Guild Wars 2

I never said the fx8350 was bad in fact I said it was a GOOD CPU I never said it would give unplayable fps in GW2 either, all i said was the 3750k is faster you have to overclock the fx8350 to get roughly the same perfomance as a 3570k @stock which again you can overclock and get even more perfomance that was my point.

You linked this I had seen it befor and was one of the in game Arma 2 benchmarks I was refareing to the 3570k is 9fps faster, not much I know but at when fps is droping that low every little helps.
http://www.behardware.com/articles/880-13/amd-fx-8350-review-is-amd-back.html

Again more examples in CPU heavy situations the 3570k is a much better gaming CPU

http://www.behardware.com/articles/880-14/amd-fx-8350-review-is-amd-back.html

Again massive battle in Shogun 2 and a modded Skyrim
http://www.behardware.com/articles/880-15/amd-fx-8350-review-is-amd-back.html

And yet again a massive Starcraft battle ok this 1 tanks on both CPU’s but and Anno 2070
http://www.behardware.com/articles/880-16/amd-fx-8350-review-is-amd-back.html

And 1 more
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6396/the-vishera-review-amd-fx8350-fx8320-fx6300-and-fx4300-tested/5

And yes i know it is getting 91fps in WoW but they allways do the WoW bench in one of the start zones for consitantcy but that bench was done @1680x1050 for some odd reason and in some of the new 25 man boss fights you wont get that and definetly nowhere near that on the new 40 man world boss fights. not with everything maxed out on Ultra inc shadows with x8 aa.

Just for the record my PC is as follows

3770k small overclock 4.2ghz stock volts.
8gig ram
Asus p877-V Pro motherboard
x2 WD 750gb sata 3 black eddition harddrive.
Creative FXI extream gamer soundcard

I went for that chip at the time beacuase I had the money and nothing else to spend it on at the time, otherwise it would have been the 3570k.

SolarNova.1052:

2gb for 1080p & mild AA.
3gb for 1080p & HD textures (usualy from mods) and high AA
3gb for 1440p/1600p & mild AA
4gb+ for 1440p/1600p & High AA

You don’t need 4gb card for 1600p there are only 2 games I have seen use more than 2gig vram at 1600p on my 7970 and that is BF3 which used about 2.1/2.2 and Crysis 2 which used about 2.4 max, but both games still run fine on a gtx680 at that res which only has 2gig vram.

4gig vram is really not needed unless you are runing 3D eyefinity or 3D Nvidia souround set up

As I said in acouple of years the Fx8350 will be faster in most games but as it stands now the i5/i7 is still the better option beacuase lots of current games still perform quite abit better in some cases on Intel.

The way you guys have been hyping it up you would think Piledriver stomps all over Intel but it dosent stomp all over it, it’s not bad and in things like encoding it keeps up with and sometimes beats the i7 for alot cheaper which is where it really shines, but for gaming you can pick up a 3570k and a decent mid priced Z77 board for not much more than a 8350 and a decent 900 AM3+ board, which is where the 3570k really shines.

Telling people to upgrade to a CPU or a GPU that is slower in the games they play when they can get something for around the same price or slightly more that will be fast enough to tell the differance that is ignorant, in GW2 Intel in WvW is quite abit faster the OP plays DayZ not played it myself but I know Arma 2 is allso quite abit faster on Intel so taking a guess that DayZ will be aswell. If the guy did alot of encoding aswell then yeah the FX8350 would probbably be a better option.

I know you say overclock it to 4.5/4.6ghz but you can do that just as easy with the intel CPU’s and get an even bigger boost in perfomance that you would from overclocking the FX chips.

And yes I said it was faster in BF3 and I dont think there is much in ti in Crysis 2/3 either but then if you look at the differance the FX 8 core chips and the i7 don’t beat the i5 by much, but then if you look at big WvW battles in GW2 or some of the 25 manboss fights in WoW or games like Shogun 2 or Starcraft 2 when you have massive battles going on the i5 is quite abit faster than the FX8350, which is why I say it is still the best choice for gaming you can argue that it is beacuase of crappy game engine’s ect this is mostly true but it still dosent change the fact as an overall gaming chip the i5 is worth the extra few quid dollars euro’s.

@the op, go with the 3570k it is more than enough for gaming and is quite abit faster than the FX8350 in GW2 in WvW and I would say looking at most of the Arma 2 benchmarks I can find it seemes to be faster so would guess it should be faster in DayZ aswell.

