[BUG] Only 40 FPS with an overclocked GTX970... REALLY????

It seems like I am getting CPU bottlenecked, which is absolutely ridicolus because I have a 3570k overclocked to 4.6 GHz. I can play any AAA title including Doom, BF4, you name it at 1080p, all max settings, and never dip below 60 FPS even in heavy battles. But in Planetside 2 (which is far older and has worse graphics than modern AAA titles), the CPU load is so high that the load on my GPU hovers around 30%. What gives????

I'm running 1080p resolution on all max settings, which my computer should be more than capable of handling considering it can run far more advanced games on all max settings with a constant 60 FPS.

Planetside 2 relies heavily on CPU because it's a much larger scale than those modern AAA games you're use to. When you have 100+ players condensed in 500x500m area all firing weapons, explosions are going off, bullets are flying, thousands of calculations going on every second to compensate... it lays heavy on the CPU, GPU is relatively unimportant in this game.

Pretty much what he said.

You could have the best GPU in the world and still get horrible FPS if your CPU isnt good enough.
I suspect being CPU heavy is why MMOFPS games arent more popular.

All the above is great, but remember, PS2 has basically **** itself in the FPS department lately. On a PC I used to run almost 200FPS on occasion, now I can hardly manage getting +90.

Agreed with Gundem, I also got a drastic performance loss since last patches. I was told that they were working on it, but actually ps4 seems to be more important

No, It's not a recent thing.

PS2 is extremely CPU-bound. Most games are the other way around, but PS2 is unusual due to it's scale and number of entities it needs to track in a large fight.

Obviously when you are CPU bound it does not matter in the slightest if you have an amazing GPU - so all that is a red herring.

Also, comparing PS2 with games like Doom is not helpful. The latter tracks a handful of entities at most in a very local area and with no network reliance. The former tracks hundreds of entities locally, thousands remotely, and has to update all this via network. They are fundamentally very different games in terms of the underlying program code that is required. Expecting them to act the same in terms of system requirements is naive in the extreme.

So yes, PS2 is very CPU heavy. Yes, it is sometimes hard to get consistently good performance even if you have a top-end rig.
It's very possible that it could be made even better, but considering what the game actually computes I'm not really surprised as the status quo.

-Stigma

Instead of having everything maxed out, try putting shadows on low and cutting down your render distance.

I also run with a GTX 970 and a i7 4790k 4.0GHz and get a good 90 frames in most fights.

See if you had 6 cores you would only be running at 33% on all 5 cores.... !!!! Just keep telling me you don't need 6 cores...!
As I laugh my way to 60 fps....! With SLI and 6 cores... !! Ya 4.6 ghz 4 core cpu is going to beat a 6 core I7 CPU.... hahahahahahah and I only run at 3.3 ghz not even working hard.


4 cores CPU is old technology 6 & 8 cores is the new gaming standard.... I don't want to here about 4 cores.....!

The new x99 cpu has 10 cores....

Please, stop spreading nonsense. A 10 core CPU, a 20 core CPU, a 100 ******* core CPU will not run any better then a good 4 core CPU overclocked to 4.5GH'z.

Games do not multi-thread very well. They benefit more from single core performance then they do quantity of cores. Just look at the AMD Vs. Intel Benchmarks will ya.

Could you do me a favor and turn off hyperthreading and see what % of CPU you get? You may actually gain some performance too as some games don't play well with HT.

FYI: If you're seeing 33% usage max that means PS2 is running on 4 threads. 12x.33=3.96
Once you disable HT the usage should move to around 66%.

I once long time ago I ran 4 cores... maxed out at about 80% on 4 cores.... PS2 (current PS2) is made to run on 5 cores as is follows that PS2 / PS4 uses 5 cores... and the PC version is the BETA for PS4... this idea that PS2 is made to run on 4 cores is just stupid. The DEV have side time and time again that the PC version is for upgrading PS4. They have dumbed down the graphics as it is, to run on 4 cores.

