By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close

Forums - PC Discussion - Need some PC expert help... Gtx 1080???

Conina said:
BlueFalcon said:

Your CPU is a huge bottleneck for GTX1080 at 1080p. The most you should buy is a GTX1070. Future proofing with a 1080 is a waste of time and money. You picked the worst time to buy a 1080 since NV is rumored to be launching 1080Ti around March 10th (PAX East). Sell the RX480 and get the cheapest open-air cooled on-blower GTX1070. Later on, sell your processor and buy a used 6700K/7700K and then upgrade to Volta in 2018-2019.

His CPU is a huge bottleneck? Even an ancient i5-2500K (not overclocked) is more than enough in most (not all) games:

 

Try to use more than 1 data source to draw conclusions, especially since Computerbase.de didn't provide the test scenes or videos to confirm they were testing CPU-limited sections of those games. It's also important to consider that frequent drops below 60 fps aren't reflected by those charts since we were not provided with frame times data.

Even Digital Foundry shows 2500K lacking compared to modern processors:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2016-is-it-finally-time-to-upgrade-your-core-i5-2500k

Read this thread and watch the 2 videos comparing 6400 to 6400 OC - in some games games, it's sufficient while in others it dips well under 60 fps while 6400@4.6Ghz flies:

https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/techno-kitchen-i5-6400-3-1-ghz-vs-i5-6400-4-5ghz-w-gtx1060-2ghz-cpu-bottlenecking-explored.2492314/

I5-6400 is a massive bottleneck in many titles compared to the same CPU at 4.4-4.6Ghz. As I said, the OP should lower some settings or get a GTX1070 and then upgrade to a new CPU/platform down the line. 

I would also download HWMonitor, GPU-Z and MSI Afterburner to ensure there is no CPU/GPU thermal throttling. He needs to confirm that his card doesn't indeed run at 1266mhz and the CPU runs at least at 2.7Ghz. 

As I mentioned in my first post, various forms of AA such a simple MSAA/UberSampling in the Witcher games or SSAA in Tomb Raider, etc. are very GPU intensive and can easily bring 780Ti and R9 290X to 30-40 fps minimums. I am not trying to suggest that CPU is the primary problem here. However, should the OP upgrade to a GTX1070/1080, the CPU bottleneck will grow even more. 

It's easy to see a CPU bottleneck - drop the graphics settings from Ultra to High/Medium, and if performance barely goes up and minimums still tank, the graphics card is CPU bottlenecked. I would try other games and play around with the graphical settings. 

One other suggestion, put Windows power settings into High Performance mode, NOT balanced mode:

https://www.google.ca/amp/www.howtogeek.com/240840/should-you-use-the-balanced-power-saver-or-high-performance-power-plan-on-windows/amp/

I've encountered various cases where running Windows in anything other than High Performance mode sometimes cause she the CPU/GPU clocks to fluctuate significantly during gaming. Running Witcher 2 at 30 fps shows the OP enabled Uber-Sampling, has super-sampling set in his Radeon control panel, or there are some other issues with CPU/GPU utilization/clock speeds. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



Around the Network
ps3-sales! said:
setsunatenshi said:
The most important question is, what monitor do you have, which resolutions are you trying to achieve?

As others pointed out, if you buy a gtx 1080, that CPU will bottleneck you like crazy. I would suggest the following, unless you're really hurting for a new machine, give it a few months and see what AMD comes up with both on the CPU and GPUs (Ryzen and Vega).

The rumors are pretty strong that the IPC improvements will make them the better choice against the latest from Nvidia and Intel. Especially on a price/performance analysis.

Also, there's no such thing as future proofing a PC. You should always buy the most balanced machine you can afford for the display that you want to use.

I have a 144hz AOC monitor. 1080p. 

Yeah... I am just impatient lol. I shouldn't have gotten this pre built pc. should have built my own xD. 

I just want to play games at 60fps at 1080p at close to max settings. Is that too much to ask for?? heh.

Another question... if i wanted to keep my rx 480 could i just outright upgrade my cpu? would that help? another guy suggested throwing in an ssd which most people highly suggest.

Awesome, thanks for clarifying that. 1 question though... If you have a 144Hz monitor why is your target 60 fps? You should be looking at 144 really. 