And as far as the GPU gose go for the 7850 you can pick them up for the same price as the 650ti and there quite abit faster.

@ Jazhara Knightmage.4389, Ok you called me a fanboi the other day just beacuase i disagreed with you? afew people have had bad experinces with heat on there Ivybridge CPU’s but for the most part people are perfectly happy with them and dont have any real probblems with temps or overclocking most will do around 4.5/4.6 on a good cooler yes I know that is lower than alot of Sandy’s will do but on avarage perfomance is roughly the same @4.6 compared to a sandy @4.8/4.9, And I addmitted the tim wasant the best aswell but even crap tim should be good for around 4 or 5 years.

If anything I would prafer an AMD CPU I reamber the good old days when the FX range where the best I had an FX57 in my PC and it compleatly owned all my freinds Pentium 4’s then I upgaded to a Opteron 185/FX60 later on, but the perfomance in lots of games just isant there with Bulldozer/Piledriver, yes I know they beat intel in the odd game like BF3 supports upto 6 threads ect, and lots more games you wouldant notice the differance unless you where benchmarking.

But there are still quite afew that you would like Shogun 2 when there are massive battles i.e thousands of troops on screen kicking the crap out of each other, WoW in 25 man boss fights some of them can be pretty CPU intensive, GW2, Starcraft 2 where even overclocked it strugles to keep up with an i5/i7 at stock.

And don’t get me wrong I am not saying Bulldozer/Piledriver are bad chips far from it in fact especially Piledriver but if your main thing is gaming then the i5/i7 are currently the best opption that might change over the next couple of years with the new consoles both being 8 core AMD CPU’s more games will be designed with mulltithreading in mind and I have no doubt that that the 8350 will be beating the Sandy/Ivy i5/i7 in alot more benchmarks, but by then both Intel and AMD will have new CPU’s out anyway.

Ok that is crap at iddle Ivybridge CPU’s dont run that hot, if they are I would guess the heatsink hasant been fited properly the push pull pin sytem on the stock heatsinks is pants and can easily lead to a badly fitted heatsimk if not fitted right.

tbh if there not overclocked temps arent to much different to Sandybridge CPU’s even when overclocked they only get hot when the volts are pushed to high.

There is alot of rubish spread about the tim used on the Ivybridge ok it is not the best and they could have used better, but it should still be good for around 5/6 years atleast which by that point most people will hav or will be ready to upgrade again anyway.

Seems odd your 670 should automaticly overide the Intel GPU, try going to your PC power settings make sure it is set to high perfoamnce if it is set to power saver mode that could be why.

Cntroll panle then syten then you can accses the power options from there.

12.11 drivers are really good, If that dosent fix it Iwould try afew other games aswell to see if you get the same thing happen there, if you get the same thing happen in other games I would contact whoever you bought the card from and try and set up an RMA and get it replaced.

Just try giving your heatsink a good clean odds are it has collected alot of dust over the last couple of years, get a can of compressed air and give it a good blast that will clear it out.

Well MMO games are all very similer in the fact they are all very CPU dependant if your PC is strugleing with WoW, then the odds are it will strugle just as much in GW2, SWTOR or Rift as it dose with WoW, Even though it might run the new COD game or BF3 fine.

Ok I know different engine different game ect but MMO’s nearly allways tend to be pretty simmiler performance tbh with the CPU allways being the bigest bottleneck so it is easier to judge if your PC suxs running WoW or Rift then odds are it will suck just as much running GW2 or SWTOR ect

@Rabbiddog sorry to hear that your are getting BSOD try doing a full driver clean see if that helps try downloading driver sweper and Ccleaner.

Driver sweeper
http://www.guru3d.com/content_page/guru3d_driver_sweeper.html
Ccleaner
http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner

Uninstall your AMD drivers allso uninstyall PhysX aswell odds are it will be there somewhere alot of games need it installed to run, then boot in to safe mode and run driver sweeper then reboot and use the registry cleaner bit of Ccleaner, you might need to run that more than once for a full clean. Then reinstall your AMD drivers and install the latest version of PhysX aswell see if that helps.

Had a similer thing happen on my old 6970 just reinstallign the drivers ddint fix it but reinstalling PhysX aswell did the job, could allso be worth updateing your motherboard BIOS aswell as sometimes that can have compatability problems with some cards.

Also if you have a freind or familiy member with a powerfull enough PSU in there PC who would let you teest your card, then that would help rule out either the card or the PSU being fualty aswell.

Swordbreaker.2581:

WoW is 10 years olds. You can’t be serious.

