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Hardware upgrade and low fps


Falconeer

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Hello guys,

im having a somewhat strange problem with SB Pro.

I recently bought a gtx 750 TI (former card was a gtx 560) and my fps with this card is lower than my old one. On most maps, i feel like my system is barely reaching 30 fps.

I did remove and reinstalled the latest Nvidia drivers, played around with config settings in Nvidia profiler and also turned off every eye-candy ingame. None of these made a real difference.

I also reinstalled SB Pro version 3.027 and deleted the config file and also these changes had no effect.

Also made sure my card is not running on adaptive power management. Im kinda on a dead end now, or maybe im missing something here... Im running the 64 bit exe of SB pro.

System specs:

- Win 7 64-bit with SP1

- Asus p8h61 MoBo

- 8 Gb DDR3 1300 mHz

- Intell i5 2500 3,3 GHz (quad core)

- GTX 750TI (Strixs version) (2 GB)

- 2x Hitachi 500 Gb Sata HD

- Nexus 600W power supply

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In the age of counterfeit products and chip relabeling ... it may sound like a long shot, and probably it is, but are you SURE that you got a GTX 750Ti?

It's probably more likely that there is some configuration issue (not that I have yet an idea what it may be) ... but one shouldn't rule out the possibility of a lesser GPU being relabeled as a more potent item, to be sold at much higher profit margins. It has happened before. Do the NVidia driver tools (right-click the desktop, select the NVidia driver entry from the context menu) actually show a GTX750?

What about the Device Manager entry?

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I'm always wary about everything "shared memory". Given that of the 3GByte video memoy only 1 GByte are actually "owned" by the graphics card and that usage beyond that threshold must inevitably lead to some performance loss, I wonder if the old card simply had more physical video memory.

Do you still have it/have the exact model and brand of manufacture?

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Sorry to say,

but the 750 Ti is not superior to the 560 in all aspects, especially the memory bandwidth is significantly lower on the 750 Ti:

560: 133.1 GB/s

750 Ti: 86.4 GB/s

The main issue here is the bus width, which has been cut in half:

560: 256bit

750 Ti: 128bit bus.

Same is true for the render output processors:

560: 32

750 Ti: 16

All in all, the GPU and memory clockspeed only is a marketing number. The real performance is a combination of many things, and SteelBeasts is heavy on bandwidth.

Unfortunately, this is exactly where the 750 Ti lacks significantly.

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Yes, most likely. The memory bandwidth numbers don't lie. ;)

If you still can return the 750 Ti, the 760 *is* a definite improvement over the 560 in the memory bandwidth area and does not cost overly much.

Regardless what you do, you should never choose a GPU with a 128bit memory bus. Always aim for >= 256bit, especially if you're planning on playing in >= full HD resolutions. 128bit can be ok, but only at fairly low resolutions where the bandwidth needed to fill the screen is not an issue to begin width.

Edited by dunc
typo
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Can it also explain why other games\sims did have an improvement?

For example, my most played sim, falcon bms runs quite smooth with this card, while with the 560, i needed to turn most shaders off, for smooth flight

Falcon , didnt it come out in 98 ?

Maybe it requires less memory bandwidth.

I agree with dunc on the bandwidth , I would never get a card which is less than 256bit bandwidth.

I am using a 6-7 year old Nvidia Gefore 9800GT with 1GB ram but it has 256 bit bandwidth. Runs everything i can throw at it, Including Steelbeasts and GTA V.

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Can it also explain why other games\sims did have an improvement?

For example, my most played sim, falcon bms runs quite smooth with this card, while with the 560, i needed to turn most shaders off, for smooth flight

Sure it can explain that. :)

While the 750 Ti lacks in memory bandwidth in comparison to the 560, it nevertheless has other areas where it is superior. Especially the number of shader units has been increased quite a bit:

560: 336 units

750 Ti: 640 units

Also, the texture fill rate is much higher:

560: 50.4 GTexel/s

750 Ti: 82.64 GTexel/s

So... the actual FPS that you get with a specific game depends on where the GFX engine needs the most power. With SB, it's memory bandwidth (560 wins). With other games, it might be shaders or fill rate (750 Ti wins).

Edited by dunc
typo
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Thx for explaining. I learned something new :bigsmile:

is there a way to squeeze some more performance out of this setup? For example 16 bit textures or so?

all other settings inside SB didnt make much of an improvement.....

Try to do following steps...

1) From Main Menu go to "Options" and then select "Graphics"; then in pop-up menu disable or reduce all settings- HDR blooming, anti aliasing, shadow mapping and volumetric clouds.

2) Select "Terrain detail distance" and reduce settings thre by moving sliders to the left; start with ground cover slider first, and the try to adjust other 2(note, those are controlling your own visual range, not AI`s)

3) Select "Display" and reduce size of Z-Buffer from 24 to 16 bits; you can also try to disable VSync(this actually can cause more harm than help). Also you can try to reduce resolution or select windowed mode(and reduce window size).

...And don't expect really big and sound improvements in frame rates. :(

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I would not recommend a Z buffer reduction. It only creates really bad flickering of objects at medium to far distances and doesn't offer a performance boost. That said, the user's manual has a section about ways to bood your frame rate (at the expense of image quality in the widest sense). It's all about trade-off; hardware limits are hardware limits.

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Regardless what you do, you should never choose a GPU with a 128bit memory bus. Always aim for >= 256bit, especially if you're planning on playing in >= full HD resolutions. 128bit can be ok, but only at fairly low resolutions where the bandwidth needed to fill the screen is not an issue to begin width.

A full bus is ideal but usually not available for those who are looking at budget vid cards. Vid cards are definitely one of those things that you get what you pay for.

Another possibility for low throughput is using a single link DVI cable. Depending on the monitor resolution and refresh rate, a dual link can improve things.

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Pressing ALT-F12 in SB will give you the frame rate counter.

Here's a link to a benchmark scenario: http://www.steelbeasts.com/Downloads/p13_sectionid/267/p13_fileid/1630

Set the terrain detail settings (shortcut is ALT-D) to default, and set all graphics settings (ALT-G) to the minimum.

In that scenario there are three different tanks, "built-up area", "moderate", and "thick woods". In each tank, jump to the gunners primary sight in day sight mode and take note of the frame rate when at low and then high magnification while keeping the view centered on the marker that is directly in front of the tanks.

For a low end comparison: my laptop with a Core i5 3230M CPU at 2.6 GHz using the Intel HD graphics 4000 integrated GPU gets:

Built-up area: 32/31 (wide/narrow)

Moderate: 45/49

Thick woods: 44/42

This was in full screen mode at a resolution of 1366x768 with vsync off.

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