 

So let me save you some money... Don't buy the 1080 for 1080p gaming. In some games you wont achieve the 144fps but the limit there will be your cpu, which for that case, buy a gtx 1070 and a really good cpu.

 

The i'm saying this only if you really do have a lot of disposable income and/or an absolute need to upgrade. Failing this I sincerely think you should wait for Ryzen and Vega. I bought my new rig last september and i would have waited as well if my graphics card hadn't died. I really needed it for bf1.

 

So yeah... Wait a couple of months if you can, and if not just go gtx 1070, you'll be throwing cash down the toilet for a 1080 in 1080p gaming



Knitemare said:

Yeah, I have a 4th gen Core I5 (4670k)and it does just well.

I have a SLI of two GTX 980 and can do 5760 x 1080p in medium to high @45 fps... EDIT: @45 fps in the Witcher 3.

Ya, but the OP might be running his games maxed out with heavy MSAA/SSAA/Uber Sampling. 

I am going to link the games OP mentioned with hard data. RX 480 ~ R9 290X.

The Witcher 2 - 43 fps minimums / 49 fps averages

In CPU demanding sections of this game, a 2.7-3.0Ghz i5 is going to hover in the low 40 fps range as far as minimums are concerned.

http://gamegpu.com/retro-test-gpu/the-witcher-2-assassins-of-kings-20011-retro-test-gpu.html

 

Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag

- 43 fps minimums / 51 fps averages on R9 290X with SMAA

35 fps minimums / 41 fps averages on R9 290X with MSAA 4X

CPU wise, not possible to maintain 60 fps minimums without an overclocked i5. 

http://gamegpu.com/action-/-fps-/-tps/assassin-s-creed-4-black-flag-test-gpu.html

Skyrim Special Edition 

RX 480 cannot maintain 60 fps minimums at 1080p.

And a sub-3 Ghz i5 will also have dips below 60 fps with an RX 480

http://gamegpu.com/rpg/%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%B2%D1%8B%D0%B5/the-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim-special-edition-test-gpu

The best quick fix is to sell the RX 480 and upgrade to a $360 GTX1070. 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA65C4VD6807&cm_re=gtx_1070-_-14-125-893-_-Product

Then take the $200+ saved from not buying a GTX1080 and start saving up for either a 6700K/7700K drop-in (and sell the i5-6400 to recoup some resale value) or consider 6-8 core Skylake-X/Zen platform. There are rumors that AMD may have a 3.4Ghz Zen 8-core 16 threads priced as low as $349-399. That would be a hell of a deal since with PS5/XB2 possibly launching in 2019-2020, we should start to see even more games taking advantage of more than 4 threads. 

Some people always claim their i5 2500K/3570K/4670K/i5 6600K, etc. + RX480/1060/GTX980 rig runs all games at 60 fps but anecdotal experience doesn't align with hard facts when tested by professional reviewers. For example, Watch Dogs 2 on maxed out settings will crush even a $600 GTX1080. The key with such poorly optimized titles is to change the IQ/graphical settings in the game. 

Also, the newer games are using > 4 threads and an i5 simply cannot keep up with some of them. In Watch Dogs 2, the January 2011 i7-2600K is faster than the August 2015 i5-6600. Even the 8 module FX9590 is faster than the i7-4770K. More and more games are going to take advantage of at least 8 threads in the future. 

http://gamegpu.com/action-/-fps-/-tps/watch-dogs-2-test-gpu

While I am responding, I'll also add that both the Witcher 2-3 and all modern Assassin's Creed games also run faster on NV hardware. 

http://gamegpu.com/action-/-fps-/-tps/assassin-s-creed-unity-test-gpu.html

Assassin's Creed Syndicate is even worse. R9 290X/GTX780TI/GTX970 can drop < 30 fps averages at 1080p fully maxed out.


With AA

http://gamegpu.com/action-/-fps-/-tps/assassins-creed-syndicate-test-gpu.html

They don't call it Ubifail for nothing :) Ubisoft's open-world games are notorious for being poorly optimized. 



ps3-sales! said:
Pemalite said:

 

First question is first.
What type of Radeon 480 do you have? There is a fairly large performance delta between the vanilla 4Gb RX 480 and and say... An 8Gb RX 480 Overclocked edition from like every manufacturer.

As for your games...