WoW may be an old game but it tends to get a big a big overhual from time to time , and this expansion was the biggest ever they have changed alot of stuff especialy in the new zones, I reamber running it maxed out on a single core Athlon 64 @2.6ghz with a 6600gt in Vinila with no FPS probblems in a 40 man raid that probably wouldan’t even run it on low anymore at anythign above 10fps.

Since WOTLK the game has been getting more and more demanding espeicily in 25 man raids with lots of people and spells flying about alot of people really strugle with FPS thes days in WoW with PC’s that used to run it maxed out with out any problems 2/3 years ago.

@Rabbiddog, Make sure you download the 12.11 beta driver for best perfomance, and do not install the driver that comes on the disc. also make sure you download and install the seperate CAPs Driver aswell 10.1

Yeah didnt think about the PSU.

If your not sure what it is take the side of your case off and there will be a sticker on the side of th PSU telling you how many watts and how many amps it has, the ones that are the most important are the watts and amps ont he 12v rail.

Should think that the 560 and the 7850 should fit inside most cases with out any problems but might be worth measureing up first just incase.

Read the reviews

Reviews
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-7870-review-benchmark,3148.html

http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/his_radeon_hd_7850_iceqx_turbox_review,1.html

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5625/amd-radeon-hd-7870-ghz-edition-radeon-hd-7850-review-rounding-out-southern-islands

XP has had the longest run of any OS and it is a shame to see it it go affter all this time but nothing lasts forever

@ Duxa, yeah I know what you mean Nvidia can sometimes be quicker with the bug fixing, but both side can be slow to fix driver bugs from time to time.

Looks like all 3 consoles Nintendo, Playstation and Xbox could have AMD gpu’s and possibly amd CPU’s aswell, while that is good for AMD not sure it is good for gaming.

7850 is faster than a 560ti, then thing about the 560 is there are 3 different 560’s there is the 560 then the 560ti and finaly the 560ti 448 eddition,

The 7850 is faster than the 560 and the 560 ti.

Depends on the game can range from just afew hours to days depends on the game how much investment they have made and what needs doing.

I know Dice when they where working on BF3 even though it is an AMD title still had meetings with Nvidia tech guys aswell to make sure it would run ok on Nvidia cards, and ok I could be wrong but both camps normaly have a beta driver ready to go as soon as most big games go into open beta. Which would sugest that they have had atleast some limited time to work on the drivers before the game gose live.

TBH Nvidia buy AGEIA was one of the worst things to happen to PC gaming in along time PhysX could have been one of the best things ever if it had remaind independant and still worked on both platforms yes you would have need to buy a seperate AGIEA card to use it but I think it is somethign alot of people would have done and it would have been alot more popular.

Yes it looks good can do some really cool stuff with it, Borderlands 2 for example got some really cool looking stuff in there but most of the stuff done with PhysX could be done just as easily on the CPU if it was coded properly, which PhysX is coded to run liek a snail on a CPU, Look at some of the stuff you can do with the Cry engine 2 and 3 you can do some absolutly stunning effects with that, also look at the Havok and Bullet engines both really good aswell.

Even affter all the money Nvidia pumped in to the Crysis games 2million dollars just for Crysis 2 alone, But still Crtek said no to PhysX there own in house engien is by far alot better than PhysX.

AMD have not been slow over the past few years atall I would hardly call 12 drivers a year with lots of beta and hot fix drivers in between as slow, I reamber when I had my gtx285 I can reamber going about 4 months once with out a single driver update.

Can’t ever reamber reading anythign about them saying thay are shifting away from high end graphics cards why would they? there where rumours about them maybe giving up on the high end CPU market but that was just someone getting the statement wrong what, they did say they are concentrating more on the mobile section there new APU’s are really good with pretty decent onboard graphics perfect for home theater PC’s and laptops and with rumours about Apple wanting them for there Macbooks things are looking up there.

Ok there highend desktop CPU’s are strugleing abit at the minuet, but Piledriver is a step in the right direction some nice gains over Bulldozer with lower power draw and at the curent price is pretty good value for money and with Steamroller out later next year with even more fixers hopefully they will be back on track.

And the graphics card division is the one bit of the company making a decent profit at the minuet with increasing market share over the last few years they spent alot of money devolping the GCN arch and have the fastest single GPU with the 7970ghz eddtion note the 690 is a dual GPU card so dosent count and are pumpng more and more money in to game develpment aswell.

