What to upgrade?

[mastergeorge]

Hi folks,

I've had my PCS system for a hair over three years now. I've made a couple of changes, but am finding that it's below where I want it to be (a combination of my original budget and 'time passing'). It's been a long time since I was anything close to up to speed on the intricacies of systems, and, now that I'm looking to make some upgrades, I want to make sure I'm directing my attention to the most impactful areas.

Here's what I'm running with right now:

AMD FX-6350 Six Core CPU (4.2/3.9GHZ - 8MB CACHE/AM3+)

ASUS® M5A99X Evo R2.0

8GB KINGSTON HYPER-X GENESIS DUAL-DDR3 1600MHz, X.M.P (2x4)

Two 2GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 770

Corsair CP-9020056-UK RM Series RM850

Reading this back, I've actually replaced the motherboard, added an extra GPU and swapped the power supply since my original order. Adding the second GPU really didn't pan out the way I wanted it, because I seem to get poor or no SLI support where it counts.

So, my questions for those here:

What gaming performance should I be expecting from this setup right now (if it's way out of whack with that, it's probably an artifact of user incompetence while changing components)? And, if I want to actually update this to be more competent, what recommendations would you give? I play games of all ages and types, including current titles such as Hitman and Dishonored 2, which are both also examples of games where I'm seeing very low graphical performance.

Thanks in advance -- I really appreciate the chance to benefit from your knowledge here. If I haven't included any pertinent details or if I've been unclear on anything, please just let me know.

Many thanks,
George

 

[Oussebon]

Reading this back, I've actually replaced the motherboard, added an extra GPU and swapped the power supply since my original order. Adding the second GPU really didn't pan out the way I wanted it, because I seem to get poor or no SLI support where it counts.

In addition to sub optimal SLI support in some games, you may be facing two other issues - CPU bottleneck (a modern Intel i3, maybe even a Pentium, would be better in most games) and only 2gb VRAM.

What performance should I be expecting from this setup right now (if it's way out of whack with that, it's probably an artifact of user incompetence while changing components)? And, if I want to actually update this to be more competent, what recommendations would you give?

That depends on the game. A pair of 770s should probably be able to run most things that don't scale abysmally with SLI on quite high settings, textures notwithstanding.

I would be temped to look at upgrading the CPU possibly once Zen/ Ryzen has been released (AMD's new family of CPUs expected to start coming out in early March). This will also mean upgrading the mobo and the RAM, since they won't be compartible with the new gen.

You may also find yourself wanting to trade in your 770s and get a single card that's about as powerful as that pair could be, but with more VRAM, such as a GTX 1060 or RX 480.

 

[mastergeorge]

(I goofed on the motherboard details; fixed in original post).

Thanks for your reply. I need to run some proper tests on this, but, anecdotally, I'm getting much better performance on lower graphics settings -- does this imply a GPU rather the CPU limitation?

I though the 770s should pack a fair punch, but I'm e.g. on lowest settings on Dishonored 2 to avoid performance issues, and am limited to the lowest on Hitman. Rise of the Tomb Raider is somewhere in the lower mid-range. It mostly seems fairly poor, even accounting for some games having poor SLI support. Does that sound way out of line, implying some other, more fundamental issue?

Trading in the 770s for a single card would be less of a headache, if nothing else...

 

[Oussebon]

I'm getting much better performance on lower graphics settings -- does this imply a GPU rather the CPU limitation?

On its own, that observation doesn't mean either I'm afraid It could be that the higher settings you were on were overwhelming the CPU, or the GPUs.

e.g. in World of Warcraft, turning up Anti Aliasing might reduce FPS due to putting more load on the GPU. Turning up view distance to max will eventually reduce FPS even on my OCed 3770k due to a CPU bottleneck. Sticking with WoW, I vaguely recall when I experimented with this that things like ground clutter increased load on the GPU, but also the CPU, presumably as it had to send more instructions to the GPU to make that happen.

There's someone commenting here on twin 770s SLI and Dishonoured II. https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/5cftyk/dishonored_2_sli_bits/ Apparently they got a bit better performance by using a Witcher 3 profile in Nvidia Inspector.