1) Black Flag is a Ubisoft game. Enough said. - Disable V-Sync or download Radeon Pro and use adaptive V-Sync, turn off HBAO+/SSAO and TXAA.
The RX 480 should be more than capable of hitting and maintaining 60fps in this title. So something is up with your rig, try fixing the problem instead of throwing money away on a new GPU which might not fix the issue.

Skyrim and the Witcher are CPU heavy. Skyrim was never a well optimized game anyway and uses an abundance of scripting. - Are you running the Special Edition which uses the Fallout 4 engine?
There are mods which can increase the amount of DRAM Skyrim can use (If you aren't using the special edition), optimize the scripting etc'.

Witcher 2 is older. Disable Ubersampling, edit the configuration file to set the FPS limit at 60 and increase the render ahead count to 2.

***

With that said, Polaris, Aka. The Radeon RX 480 was never supposed to be a high-end card, people had unrealistic expectations. (Mostly because of the flops.)

It was priced and targeted as a mid-range card, so your expectations need to be aligned to match.

As for upgrading to a Geforce 1080, utterly pointless.
Your motherboard is low-end, your CPU is average... So one must assume you are only gaming at 1080P and lower anyway, so a Geforce 1080 is a waste.
You would be better served with the Geforce 1070 or upgrading the rest of your rig.

Or better yet. Upgrade none of it and get an SSD. - Using a 5400rpm must suck hardcore, how do you handle having to wait for everything to load?

i have the vanilla 4 gb version lol. 

i edited OP. i have the 7200rpm sorry heh. still bad though. a lot of people have been recommeded an ssd for windows/games. but honestly my load times aren't really terrible. 

 

i've asked a coupple others but is it possible for me to just upgrade my cpu on my current build? the only things are would my psu and motherboard support it...

That's probably your problem right there. The 4GB is probably bottlenecking the performance in certain games that require more VRAM. 

You might be able to improve performance if you can turn down VRAM heavy settings like texture quality and render distance. Also be careful which anti-aliasing settings you choose as some are far more RAM heavy than others. Most other settings (with a few exceptions) can probably be turned up to max, althought they will all have a small contribution to VRAM usage. Resolution, textures, render distance and anti-aliasing are the main culprits to VRAM usage though. 

Games like Skyrim also have pages full of ways to optimise them to Oblivion...



something seems wrong with your system. I got a r9 280x with 3gb, I can run witcher 3 on high / ultra with 35-40 fps, I play assassins creed rogue right now with constant 60 fps. and on witcher 2 I had 35 fps with my old hd 6950 (without ubersampling). my cpu is also weaker.



Around the Network
ps3-sales! said:

i have the vanilla 4 gb version lol. 

i edited OP. i have the 7200rpm sorry heh. still bad though. a lot of people have been recommeded an ssd for windows/games. but honestly my load times aren't really terrible. 

 

i've asked a coupple others but is it possible for me to just upgrade my cpu on my current build? the only things are would my psu and motherboard support it...

The biggest advantage of an SSD is latency. It's responsiveness.

I can click on any program and it loads instantly, it is a night and day difference over a mechanical drive, the stupidly fast load times are great as well of course.
Mechanical drives tend to top out at around 150MB/s in sequential reads where an SSD can happily hit 500MB/s on even a budget drive.

SSD's can be one of the best upgrades you can have, especially for older systems to give them a new lease on life.
Most casual people wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a 10 year old Core 2 Quad @ 3ghz+ and a Core i7 7700K with casual web browsing, email and facebook, but they would certainly notice the difference between an SSD and Mechanical Disk Drive.

***

Provided the motherboard is what you say it is. Then yes. You can upgrade your CPU.
A Core i7 7700K will likely be the best CPU you can buy for that motherboard.

And then you will still wish to buy a new GPU anyway, suddenly things start to get expensive.

Personally, I would stick with what you have for the time being.
Vega and Zen is coming, even if they don't retake the performance crown, nVidia and Intel will respond with lower prices... And it's not like you are unable to play games yet.

Your PSU should be fine with it. You aren't jumping massively in TDP's here.


Scoobes said:

That's probably your problem right there. The 4GB is probably bottlenecking the performance in certain games that require more VRAM. 


The 4Gb Radeon RX 480 also runs slower than the 8Gb version, the RAM is clocked lower.