+ it is looking like they have the contracts for the PS4 the next Xbox and the next Nintendo so unless they mess up things are looking good there aswell. Allthough personaly I think that is a bad thing I don’t think it is good just to have one graphics card company compleatly dominating the console market tbh would be good if Nvidia got atleast one of the contracts.

Not true when they get to the final testing phase they will let both graphics companys have accses to the game, so they can test it and give them time to try to fix any driver bugs before the game gose live, yes there will be differances and the game will run better on which ever partners GPU’s who helped with the tech support but the perofmance alot of the time evens out affter afew months or so with new patches and driver updates.

The last thing a game dev wants is a game that will be compleatly broken on one set of graphics cards beacuase it could cost them tens of thousands of sales.

they do how ever realse lots of games with lots of bugs or missing lots of content look at Crysis 2 and Shogun 2 Total War, both games where hyped up with DX11 both games failed to have it rdy for weeks affter the games went live, but thats more to do with the publishers like EA and Ubisoft and Sega only careing about the money and wanting returns asap, with the internet and it being easy to add patches they dont care if the game is finshed or not when it gose live aslong as they get the cash now.

I can think of lots of games in the last couple of years that are on the Gaming Evolved program.

Drit2, Dirt3, AVP, Farcry3, Hitman, MOH, Shogun2 Toatal War, BF3, Warhamer Space Marine, Dragon Age 2 , Dirt Showdown, Deus Ex, Sydicate, Sniper Elite2, Dawn of War 2, Sleeping Dogs, Aliens colonial Marines, Alan Wake. Dishonord, Two Worlds

And Nvidia have
Crysis/Warhead, Crysis 2, Borderlands 1, Borderlands 2, Metro33, Metro light, Mirows Edge, Massefect 2, Massefect 3, Batman Arkam aslyum, Batman Arkam City, Planet side 2, Mafia 2, and I think COD and Assasins Creed are Nvidia aswwell

So both sides have there fair share of big name games. Then there are just as many deves that don’t take sides aswell and just get on with making there games.

So alot of what you said earlier is wrong, most games are not part of Nvidias twimtbp program, AMD graphics cards do not offer last gen performance.

And allmost forgot about the bit about AMD being slow to relase drivers wtf? really lol AMD untill recently released a new driver every month with out fail, they have recently changed that though but still release a new driver every couple of months or so and tend o have lots of beta drivers inbetween.

I know it makes me sound like an AMD fan boy but I am not if you had been saying the same things about Nvidia that you have about AMD I would still have argued with you I go for what ever offers the best perfomance in the highen bracket when it comes to GPU’s and have switched back and forth alot over the years.

@duxa, Can i ask what you do mate?
i was going off early benchamrks that showed the AMD cards perfomaing better than Nvidia in this game+ the fact there seems to be alot more people with Nvidia cards complaneing about perfomance problems on this forum?

I have 2 rigs with AMD/ATI cards and they both run the game with no problems atall allso have a laptop with an Nvidia card and again dosent rally give me any issues either tbh.

Nvidia are not ahead of AMD/ATI at the minuet in perfomance there both neck and neck

The 680 and 7970 trade blows depends on the game sometimes the 680 is faster sometimes the 7970 is faster with the 7970ghz eddition slightly ahead, the 7950 and 670 again more or less the same trading blows dependign on the game, and with the new drivers the 780 is about as fast as the 660ti..

You need to look at more recent driver reviews

http://www.legitreviews.com/article/2059/1/

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canucks-reviews/57413-amd-12-11-never-settle-driver-performance-17.html

http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/AMD-Never-Settle-1211-Beta-Driver-Performance-Testing

The main problem with just trusting the Anandtech bench is they do the test stick them on there then hardly ever update them with later drivers.

And there not more games that are just being designed for Nvidia cards, the dev’s get help ad tech support from AMD or Nvidia and there are probbably just as many big titled games on AMD’s gameing evolved program as there are on Nvidia’s The Way it’s meant to be played program. but they will still do the testing on both sets of cards before the game gose in to the public beta.

64 bit driver
http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/windows/Pages/radeonaiw_vista64.aspx
32 bit driver
http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/windows/Pages/radeonaiw_vista32.aspx

Make sure you download and install the 12.10 CAP 1 driver aswell

Running fine for me, as Rabbiddog said though try the new 12.11 beta drivers some massive perfomance gains in lots of games for the 7000 series cards.