Hitman's SLI and Crossfire scaling is (or at least was when these articles were written) complete rubbish in Dx11 and not great in DX12:
(DX11) https://uk.hardware.info/reviews/66...game-tested-with-22-gpus-slicrossfire-scaling
(DX12) http://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/hitman-2016-pc-graphics-performance-benchmark-review,8.html
(both) https://www.overclock3d.net/reviews/gpu_displays/msi_gtx1080_gaming_x_sli_review/8

I haven't read the articles in detail, so it might be that guru3d which sees the best performance in DX12 is using a multi-GPU feature built into the game rather than SLI, while the other articles are using actual SLI.

But there's apparently a workaround that gave people upto 96% scaling on SLI (well, a GTX 690) http://www.dsogaming.com/news/hitma...ring-96-scaling-on-two-nvidia-graphics-cards/ in the Hitman beta.
The 690 should be quite close to your 770 SLI, since it's basically two 680s on the same card, and a 770 is basically a 680.

You could experiment with all that, and may as well since you already own the hardware.

 

[mastergeorge]

On its own, that observation doesn't mean either I'm afraid It could be that the higher settings you were on were overwhelming the CPU, or the GPUs.

e.g. in World of Warcraft, turning up Anti Aliasing might reduce FPS due to putting more load on the GPU. Turning up view distance to max will eventually reduce FPS even on my OCed 3770k due to a CPU bottleneck. Sticking with WoW, I vaguely recall when I experimented with this that things like ground clutter increased load on the GPU, but also the CPU, presumably as it had to send more instructions to the GPU to make that happen.

There's someone commenting here on twin 770s SLI and Dishonoured II. https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/5cftyk/dishonored_2_sli_bits/ Apparently they got a bit better performance by using a Witcher 3 profile in Nvidia Inspector.

Hitman's SLI and Crossfire scaling is (or at least was when these articles were written) complete rubbish in Dx11 and not great in DX12:
(DX11) https://uk.hardware.info/reviews/66...game-tested-with-22-gpus-slicrossfire-scaling
(DX12) http://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/hitman-2016-pc-graphics-performance-benchmark-review,8.html
(both) https://www.overclock3d.net/reviews/gpu_displays/msi_gtx1080_gaming_x_sli_review/8

I haven't read the articles in detail, so it might be that guru3d which sees the best performance in DX12 is using a multi-GPU feature built into the game rather than SLI, while the other articles are using actual SLI.

But there's apparently a workaround that gave people upto 96% scaling on SLI (well, a GTX 690) http://www.dsogaming.com/news/hitma...ring-96-scaling-on-two-nvidia-graphics-cards/ in the Hitman beta.
The 690 should be quite close to your 770 SLI, since it's basically two 680s on the same card, and a 770 is basically a 680.

You could experiment with all that, and may as well since you already own the hardware.

Those are some great links, thanks. Will have to check them out properly and test those configs. I'm also going to run some more checks to see if it's a CPU bottleneck, but I ran some benchmarks today (two hour phone meeting...), and what I'm seeing is that, with one card disabled in Device Manager, I'm getting higher performance than with SLI turned on (benchmarked in Rise of the Tomb Raider and Hitman). Regardless of the settings, there's a solid drop when I turn on both cards + SLI. That's definitely a sign that something's not right, right?

 

[Rakk]

Apologies if this doubles up, my reply doesn't appear to have shown up.

When you are new to the forums your posts will often get auto-moderated which means they will not be visible until a mod approves them
PS. I deleted your duplicate post

 

[Oussebon]

Yeah - the most obvious thing would be that those games don't like SLI.

Apparently there was something people needed to do to improve SLI performance in ROTR as well: http://www.dsogaming.com/news/rise-...d-offering-95-sli-scaling-on-two-nvidia-gpus/
https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/913347/no-sli-scaling-in-rise-of-the-tomb-raider-/
Though again that article is a year and old am not sure how it may have been affected by patches since then.

If you have Geforce Experience installed, make sure it's not auto-optimising your game settings and doing silly things like detecting SLI has been enabled and cranking the settings right up.