Heya all, I have been struggling last couple of days playing BDO. I have a Sapphire Radeon 7870 OC 2GB, game looks great, but I am running into fps issues. I aml curious if I would get better performance if I upgrade my i3 - 2120 and Motherboard - Gigabyte GA-P61-USB3-B3. Any quick advice? Budget is 200-300 USD. Cheers
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Do you plan to spend some more on the upgrade in near future?
Otherwise, i5-6500 + H110/B150 motherboard and 8GB RAM could fit 300 USD budget.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819117563&cm_re=i5-6500-_-19-117-563-_-Product
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128881
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&IsNodeId=1&N=100007611 4814 600521523 600006069
302 USD not including shipping. You could go with cheaper motherboard and save about 25 USD though.
The rule of thumb says you get more FPS with GPU upgrade over CPU but in your case, both parts are ready for replacement.
http://black-desert.com/forums/index.php/Thread/9714-Black-Desert-GPU-and-CPU-tests-Check-your-FPS/
For 200-300$ you cannot really do much on both CPU AND GPU side.
Issue I have with Black Desert is that I find myself constantly fiddling with graphics settings - fps drops to 5 in cities, but than outside towns I want to get better graphics so I adjust. Anyhow, the game looks great so I just want to get better experience.
Based on your responses, it seems though that GPU will again take priority and gonna check out some of your suggested.
Getting CPU now is better because CPU will last much longer and your old i3 might be possibly holding your 300 USD GPU back in perfromance, thus you would be wasting money.
Looking at the link Malabooga provided... you could gain some FPS by upping the CPU, but that 7870 of yours is near the bottom of the charts, whereas your i3 can ~almost~ get to 60FPS if it has enough GPU behind it (probably could if you could OC it a little bit).
In my opinion, GPU is the best bang for the buck. If/when you are looking at CPU upgrade, that's when you really just need to consider building an entirely new rig, because your most of the way there with that already.
Whoever said you needed 8G of VRAM... yeah. Ignore that.
I would advise against getting a new motherboard unless you're willing to replace the entire computer outright. You could get a new CPU and use it with the same motherboard, though it may require a BIOS update. A Core i5-3570 could be had for under $200.
But the real question is whether that will fix the problem for you. I haven't played the game, but you can usually tell if you have a CPU or a GPU problem by turning graphical settings down. You've got a decently capable GPU, so if you set the game to low graphical settings and it then runs great, you're looking at a GPU problem--or perhaps rather, turning graphical settings unreasonably high. If the game struggles at low settings and you're not running out of memory, then you probably need a new CPU.
If you do go with a GPU upgrade, I'd generally advise that you at least double the performance of your old card. That's not happening on your stated budget.
The real solution might be tinkering with graphical settings. If the game runs great at low settings, then try selectively turning up various settings and see what happens. There's a decent chance that the game will run fine on the system you have now at more appropriate settings.
Based on here:
http://www.tentonhammer.com/guides/black-desert-online/black-desert-online-videographic-performance-guide
it says the game has a "high end mode". Certainly turn that off if you haven't already. Depth of field and SSAO are other, obvious candidates to turn off if you're struggling with frame rates.
It is possible to run out of video memory, though I wouldn't suspect that on a 2 GB card unless you're doing something very strange. The game's recommended system requirements only say a 1 GB video card.
So based on your responses, I guess new CPU wont cut it, and this is a limit of a GPU. Which I am surprised, because I thought the ancient CPU is the culprit here.
Anyways, thanks for the responses, I am going to hunt a good deal on a new GPU.
About CPU, yes, BDO uses a lot of computing power. My Phenom 1090T comes to 40-60% usage when playing. BDO is also the first game where my CPU shows it's bottlenecking the GTX970. Others with this GPU and having the latest i7 CPU have at least 50% more FPS than I have on maxed settings (still have ~25FPS in Heidel though).
@OP from my personal experiences, I think you won't be able to upgrade your PC for $200-$300 to get a better gaming (graphics) experience in BDO. You really need to look more into double your budget ($500-$600) if you want to play the game on maxed settings.
