Windows System Performance, expectations and perspective

Do you know what frame rate you get at those settings? Like I said earlier in this thread, it's not a high end card, and Crysis at 1080p with some AA and high AF is kind of pushing it. It's a good card actually, definitely above average, but still, that's quite a demanding setting in a very demanding game.

At a rough guess, I'm thinking you should get about 25-30 frames per second, or so. But that's just a guess. You should definitely be able to get it playable though, just try playing around with the settings. Start with a small compromise, like turning AF off, and maybe just having 2x AA. If that's no good, get rid of AF and AA. If still no good, try lowering one or two of the settings like shadows or whatever. It should be pretty smooth at that point. If not, see how low you need to go to make it smooth. If it never gets smooth then something is definitely borked.

 

Anisitropic Filtering is pretty much useless with crysis as it uses Parallax Mapping on most textures, especially the ground textures so all you will be doing by enabling it is wasting graphics card memory. AA has a much bigger performance hit with Crysis than with most other games too.

 

As means of a bench mark I ran the fps counter during game play and found that with settings on "high" AA x2 and AF on I managed between 25-35 frames per second, sometimes higher, it didnt drop below 25-22 fps but it was choppy. So I guess this is about right for my specs. When I ran it at lower settings I got around 50-70 frames out of it.

So I guess my performance issues are more down to my expectations of my hardware being too high. Running things at 1080 and with AA and AF maybe out of reach.

Is this the issue or should I still think about sending it back to Scan for them to check it out???

 

Yeah that sounds normal to me. It's a good graphics card and it will eat most games, but Crysis is an exception. And really, 1080p is quite a high and demanding resolution, and AA is big deal too. I think if you had a smaller monitor it would be fine for pretty much everything, but how you're playing is pretty much top end settings that really needs a top end graphics card to cope with.

I would try to find a nice middle ground in the settings. 25-35fps is a bit low, and 50-70 is a bit high. See if you can have it on mostly high settings, with just one or two options lower, and see if you can get it to average around 30-40fps. That way it should be smooth enough to play, but still look nice looking.

As for COD4, that should be similar. Really, you should be able to get the games looking gorgeous and running smoothly, just don't expect to be able to crank them to max and have AA as well, at that kind of resolution. The three options are:

1) Get a high end graphics card to cope with high end demands (Like £250 card or more).
2) Compromise by playing it on a smaller screen with a lower resolution like 1680x1050. You'll probably be able to crank most of the settings at that resolution.
3) Compromise by just lowering some settings. That way you'll still be able to play at 1080p with your current card, but you'll have to compromise a bit with the graphics settings.

Most games these days are designed to work on Xbox360 anyway, so your computer should be able to crank most stuff. There are just several exceptions like Crysis which really push the boundaries of hardware. Others may disagree, but that's my opinion anyway. (Based on gaming with various similar hardware)

 

Cod 4 shouldn't have any trouble running at the highest res with AA and AF with your graphics card.

 

Hi all, by way of comparison Ive run 3 games: Crysis, COD: Black ops & Battfield bad company 2 to get a sence of how its performing, heres my findings, this has given me some perspective and I feel a little bit better about the preformance, not too sure of stability though now.

Crysis "built in" fps count reproted:

Settings: High
AA x 2
1080p res

45-32 frames

...actually not a bad count

Crysis

Settings high
AA x0
1080p res

39 - 52 frames....
froze mid game, lots of white squares in diagonal strips had to restart system. never happened before.

Crysis

Setting medium

AA x0
1080p res

65 - 80 frames...
runs fairly smooth least juddering but missing textures and artifacting...never happened before

Crysis
Setings High
AA x 2
1024 x 768 res

60-80 frames 120 max

COD: Black ops

RAN WITH FRAPS

Full settings
AA x 16
AF full
Trilinear filtering
Texture quality extra
1080p res

54-60 frames (never above 60) runs very very well since patch.

BFBC2

RAN WITH FRAPS

settings high (shadows medium)
HBAO off
AAx2
AF x16
1080p

30-60 frames... actually very respectable.

however did freeze during game play, that hasnt happened before.

didnt see much need to try BFBC2 or CODBO as these frames seem quite good????

What do you think? Im kind of happy with the fps rates but now I seem to have instability and crashes out of nowhere.
Could that be a side effect of FPS counting??