BlueFalcon said:

Your CPU is a huge bottleneck for GTX1080 at 1080p.

That would be an accurate assumption. Provided the game is CPU heavy.

BlueFalcon said:

Honestly, your processor will even bottleneck the GTX1070. Modern games use 4-8 threads and your only have an i5. On top of that, when all 4 cores are loaded, your CPU only runs at 2.7Ghz!

 

Load of rubbish.
Majority of games are built for 4 threads, just because a game might support more CPU threads, doesn't mean it will use them.
All of Blizzards games are built for 2 threads for instance.

The advantage of having more threads isn't for the game itself, it's for background tasks.
Having things like the Virus Scanner, xSplit, Transcoding, Web Browser, Game Clients and OS stuff all running in the background is where the extra threads really start to come into it's own... As none of it has to compete with the same threads as the game.

Besides, Hyperthreading can actually *reduce* performance in some edge cases anyway.

I have been running a 6 core processor for the last 7 years and a 6 Core/12 Thread processor for 5+ years, thus I can speak from first hand experience.

Plus there is more to performance than the amount of Threads/Cores a CPU has, Intel will Castrate it's i5's by using lower clockspeeds and less cache to go along with the removal of Hyperthreading... Comparatively, one of the reasons my CPU has aged so well is because of how much cache it has.

BlueFalcon said:

You would be 10x better off building an 8-core Zen or 7700K/6800K overclocked system after reselling your mobo/CPU and getting a 1070 with the $ saved from buying a 1080.


From the Engineering Samples, per-core performance of Zen is roughly inline with Intels Core i5, thus in heavily threaded scenario's the 8-core Zen falls in between the 6 and 8 core Intel chips, but uses as much energy as Intel's Octo core processor.
In lightly threaded scenario's (Majority of games) Zen comes up a little short.

We knew this was going to happen due to AMD's insistence of not having a unified L3 cache, AMD split the L3 cache pools to reduce cost at the expense of performance.
Converesly, AMD isn't providing any high-end motherboards to go with Zen.

The big advantage of waiting for Zen though is Intels response with lower pricing.


BlueFalcon said:

You are also memory bandwidth bottlenecked. DDR4-2400 isn't fast enough for Skylake. DDR4-3000 is minimum to alleviate the bottleneck of 6700K/7600K/7700K. In your case it doesn't matter since your CPU is slow but should you upgrade to faster CPUs, that RAM bottleneck will show up at 1080p when using a GPU as powerful as the 1080:

Wrong.
DDR memory speed is for the most part. Irrellevent.

What does enjoy the faster memory speeds is Integrated Graphics, not the CPU.
He would end up spending hundreds on new memory for a couple of FPS, when that could be better spent on a better CPU, GPU or Motherboard.

So keep the old memory. DDR4-2400 is fine.

BlueFalcon said:
Conina said:

His CPU is a huge bottleneck? Even an ancient i5-2500K (not overclocked) is more than enough in most (not all) games:

Try to use more than 1 data source to draw conclusions, especially since Computerbase.de didn't provide the test scenes or videos to confirm they were testing CPU-limited sections of those games. It's also important to consider that frequent drops below 60 fps aren't reflected by those charts since we were not provided with frame times data.

Even Digital Foundry shows 2500K lacking compared to modern processors:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2016-is-it-finally-time-to-upgrade-your-core-i5-2500k

Digital foundry isn't contradicting Conina.

Only in Grand Theft Auto 5 did the 2500K drop under 60fps.

But who the heck would be running the old 2500K at stock in 2017? Overclocked it's competitive with the i5 6500. And it costs you nothing extra.
Sandy Bridge chips LOVE to be overclocked, it's also a heap of fun. My Sandy-Bridge chip will happily hit 4.8Ghz reliably 24/7 and out-bench the latest Kaby Lake processors at stock.

Plus even Digital Foundries states that the Core i5 2500K is more than perfectly viable for 60fps gaming. - For CPU and GPU's though, I find Anandtech to be a better source of information than Digital Foundry.



--::{PC Gaming Master Race}::--

Wait for AMDs next generation of graphics cards.
The cards do not change that much between MSI or ASUS, or other; Just get what you like the look of the most (unless it won't fit in your case).