Tests you did are fairly moot, they are not indicative of anything.
If you are getting new CPU, stay away from AMD cards unless you have money aside to replace your PSU as well. AMD cards will have significantly higher power consumption than your current card and assuming you have older PSU, this might be dangerous move.
I would still vouche for getting CPU first, you need to upgrade it anyway.
Here is why: If you are getting GPU now, you have a choice of GTX 970 for $300 which might be hold back by old CPU and will be aging much faster or you can get GTX 960 for $180 but then the improvement over current card won't be as great.
By getting GPU next year, for $180 you might get a card that will be on some sweetspot between current $300 and $180 card or you can just go for $300 and get maximum performance.
In either case, leaving 2nd hand purchase options aside, as long as you stay away from AMD cards, it is not as much of a big deal which route you take, all have their pros and cons and neither is significantly worse than the other, albeit like I said above, getting new GPU will result into bigger immediate FPS gain.
Good luck.
After that test how the game is working, and if its still bad wait until u can add a few more bucks (depending on how much u spent on the used ivy bridge i5) and get a nvidia 970
If u could find a used 3570/3550/3470 that still has a few months on its warranty, that would be awesome.
it is plenty risky to find a reputable seller on ebay and similar, so this might not be an option.
And meeting in person doesn't mean much unless u can check if the cpu works before u hand over the money.
http://www.pcgameshardware.de/Hitman-Spiel-6333/Specials/DirectX-12-Benchmark-Test-1188758/
http://www.pcgameshardware.de/Ashes-of-the-Singularity-Spiel-55338/Specials/Benchmark-Test-DirectX-12-1187073/
960,970,980, 980ti are pretty much obsolete GPUs. Unless you want to buy new GPU really soon after you buy one of these.
Asus is releasing water cooled 980ti with TDP of 525W to try to compete with Fury X that has 275W TDP lol. 525W. It has 3 8-pin power connectors of which 2 are mandatory (375W TDP) and price of 899$ over 649$ Fury X.
Just for information, 295x2. which was proclaimed "most power hungry GPU ever" had 450w TDP, and thats 2 R9 290x there.
Fury x2 will have 375W TDP, an pretty much be priced similarly to that 980ti. Its not even a contest lol.
That would mean 8G should be plenty of system memory, so long as there aren't a lot of other programs loaded in the background eating up the memory.
Of course more is better, but if you already have enough, more won't do anything to help. That's an easy thing to check though, and it's easy enough to just quit background programs and services if that's all the issue is. I don't think that's the problem though.
A new GPU will get your maximum score up to, or maybe a bit better, than what you see if the Minimum test you ran. A new CPU would raise your minimum test scores up, but won't do much for the maximum.
The pickle is that the budget isn't really big enough to upgrade both. If you throw all $300 at a video card, you'd get a nice card that's a worthwhile upgrade (at least double the performance), but you'd still be locked by the CPU. You could probably find a good deal on a used i5-2500 or i7-2700, and still have a couple hundred to throw at the video card, but that won't get you a good upgrade on the video card, it would be faster, but maybe not enough to get you to all the way 60FPS if that's important to you.
I still think your biggest bang here is the GPU, but that being said, there is a strong case to just hold off until you can put together an entire new computer.
I don't think anything is going to get you to 60FPS in cities though - that's more a software optimization issue, and I don't know if there's any amount of hardware that will get you there now.
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
The game is going to have a much bigger CPU bottleneck. Each draw call is more CPU power needed. Considering how many horses are in front of the warehouse, its making a lot of draw calls.The GPU really doesn't care too much about the number of objects in the scene since the depth buffer is a relatively fast calculation. After the depth buffer is done all the other objects don't matter since it calculates per pixel.
MMOs and Strategy games tend to be more CPU-bound. The Core i3 is a really weak CPU. It has good per thread calculations, but right now CPU-bound games are multi-core. This is one area where you want more cores.
Like Quizzical said, if you are looking to replace the mobo you are looking to replace the system. Play with the settings until you are ready to replace the system.