First off let me give you my technical specs: FX-8150 3.6 GHz MSI 990FX-GD65 Mainboard 8 GB Gskill sniper ram 5850 Radeon HD GPU Using this rig in a "stock" configuration I would have to play on low settings just to get 25 FPS in largish battles. Since PS2 is a single core program, a 8 core bulldozer is far from ideal. It has raw power for multi threaded tasks, but lacks in the single core application. After this tweak I still roughly the same FPS, about 40ish on average in mild combat, but running on high settings. The clarity high settings offers has boosted my game experience even using what some might consider "low" FPS. Those are videophiles and I pay no attention to their rantings. All I did was disable cores 5-8 in the bios, and gave the proc a slight over clock of 4.2 GHz (210x20) on stock air, using the NB Voltage at 1.24v. The difference is night and day. Once I get a more solid cooling system, I am looking at 4.8-5GHz and I should get some better performance. Now the only strain I really have is on the GPU which seems to be my bottleneck now in PS2. I hope this info helps those struggling with the lack of love SoE gives to us AMD users.
You could try the new Beta Drivers 12.11 But they mainly work for Crossfire. I run thoughs in Xfire and get about 80 fps in large battles in single monitor, running in muilti-monitors though I get about 30fps in vary large battles. I have everythign set to Medium, but Textures set to Ulrta, I found setting it to that helped FPS, think cuase it runs them non compressed and ATI runs non compress Textures better. to set that to Ultra though you have to goin to your UserOptions.ini file in your games directory and set TextureQuality=0 and set OverallQuality=-1 with is custom in game to get it to read your changes and not revert them every time you load game If non of thoughs settings helps then you going to have to Xfire that card like me to get something deasent out of this game till it fully optimized for AMD, and or AMD gets profiles for this game like they do Xfire. PS watch out when running thoughs drivers in Xfire though, seen that in this game running thoughs beta drivers it gave me 60% boost to play but temp on cards went from 70deg C to 89c in this game only. got new zalmen fans to change out heat sync and fans now runs game at 100% load at only 65 temp 40c idle on Desktop use to run 65 on desktop.
Um, how are you getting +50 frames from disabling a second screen? I get absolutely no benefit what so ever from disabling my second monitor, unless it too small to even notice.
Not all bad, but you got some of it wrong. PS2 is not a single core program, it does however rely heavily on single core performance as it is not yet optimized for running on multiple cores. This however does not mean it will not use more than a single core. The current situation is that adding more cores will not result in a net effect gain, this is mainly caused by heavy load on a single core which the GPU ends up waiting for even though the other cores finished their task. That is why intel cpu's appear to be favoured, they have better core performance and the GPU will have to wait less for the the heavy loaded CPU core to finish. As a result of being heavily CPU hungry the graphic settings has little impact on performance, there are 2-3 settings in there that will affect CPU load, but for the most of it you can increase from low to high settings at the cost of 1-3 fps. There are multiple "optimization" / "low fps" threads here confirming this. Disabling core 5-8 is far less then ideal, this is because the FX series is made up by cores and modules. Where 2 cores share 1 module. To optimize performance you should turn of core 1, 3, 5, 7 and have 0, 2, 4, 8 active. This way you have 1 core for each module so they do not have to share resources. However this was mostly fixed by a Win7 hotfix and you should already have it installed, if you open your taskmanager while playing a game you should be able to see that it is only every 2nd core that has a workload. About overclocking, since you have the FX i strongly suggest you try the multiplier as it allows simple overclock without interacting with the FSB. There has been some saying that PS2 require high bandwidth and fast memory speed. So you might want to try OC'ing your memory speed / timings, if it is set to "auto" or by "SPD" in your bios it is most likely running slower than what it is capable of. Check out the manufacturer's settings first though as OC'ing can shorten life span. You might also want to double-check your HT speed, from what I know it should be at least 3 x the speed of your ram to avoid bottleneck. If you have 1600 mhz ram that means 1600 / 2 = 800mhz *3 = 2400mhz. Im not certain if you know, but the FX-8150 is very power hungry at high voltage/clock settings so if you do not have a good PSU you are likely to experience severe stability problems. Disabling cores should help lowering the power consumption and temperatures though. I OC'd my FX-8320 by 27% from 3,7 to 4,7Ghz and did see a nifty 25-30% increase in fps in game. It took me from 30-33 to 38-40 fps. The game was still CPU hungry though and experimenting with graphic settings gave me an unnoticeable variation in FPS. Last: there is also a built in fps/[CPU]/[GPU] counter/meter that you can access in game by pressing alt+f or shift+f, check the controls if it does not turn on by pressing one of those.
When I wrote "The current situation is that adding more cores will not result in a net effect gain" I meant of course adding more than 4 cores. Some observations show that you get about 2,6 - 3 effective cores (running 100%) regardless of how many cores you actually have.
You can only disable the cores not modules. Using clickbios I can save a screen of my settings. I will edit with a pic later. This is the PSU I have currently. Before I bought the FX-8150 I looked around several Hardware forums at threads asking about power for that proc and nearly all stated 500w would be sufficient. Here is the CPU-Z image of the proc and memory settings. Though money is really tight, I am looking at some cooling options for the processor. Either building my own, or getting either the H80 or H100.
You should be able to up your multiplier and get that proc to 4.2-4.3 Ghz with stock cooler. A good aftermarket and you can push it to 4.7-4.8.
Thanks for the advice, but unfortunately this is nothing new Since the game can just use 4 cores (and not even at full capacity), it's quite obvious that overclocking brings better performance. I think this is valid also for other processors, not just AMD FX. The point is I find unacceptable that overclocking the CPU is the only option players have to get the frame rate one expects from Planetside 2. Before I start working with my PC frequency, SOE has to tell my why is this game just using 25% of my CPU. I know programming multi-core stuff is not easy but this game is out on the market and it's their job to provide their customer a decent performance level.
Unpark cores, tell PS2 to use cores 0,2,4,6 (there's a "start /AFFINITY" commandline you can do as a batch). And install the FX fix patches from Microsoft if you're on Windows 7.
See if there's a BIOS update for your motherboard, MSI are on the downfall in stability from what I've been reading- I owned a few MSI motherboards and had no problems with them but it seems to be with recent motherboards.
At the hospital on my netbook... can you link the info for me to read over, and does this pertain to windows 8 builds as well? Also why 0-2-4-6? I have 5-8 disabled, and I can only do them in pair 5-6 7-8 using clickbios II.
? Not gonna help if it doesn't use all 8 of AMDs cores..... they have a weaker single core performance than Intel but have twice the amount of cores than Intels CPUs. In encoding software, archiving and anything really that loves CPU power the AMD chip often beats the Intel chip by a little bit. However Games really suffer, it's because they ain't multithreaded, there are only a few games that do as well like Crysis 2, CIv 5 or BF3.
Disabled some cores on the Phenom II X6 1055T - no performance increase but even no noticable loss. So that's not the fix for me.
Well, disabling the cores was only a means to use less power. With less heat from power, you can squeeze in a few more MHz into your stock air over clock. In my case 600 MHz. My card is also a limiting factor as well so I started playing at 1400x900 resolution. Hopefully this new client will help.