 

I've never seen fraps cause a crash or freeze like that, I usually play with it on all the time.
maybe something is overheating, use GPUz to log your temps in the background.

 

Another issue another application lol, ill give that a go when I get home from work...

 

Those frame rates are good, the only issue is the crashing/artifacts. Is the graphics card pre-overclocked? Need to keep an eye on the temps of it and the CPU and see if that's an issue.

 

The crashing, artifacting and missing textures etc has only started today while I was running the fps tests, NEVER happened before, Speedfan has said that my CPU is running sweet and also previously it reported that my GPU was fine, people said that the temps I posted previously were fine, ill run this GPUz to see what the deal is.

I still need to do this bloody reinstall at some point, but people are telling me its unlikley to solve anything so im confused as to why SCAN are so insistent upon it.

Another thing, I looked at task manager today, at the cpu counters for each core, should they be all over the place? it looks like 3 or 4 are functional but all different one has a green line flat at the bottom and another is flat out at the top... what does this mean???

 

Sorry "Sozzer" yeah its the EVGA "super clocked" edition so it pre OC'd I think.

 

well with my quad core, doing hardly a thing, all 4 are around 0, so if you have some constantly high, thats odd i think.

take a look at processes tab, and sort by memory or cpu to see whats eating up that cpu time

 

Nevermind, I'm a dingus.

 

Well it's good news and bad news.

The good news is that your computer seems ok now, it's running at a good speed and everything works. The only bad news is the artifacts / missing textures.

This is a common side effect of overclocking a graphics card, and pre-overclocked (or superclocked) graphics cards are not exempt from it either. It is also a sign of a flaky semi-broken graphics card though too.

If you can find some kind of nVidia overclocking tool, you should be able to lower the superclock a bit, or even set it back to stock speeds. My guess is that your artifacts will vanish when you do that. If not, the card is broken, and even if it does fix it, it's not much good having a graphics card that can only run at a slower speed than what you paid for.

Either way, at this point, I would suggest getting on to Scan and update them on the situation. You can say that the performance is good now, and all the other components seem to be working nicely - but you have graphics glitches which you're concerned is a sign of a dying graphics card, or a problem with superclocked cards.

They will probably offer to replace the graphics card with another one the same, or may offer you an alternative at a similar price. That should sort you out. One possibility is that you could ask them for a 1gig XFX HD5850 AMD / ATI Graphics Card instead. It's about £10 more and would be slightly faster than your current card. I'm guessing it would also be quieter too, and it would be perfectly stable. They also apparently overclock extremely well, so you could do that yourself and end up with a much faster card than you currently have. Up to you. Good luck, let us know what happens.

 

sersiously why havent you RMA'd this box yet ?

scan will want to elimate the OS been the issue which is why they have asked for a re-install before sending it back. its pretty standard as scan dont fix software issue nor do any other companies when you get PCs from them.

i would imagine the problem will persist if your getting artifacting but better make sure eh ?

 

Just Played for over 3 hours I checked GPUz after and its says my gpu temp was about 58c, thats acceptable right. In fact I was really pleased with how it ran, Until it crashed after 3 hours, It may have been steam though. worth noting that it wasnt artifacting this time.

Im off work for a few days from new years eve, I work harsh 8 day rota's so once that is out of the way ILL have time to do the reinstall. once we can eliminate that I guess scan will talk about an RMA, I can understand why they want me to do it. but ive never done one on my own before and I havent had time. Scan have mailed me instructions and when I can do the reinstall I will.

 

Reinstalling Windows is easy. It's fire and forget these days, you barely need to do anything. I think you need to do that asap so you can get Scan to fix it. I think your graphics card is either broken, or just no good. So it's time to get them to sort it out. Either take them the whole PC so they can test it, or just send them the graphics card for a replacement. As for your GTX570, I'd suggest trying to do that now, rather than having to sell your current card. It's not going to give you any new problems, chances are, with that new card, the PC will be perfect.

 

Ok, cool, do you recon that my current PSU will run a GTX570??

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/550w...i-crossfire-eps-12v-120mm-fan-5-year-warranty

Ill be upgrading the PSU once I know the PC is good.

 

Yep 550W is ok, and Corsair PSU's are really good.