Must be a differnt guy or you would have recognised the name

Was in a rush yesterday I meant to say get acouple of normal SATA 3 hdd’s and if your that fussed you could run them in RAID 0 to get faster read/write times.

Not sure what you have been reading but on avarage AMD/ATI cards tend to be perfoming better in GW2 than Nvidia cards are.

Tends to be the CPU that is making the biggest differance with perfomance for most people.

What are your sytem specs?

Lol Thana is that you?

Looks like a good rig, the 3770k should be ok most will max out at around 4.5ghz on a good air cooler which is about the same as a sandybridge i7 clocked to around 4.7/4.8ghz.

Ram is ok but 8gig is more than enough for gamin tbh but if that is you I guess with some of the stuff you do might benifit more from 16gig lol

GPU is fine aswell the 7870 is a kick kitten card overclocks like a champ and is probably the best value mid/highend card at the minuet.

Don’t really rate SSD at the minuet there still to expensive, yes they give you faster boot, load and install times but thats about it, for the price of that SSD you could probabbly get yourself to normal sata 3 HDD and with the extra money you save get a 7950 instead.

Dual cards can be tricky it is the risk you take when you buy one when they work there mazing but when they don’t work it can leave you with performance worse than running a single card.

Most people who have high end i5/i7 CPU’s and have really bad FPS probblems with Nvida cards seem to be either useing 600 seirs cards or running SLI inc the 690 dual gpu still uses SLI to make it work so my guess would be driver related.

My laptop is allmost identical to yours 2630k gt555m 4gig ram w7 snd runs fine 30/50 fps with most settings on high, but I am running @1600x900 though.

So it should be running fine tbh, have you tryed updating the driver my laptop is running the 306.23 driver aand it seems to be pretty good.

Also make sure you have the power option set to high performance n the sytems tab on your control panle, and you could try manualy selcting the Nvidia GPU by right clicking on your GW2 launcher and choseing the option from there aswell, had the problem in the past where sometimes it would launch games useing the Intel GPU instead.

@Cbuzz seriously you think the gt 555m is only as fast as a 9600gt? lol is all I can say to that one.

Ok it is not a poerhouse, but it’s not that bad tbh been seriously impressed with the performance you can get out of the card runs most games at a decent frame rate you have to turn a few of the settings down in some games, but I havn’t installed a game yet on my laptop that it won’t run.

Not sure where I would place it compared to a desktop card I think it use a slightly cut down verssion of the gts450 106/108 core so would guess around the gt440 performance which well still being low end it is still alot faster than a 9600gt.

Ok finaly got around to installing it on my lap top and the game seems to run perfectly fine tbh only tried it in Lions Arch and the Black Citadel.

i7 2630qm
4 gig ram
W7
gt 555m 306.23 driver
1600×900 screen res
Getting between 30/50 fps with alot of the settings on high

The AMD CPU’s espicaly the Bulldozer FX moddles are pretty slow in this game, best thing to do if you have one of the Bulldozer CPU’s is over clock it and you should see a massive boost in your FPS

But there graphics card are running it really well got 2 rigs one with a i7 860 and a AMD 5770 on XP 4gig ram 1900×1200 with the 12.8 driver and the other with a i7 3770k and a AMD 7970 8gig ram 2560×1600 on W7 with the 12.7 beta driver both running the gam flawlessly with no fps probblems.

75*c is fine for your graphics card, if it was your CPU at those temps then that would be to hot.

If your refresh rate is 60hz turn vsync on tbh.

It’s just coil whine wouldant worry to much, it will vary from card to card, you might have alot of whine while someone else who got a card from the same batch won’t have any, it will be the same with AMD and Nvidia cards when it comes to things like coil whine it is just pot luck.

It can varry from game to game aswell not noticed any coil whine on my Spahire 7970 in GW2 but in ME3 it get’s quite alot.

You can try burning the card in by leaveing something like the Haven benchamrk runnign in the background for a few hours this may help reduce the whine.

Another thing that can help is make sure you have vysnc switched on which can help reduce the load on your GPU there is no point having it switched off as any fps that gose over your monitors refresh rate are wasted anyway.

You could also try updating your graphics cards BIOS aswell but do this carefully and at yuor own risk reamber it will void your waranty and if you brick your card while doing it they won’t replace it.

I did this on my Spahire 7970oc you can find guides on how to do this I used the GHZ eddition BIOS basicly a free upgrade it solved afew minor probblem i had but the fan profile was meant for the normal card not the dual fan verssion so you would need to use a program like affterbrner to set up a manual fan profile.

