTheWin.
Here's something that I've often wondered about RAM (and VRAM) usage: how much of the usage is actual, genuine use and how much is software just loading up loads of data into RAM just in case it's needed? What I mean by that is: how much does extra RAM actually benefit performance in that scenario, and does a game maxing out RAM/VRAM mean that it actually needs that amount of memory to function properly?
I suppose it depends on the specific application/game and how it's been designed. You could test it but from my experience if RAM/VRAM is at a constant 100% then performance suffers. From what I've seen from my Afterburner monitoring graphs so far, BF1 uses at least 6GB RAM.
Thanks everyone... looking at around £80 for a kit through Ebuyer... this looks quite expensive considering the age of it. Any suggestions?
Seems an awful lot of money for what will be such a small incremental upgrade IMO, and yes it's inordinately expensive because it's old hat. Might be better just to scour ebay for a cheap 6gb kit and see what you can do with it... you'll probably have to knock back the overclock a fair bit, especially with the 920 having such a low multi.
All memory is very expensive at the moment. Honestly you have picked the worst time to upgrade your memory. Also, don't be afraid of running the memory in dual channel either. A 16gb DC kit works out less than £80.
That's a good point - the difference in bandwidth (in real world numbers) is negligible so you could easily run 4x4gb instead of 3x4gb. Still expensive though. Alternatively, if you really want to save money, you could run 9GB by adding a 3x1GB kit to your existing setup (I did that for a while). There's a 3GB kit currently on ebay for £20.
What are your settings? There was an issue with render scale being wrong, not sure if it was ever fixed someone with the game might be able to tell you. Are you running DX11 or 12? Benchmarks seem a bit all over the place with 12. One of my friends has BF1 running on a 290 and I don't think he has any issues @1080p, though he will have 2GB more ram and a newer i5, probably haswell, in his PC.
Tried all sorts of settings but seem to rubber band all over the place. Alpha and Beta ran in ultra no worries. Tried running the settings on low but made no difference. Currently running DX12 Ultra. 1920x1200.
Running afterburner as suggested to get the RAM usage etc and seen it top out at 5585Mb oddly the GPU usage is not constant appears to be up and down and up. got just under 1GB of VRAM available.
BF1 DX12 performance is apparently all over the place. I wouldn't make any decisions based on that alone if I were you. Have you tried playing it in DX11? Edit: here's a performance comparison:
Was that in MP or SP? I always associated rubber banding with internet issues Does afterburner report if virtual memory is being used? If you're not sure open task manager and see how much memory is being used, might be that causing issues if virtual memory is being used.
Pagefile is currently 8962Mb. Rubber banding is in MP. Reverted back to DX11. According to Afterburner the max the pagefile has got to is 10130 ?!?! This is strange as currently the pagefile is set on a max at 6656Mb and on a mechanical drive instead of my SSD. Out of interest if I get a 16gb Kit and run in Dual Channel instead of Triple will I notice much of a performance drop? Will it even be compatible? EDIT *Looks like my board is limited to 4GB modules*
Some X58 boards support 8GB modules if they use beta or modified BIOS files, so it depends on your board. Dual channel takes a performance hit in numbers only... you wouldn't actually notice a difference.
I'm wondering if it's the old BF memory leak that strikes again. When I had that in BF3/BF4 the game would work fine until the leak chewed through my 12GBs then run like crap, and since it didn't want to give up the memory even when the game was closed only a restart would solve it. Having said that, rubber banding still sounds like and internet issue to me. Have you tried SP at all to see if it also runs crap?