PS2 is not going to get better.... graphics wise... its going to get worse for 4 core people. PS2 PC is not made for a 4 core PC any more.... get that through you head....! 5 core+

And this idea that 4 core is for game is just beyond stupid intels X99 low end processor is 4 core at $200.00+
there 6 cores is little more than $300 the 8 core is a little mores that $400 the 10 core is $2500.00 that is going to drop...

Forget 4 cores for PS2 those days are gone.....! If you don't like the PC version get a PS4.

Gods, how much wrong can you get in a single post? ...

His GPU was at 30% because he was CPU limited, not his CPU.

By DEFINITION you can't be CPU bound unless at least ONE of your cores is nearing 100% - and having more cores (assuming they are individually slower than the alternative) will only be a further hindrance in games that aren't extremely well multithreaded (and games inherently tend to be hard/impossible to achieve optimal multithreading in).

"See if you had 6 cores you would only be running at 33% on all 5 cores"
You haven't the faintest clue how CPU loadbalancing works. Please do some reading.
If you don't even know the basics, please stop giving people advice on the internet.

-Stigma

You're only getting 60? With a single GPU and a quad core CPU I get over 100 in a decent fight. 160 in a relatively empty base.

Number of cores doesn't guarantee performance in PS2.

The game was running really well for me after OMFG and OMFG2 (and I still had a GTX 660 at that point, not a GTX 970) but each new patch they have done since then the performance just gets worse and worse. Bases where I used to get 120FPS (with relatively low player numbers mind you) I now see drops to 40-50FPS.

I have an i5-2500K @ 4.5ghz and OCed GTX 970 and the game has never made good use of my CPU or GPU (about 50-60% on CPU and 25-30% on GPU), but it at least used to run a lot smoother. I know it will never happen but at this point I would rather have them just revert all of the patches they have done in the last year. A smooth running game with less "content" is better than one that runs like crap but has more "content".

Don't bother with him, he's obsessed with the idea that more CPU cores will magically give you higher performance.

He thinks that my 4670k@4.5GH'z/GTX 970 OC'd to 1.55GH'z is a low tier setup.

I'd love to see his reaction if he played Everquest 2. That game sh-ts on multicores you literally need to brute force it with clock speed. But runs great on a 1.83ghz dual core. The first EQ with all the advanced settings would probably run choppy on his setup too. Ironically those games are decades old.

So, absolutely no game designer will ever design new games based on new technology. We'll never expect games to use multithreading efficiently and PC's that run EQ2 well will always run every new game that comes it perfectly.

That's about what your saying right?

I'm not sure what you are getting at, but to my knowledge, PC gaming isn't really all that compatible with multi-core hardware.

Game Engines are just too random and unpredictable(For a CPU's logical standard), one second there could be nothing and the next, BOOM, massive explosion with thousands of particles everywhere. Such a random workload cannot really be "Evenly" distributed.

I have yet to see a game tax all four of my CPU cores since I've been using quad cores in 2007. In 9 years there hasn't been one thusfar. What evidence do you think you have that could change my mind about the next decade?

I've not so jokingly commented to my friends about the best thing about a hexcore is you can six-box your own group in Everquest without any jitter. That's about what multicores give you the ability to do, multitask. Sure many games have multicore support, but that's usually offloading some low key process like a UI element or whatnot, so it doesn't slow down the main processes.

The main processes, the meat and potatoes of the game in question, is almost never put on multiple cores. At most I've seen is two. And even that is a rarity.. and how long have dual cores been a thing?

Speaking of new technologies.. where's PhysX particles in PS2 at?

Yeah, maybe.

I remember an old pc guy telling me once that gpu's were just a stepping stone. That one day CPU's would be so powerful all processes would be run on the cpu itself. Who knows. That could very well still be true. But that was back when clock speed hadn't plateaued. I think we envisioned back then cpus running at terahertz by now.

I sure as **** hope games start using multithreading. I would hate to think that games have gotten as complex as they're going to get and having better more realistic graphics is all that we will see in the next 10 yrs. How about realistic physics and realistic deformation or creation of the in game world. How about hundreds or thousands of in game AIs instead of the simple NPCs running simple scripts. Think you'd need more than a single or double cpu to process that kind of thing? I hope we get games like that in the next 10 yrs