You guys are just looking at the 2ghz bit and thinking to slow, reamber it is a laptop i7 2ghz is just the normal idle speed when gming guessing it is a 2630m? depending on how many cores beign used it will turbo up to about 2.6/2.9ghz.

Trust me these sandy/ivybridge I5/i7 CPU’s are still pretty dam fast.

When your card is idlleing it will automaticly drop the bus speed down to x1 as part of the power svaing feature as soon as your gaming again it should automaticly go back up to x16 on it’s own.

Actualy scrap that bit about PC Tools they used to be really good 2/3 years ago looks like they have gone down hill abit since

Actualy Norton has one of the best detection rates out there along with Kaspersky, PC Tools, Nod32.

Nortons bad rep mainly comes from about 8/10 years ago when it was slow and bloated and used so much of your sytem resources that it made even the best PC run like crap. It’s not been like that for a long time but people allways reamber the bad things lol.

Not useing Norton myself but ust thought I would point that out

Allways read the independant lab test reviews before desideding which one to get

http://www.av-test.org/no_cache/en/tests/test-reports/

AVG is just bad seriously it has more holes than a chunk of swis cheese. Just beacuase AVG is showing 0 infections dosent mean you have 0 infecections AVG has one of the worst detection rates out there.

AVG also detects alot of programs as false positives the WoW forums offten have alot of posts from AVG users, might be worth checking your quarantine list just to make sure that it hasnt been detected as malware and put in there.

As allrdy mentioned Malwarebytes is probably the best free stand alone scanner out there worth downloading that aswell and just do a scan with it once a week.

TBH the 640m should cope fine, acording to Notebookcheck gamin benchmarks it is about 15/20% faster than the gt555m in my laptop depending on the game, ok I have not tryed Guildwars 2 on my laptop yet but I do have WoW, SWTOR, Assinscreed 2, Skyrim installed on it and they all run really well.

gt640m
http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GT-640M.71579.0.html

Phaze Delta One.2834:

Since this game uses the Havok Engine, physics will be calculated off the CPU.

Brem.6792:

This game uses Havok which is better than PhysX anyway.

That’s incorrect. Both API’s are identical in functionality. The only difference they have from one another is the Havok Engine uses the CPU for its calcualtions and Nvidia Physx used Cuda from their video cards.

PhysX uses the CPU aswell in alotof the games that have PhysX support it just uses software support i.e not cuda, but it has been coded really badly for the CPU, where as Havok has been coded specifically to run on the CPU so tends to run alot more effeciantly.

PhysX support list
http://www.physxinfo.com/index.php?p=gam&f=all

Look at the list about 90% of those games use software support only which means they will run the same reguardless of which GPU you have there are only a few of them that will benifit from having an Nvida GPU over an AMD/ATI GPU.

Caedmon.6798:

Actually it isnt better..in this case i wish they took Physx.Havok is whats making alot of problems in this game since its using the CPU,instead of the gpu.Imo if this game was using Physx instead of havok,it would have run ( for nvidia users atleast ) a hell of a lot better then it does now for most people.

You know most games with PhysX still only CPU implamentation anyway?

there are games that use the GPU like Batman and Mirrows edge but that is only a marketing gimik and could easily be done just aswell and alot more effectivly useing the CPU if Nvidia hadn’t coded the PhysX engine to run like crap on a CPU.

PhysX could have been amzing but Nvidia messed it up alot by forceing people to use Nvidia hardware it would have been alot more popular if they had made it acsesible to every one.

Look at games like Crysis, Warhead and Crysis 2 Nvidia gave Cryteck millions for develpment of those games and still Cryteck refused to use PhysX and went with there own physics engien, why do you think that is?

This game uses Havok which is better than PhysX anyway.

Well guess they cut out the older stuff to save time when doing the perfomance charts takes alot of work to test them all. But i agree would be nice there are still alot of people on Phenom II and Core2 that would be interested in how the CPU’s perform in there tests.

The Phenom II CPU’s arent that bad tbh, much better for gaming than the Bulldozer CPU’s are, In CPU limited games like GW2 or WoW Bulldozer is just to slow.

Alot of newer games that don’t relly on the CPU as much they perfome better and the differance is hardly noticable.

I would guess the fact you have 3 monitors connected would be your problem, are you running the game in eyfinty mode? if you are try disableing it thats alot of work for a single 6970 to do.

If you are only running the game on one monitor make sure that the one the game is on is set up as your primary monitor.

