New CPU, Lower FPS

Discussion in 'Player Support' started by zgunner, Dec 21, 2014.

  1. zgunner

    Recently upgraded to an FX-6300 so I could play the new Dragon Age, and it works very well for that game. I get a solid 45 FPS on lowest settings. My old CPU was an Athlon x2 270 which of course could not even run DA above 5 FPS. but can seemingly play PS2 just fine.

    With my old dual-core, I would average 30-50 FPS, with it dropping pretty low in really big battles(of course). The game performed pretty much how I expected it to.

    Now that I have upgraded, the game is mostly unplayable. After starting the game and pressing Alt+F I literally will watch my FPS jump around from 15 up to crazy numbers like 300 for a split second(even with smoothing). None of my 6 cores go above 30% usage. I have spent at least an hour trying tons of different settings, none of them giving stable framerates.

    Only two things have worked and allowed me to play with stable FPS. Someone posted a thread recently about setting the shader values in Graphics.ini to FALSE, and that seemed to stabilize my FPS. However it stays at 20, rarely going any higher or lower.

    The other is going to msconfig and setting my PC to boot with only 2 cores. With only 2 cores running I can actually get decent framerates, but they aren't exactly that stable, and it will still randomly drop sometimes to 15 or lower.



    It's nice to see that the 64bit client is actually utilizing more than 4gb or RAM, but it does not utilize the multiple cores at all. In terms of playing this game, I was better off with a dual-core. I would just like to know why. I understand a lot of games don't handle multiple cores very well, but to get FPS jumping from 15 all the way to 300 is just ridiculous.
  2. The Original Ace

    My post about turning off the shaders basically just removes a little bit more load from the CPU so that it has more power for rendering the absolutely ******** amount of (unoptomized) entities you come across in big battles, or in general if your render distance is set high. Take away all other visible players and you'll probably be stable at 300.

    First off, I've read a lot (A LOT) about CPU's and how they relate to this game - mostly because I'm planning a new rig - and if there's one recurring theme it is that this game hates AMD CPU's. I don't know why exactly, I haven't gone into it because I have no intention to buy AMD. Honestly, AMD is quite literally the "knock-off" of Intel technology... it's 50% less in price for a reason.

    Unfortunately your 6 cores are basically worthless from a Planetside 2 point of view. My Core2Duo E8500 will perform better with it's square wheels than your lambo-in-comparison chip will. I do apologize that I can't give you specifics as to -why- such is the case, I'll freely admit I do not know why... but any amount of bing searching will confirm.

    I did read an article that showed different results among different chips with forcing windows 7 to manage multiple cores instead of allowing the game to do it, but im not sure how this works. Easy to find if you search it. Also, unpark your cores if you haven't already.
  3. BlackDove

    I can and have given specific as to why a dual core pentium runs this game better than his "six core" AMD.

    It has to do with the fact that AMDs CPUs(not their APUs) use a terrible two core per module architecture that wraps each pair of cores in the interconnect, thereby bottlenecking each pair and making two cores perform less than one of Intels cores.

    Their architecture is just outdated and bad. Thats the problem.
    • Up x 2
  4. zgunner


    While what you say might be true, my last processor was an AMD Athlon x2 270, and it ran this game pretty decently for a dual-core. Even back during beta before they screwed the game up, I was averaging 30-45 FPS.

    Every other "new" game I have tested my FX-6300 on has played pretty well. PS2 is the only game that runs worse with multiple cores.

    You can blame AMD all you want. It's obvious to me that SOE is at fault here.
  5. Razeel

    Maybe but this 'knowledge' doesn't help u play planetside :confused:
    1. lower all setting to zero and run naked around house with shaman tambourine :p
    IF for some unexplained reason 1 step didn't help...;)
    2. try to assign PlanetSide2_x64.exe to 1-2-3-4 cores(http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ee851672.aspx)
    first only 1 core then +1 every check.
    BTW if y'r using 32b client or x86 windows nothing in this world would help u.
  6. Ruxxis

    My guess is your new cpu is downclocking or turning off modules (to save energy) in Planetside 2 because average cpu usage is low (30% or less). Your old two-core cpu was running near 100% usage which is why it would not downclock. Dtagon Age is very multi-threaded which means your new cpu wont downclock and therefore fps will be high.

    The solution is to go into bios and disable anything which causes the cpu to downclock such as energy/power saving features.
    Don't ask me exactly what settings to change. If you are a serious PC gamer, then spend time to learn what everything in the bios does and optimize it.

    Since you are running windows 7, I recommend downloading and installing the Bulldozer hotfix for windows 7.
    The hotfix will slightly improve performance by trying to distribute processing load across all the modules, instead of processing everything in only 1 or 2 modules. google/bing search to find bulldozer hotfix.

    Technically, your cpu is not a bulldozer cpu but possibly it can still benefit from the bulldozer hotfix for windows 7.
    I installed the hotfix on my Athlon x4 PC (also not bulldozer) with windows 7.
    By the way, Windows 8 does not require this hotfix.

    Much tech advice on this forum (and other game forums) is incorrect. Sad to see many PC gamers who don't know PC hardware basics.
  7. tigerchips

    No, the problem is that PS2 are being sponsored by Nvidia.
  8. BlackDove

    Which is why his CPU sucks?

    And if the Athlon wasnt Bulldozer then he did downgrade.
  9. zgunner

    Limiting my CPU to using one core per module has allowed me to finally get some stable frames. I just used task manager to disable 1 core per module and I am now getting a steady 40-50 FPS, on Esamir at least.

    So if you have an AMD with more than 4 cores I recommend disabling one of your cores per module. From what I have read in previous threads it is different for some. In my case(a six core AMD) I disabled core 0, 2, and 4. If that doesn't work try the opposite which would be 1, 3, and 5. It's the only way I have been able to keep my FPS from jumping around.
  10. Mogsy

  11. player16

    i want to buy that one also what i did i have a phenom 2 and i limited the frame rate after the graphics card got fried, i play with shadows now maybe it helps just saying i always have the cpu blue thing but it has not gone down to 30 fps even in biolabs.
  12. Tyrant103

    How is your CPU usage on other games?