Why is my FPS so bad on a good machine?

(ayatollah) #1

Got back to playing with the old VPL crew and I have been shocked at the FPS I have been getting. I have fps capped at 76, simply because it is generally far lower. Most maps would average around 40-50 fps but some places, Rail Gun and Radar mostly, reduce it to ~16 fps. My last machine had the game running at least 125 fps, but my new machine doesn’t even come close.

Specs below:
OS: Windows 8 Pro 64-bit
CPU: AMD Athlon II X4 630 Processor 2.80GHz
RAM: 6Gb
GFX: Nvidea GeForce 310 512Mb

To me, I should be running ET like a dream, but it’s quite obviously not. Is there anything else I should check? My config has been altered to remove graphics stuff, like drawgun, etc, but it should still run better even if it was all up full!

Any ideas?

(Dragonji) #2

This is probably the reason of your performance in ET.

Could you please post the configuration of your old machine?

(Nail) #3

I doubt it’s your vid card. Does it run that slow when you host a game ?

(Mateos) #4

I had the same graphic card on my previous laptop, the M version, and was fine.

Threaded Optimization OFF, V-Synce Forced OFF in NVidia panel for ET?

(ayatollah) #5

Dear God! Just did some checks on benchmarking websites and my 2-3 year old GeForce 310 is considerably worse than my last gfx card, the 6-7 year old GeForce 7800 GTX. That is really shocking. Gonna have to upgrade that. I assume this is the problem seeing as I have set the options as stated by Mateos and it also happens when hosting. Strange, I thought before I upgraded to Windows 8 it was fine, obviously not because I’ve just checked QW and Rage too and they are similarly pants.

Any recommendations on some cheap, good cards?

(Fooooo) #6

You should be able to get a 275GTX or higher pretty cheap. (295GTX, even the 300 series or 400 series are probably fairly cheap nowadays.)

Just make sure you stay at or go above the 70/75 line for any series after 200 (270, 370, 470, 570 etc etc), the ones under 70 / 75 are generally much lower performance afaik. The 90’s are the top cards for that series.

I bought my 275GTX around 2 or 3 years ago for $200. Its still going strong, and will run pretty much any game on the highest settings. (as long as you dont have a cpu that is causing a bottleneck…which I used to :tongue: )

Not really sure about ATI/AMD GFX cards but have never really been a fan of them, think my last ati was an x800…

That said, I don’t know your exact specs. (Motherboard , PSU etc) So you may not have the power to run one of those cards I suggested atm…

(Mustang) #7

GTX 550 Ti, you can pick them up for £70ish if you shop around.

(ayatollah) #8

It’s actually a Dell Inspiron 570 so it has a 300W PSU and it’s motherboard is Dell propriatary presumably. I believe it is PCI-e 2.0 x16 so the GTX 550 should work? It seems to benchmark over 8 times that of my piece of crap, so should be good. Am I missing anything? Obviously the PSU isn’t great, but I’ve heard Dell’s PSUs can generally perform a little better than spec, and gfx cards are over estimated?

(Dragonji) #9

300W is way too low for a decent graphics card.

(Indloon) #10

Get Radeon 7770 series card, the cheapest what I could found is this: http://www.msi.com/product/vga/R7770-PMD1GD5.html#?div=Overview costs about 97 euros,127 dollars or 79 British pounds.

But your PSU will stuck with that card, I suggest to get Corsair CX430 PSU, it costs some money, but it’s worth it, good company, high-quality PSU. And buying it wouldn’t cause problems in future if you want to buy a new CPU( prefer Intel, AMD just sucks on CPUs ).

But before even buying some components, make sure that CPU or RAM couldn’t cause a bottleneck!

(Nail) #11

he has a Dell, most use proprietary power supplies so swap outs are usually difficult. I still think his rig as it is should be easily capable of constant 125 fps. My radeon 4350 does it easily and it’s a very low end card

(Dragonji) #12

Well, I’d suggest to test ET on some Linux distro to exclude (or not) your graphics card fault if there is such a possibility.

(Scarhand) #13

Stop talking about graphics cards. ET is very heavily influenced by processor. Sure graphics card makes a difference, but processor is really what matters for ET.

My laptop has a poor processor but excellent graphics card. Plays ET slow (20 FPS) but Skyrim perfectly smoothly. My desktop I used to play on had a good processor and terrible graphics chip, and so could play ET extremely well and Skyrim at 5 FPS.

Try Razer gamebooster. With your processor and that it should play very well, 125 FPS no problem. I have the same processor after all.

(Dragonji) #14

There is no possibility that OS would “kill” his performance so badly…

(Mateos) #15

You just said to try on Linux to see if there’s a diff ^^’

(Dragonji) #16

Well, OP can give it a shot while there aren’t any better ideas around :tongue:

(Ruben0s) #17

Dell… If you want to upgrade parts, buy a new pc. Dell PC’s are hard to upgrade, because they locked almost everything. BTW it’s more likely that your processor is the bottleneck, although your graphic card is not good but you don’t need a good one for et.

(Mateos) #18

He does not need to upgrade, but to find why ET is running like that :confused: Because his config is far enough as pointed Scarhand

(Nail) #19

try with a default config

(ayatollah) #20

Major bump here, but I eventually got around to upgrading my GFX card and it has made ET worse! I upgraded to a Radeon HD 7870 and every other game has improved but ET now runs at less than 10 fps on a hosted game with just me in it! I don’t have a custom config, just using the default Fast config. I don’t know if there is any special settings I should set on the catalyst control centre or anything, but my rig should definitely be able to handle ET! Lol!

Any ideas?