Is your overclock on your CPU stable? what temps are you getting while gaming.

tbrunt.8036:

This is not a top end system Alienware M15X-R2
Windows 7 Home Premium, 64 bit, Service Pack 1
Processor: Intel® Core™ i7 CPU Q720@1.60GHz
RAM: 8.00 GB
Graphics Card: Radeon 5800

The Cpu is old and small Not quite min specs. The graphics card is outdated.
To help you update drivers for the graphics card. Use the slider in the game untill you can get a steady 12-15 fps which will be hard. This game takes a really good CPU and great graphics card to see the game in all its glory ,this is the best looking game of this kind I have seen in years.

Actualy it’s not that bad yes the CPU came out in 2009 but it is still an i7 same number of transistors just slightly lowe l3 cash and clocks up to 2.8ghz undeload, which is more than fast enough to run this game and the 5800m is more or less the same speed as the 5770 desktop card which again is more than enough to run this game at a decent frame rate.

You also need to factor in he is on a 15" laptop which probbably has a lower screen res, so yes I can well belive he is running at 50fps on high settings.

The 690 is a dual card x2 680’s on one board so it will run hotter than a 680 but 83*c is abit hot but still okish.

If you wanted you could try useing a program like affterburner to make a custom fan profile which might help.

Also a good idea to clean your card every now again, a can of compressed air works the best just take it out of your case and give it a quick blast, or you can use the flexible nozzle on your vacum cleaner to gently run it over your fans and the vents on the back of the card to suck out some of the dust.

GuildWars.9862:

Hey all this is my first post, so im sorry if its in the wrong section as i couldn’t seem to find a general section for technical related questions.

I have a terrible PC at the moment,

CPU- amd single core 3700+
nVidia 7950GTX
2GB ram
Windows XP pro

And as expected the game runs awful, which i can’t moan about, as it played the first guild wars and the expansions maxed out with over 50fps.

What PC would you recommend? Or even if i could spend a smaller amount of money on a CPU for my motherboard, The highest i can go due to the 939 pin is an AMD Dual Core 4800+ which apparently should be okay? Any other people got these CPU etc? Cheers again.

Where abouts in the UK are you mate? Think you read my mind I am having a clear out at the min and have my old Opteron 185/FX-60 dual core that I am looking to get rid of.

The Opty 185 is the socket 939 server version of the FX-60 but if your motherboard supports the FX-60 then the Opty 185 should still work ok.

I think I still have 4gig DDR ram lieing around somewhere aswell.

The motherboard died years ago but held on to the CPU just beacuase I loved it so much it was my first high end gaming PC upgrade that I installed myself.

I dont want much for it and it is pretty dam slow compared to the newer stuff but could be a nice short term upgrade for you, if your interested download CPU-Z and if you can tell me your motherboard name, moddle number and BIOS verssion I can have a look see if I can find a CPU support list for your Mobo

Moz.8264:

Glow.4159:

Moz.8264:

Glow.4159:

Moz.8264:

Glow.4159:

You’re linking a synthetic non gaming benchmark that utilizes all cores. As said previously, games don’t utilize all cores, and per core performance is much more important.

Here’s a much more detailed compilations of benchmarks showing Intel massive lead:

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/551?vs=434

Note CPU bound games such as WoW and SC2 performing almost 100% higher on Ivy Bridge compared to the FX-8150.

You forget to mention WoW and SC2 are also known for being poorly optimized too.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ah1RjWG9Z05cdDlnUk5VTHJfWFhKSlBvejlLT2doN0E&hl=en_US#gid=0

Just because the MMO and RTS genre are almost entirely CPU bound doesn’t mean they’re poorly optimized.

You’re again linking synthetic benchmarks. In that entire spreadsheet you link 2 games. One of which is Crysis 2. Crysis 2 is almost purely GPU bound in the same way that BF3 is. In the other game however, you can clearly see that it’s beaten by a mile.

If you’d like to fool yourself into thinking AMD is currently viable, go ahead. But please don’t go ahead misinforming others with false information.

Despite me playing various mmos between wow, rift and aion, I’ve only had problems with this game. Yeah I’m misinforming people by telling them how bad this game is optimized. I guarantee none of the devs are running AMD cpus and are only fixing performance problems for Intel users to save time and money.

Now kindly show me a benchmark were Pentium Dualcores outperform FX 8000’s.

Here ya go:

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canucks-reviews/47155-amd-bulldozer-fx-8150-processor-review-15.html

Then go ahead and navigate to the rest of the gaming benchmark pages. Notice how the i3 is above the 8150 in almost every game?

There’s nothing wrong about being misinformed on certain subjects and learning something new. Problems only arise when you start stating said misinformation as unfounded fact.

There are benchmarks were the lesser FX4000 outbeats the FX8000, it’s nothing new.
And like I said; show me a benchmark of a Pentium Dual core beating an FX8000, not an i3…

GW2 CPU perfomance chart
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/guild-wars-2-performance-benchmark,3268-7.html

Dosent have Phenom II or Intels old Core2’s in there either but if it did odds are they would both be scoreing higher FPS than the Bulldozer CPU’s aswell

100% gpu usage is good for a multi card Crossfire/SLI set up thats what you want it running at means it is working exatly as it is meant to.

And 80*c is fine for a 6990 they run pretty hot and are safe to run up to about 90*c

When you say your PC shuts off when it gets to the mid 90’s are you still just talking about your graphics card? if your CPU is getting that hot then that is really bad you don’t really want it going over 60/70*c max when your gaming tbh even that is 2 hot.

The reason I aks is beacuase motherboard heat protection normaly just monitors your CPU and your Northbridge/Southbridge temps and only kicks in wheen there temps get to high not your graphics card.

Another option is alot of PSU have there own internal sensors aswell now and will automaticly shut off if they stat to get to hot.

It should just install from the disks then download the patches when it has finshed.

If it hasn’t done that what you could do is cancle the download then go in to my computer then your dvd drive go in to the disc files find the install file and luanch it manualy from there.

Mightylink.3816:

AMD still needs to come out with some new drivers, seriously their 12.8 ones are 2 months old and their beta drivers are a version behind (12.7), theres no hope in sight for us…

The 12.8 driver is less than a month old 15/8/2012.

Got 2 different PC’s here my girlfriends running a 5770 not sure what settings she is useing on the 12.8 drivers and mine running 7970 on the 12.7 beta drivers everything set to ultra and the game is running realy smooth for us.

Afew things I can sugest check is your CPU and GPU temps while in the game might be over heating.

Also this is a bug I get some times hasn’t happend to me in GW2 but had it happend in WoW and ME3 from time to time is the graphics card will sometimes get stuck in iddle or 2d clock this can happen to Nvidia cards aswell.

You can use a program like affterburner to monitor your graphics cards clock speeds, it has an on screen disply aswell so you can watch them in real time while your in game.

Caedmon.6798:

All you people that say bulldozer suck,Sorry but you couldnt be more wrong.Im running the game on a 8120,not even a 8150,have it oc\d to 4.6 and i have yet to see my fps drop lower then 40,max is well over 100. 2x GTX 560ti aswell,but their barely being touched,hoping nvidia will fix the issue of sli usage problem for this game,or its on arenanets side,no idea,but i know my cards can do better though.Anyway the Fx serie is seriously not a bad cpu,underrated.At stock i agree it kinda blows and not worth its money,this cpu will only start to shine when oc’d to atleast 4.4,you’re all set then.

Well that was kind of my point at stock the 3570k or the 3770k has no bottle knecking of the graphics card,s in GW2 but to get the same lvl of perfomance from a Bulldozer as you said you need to over clock it to well over 4ghz

Heres the link to Tom’s Hardware GW2 performance benchmark.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/guild-wars-2-performance-benchmark,3268-7.html

If you look at the top graph you can see i5 2500 vs a Bulldozer 4000 quad core both tested at 3ghz and 4ghz to be fair look at the differance in the FPS scores.

And then again if you look at the bottom graph all the tests are done with all the different CPU’s at 3ghz and the 8 core Bulldozer dose better than the 4 and 6 core Buldozer’s do but that probably beacuase it is useing 1 core per module which means the resources for the cores arent shared but again it is being beaten by a Sandybridge Pentium dual core and the i3 dual core.

The Buldozers have less IPC Instrctions Per Clock than there old Pheon II CPU’s did if you have a Phenom II quad or hex core at 4ghz in gaming on avarage you need to overclock a Bulldozer to about 4.4/4.5ghz to get the same performance from it.

Pildriver might be good though with a romoured 15% IPC imrpovment and 10% higher clock speeds it should be atleast 20/25% faster than Bulldozer.

Trust me I wish it was different I reamber the good old days when AMD trounced Intel, The FX 55/57 compleatly destroyed the top end Pentium 4’s and the Opteron 185/FX 60 dual core was the fastest thing out there and was the CPU of choice if you could afford one