Hi everyone. Heres what im currently working with.
CPU- AMD-FX Quad Core 4300 3.8Ghz
GPU AMD HD 6450
8GB Ram.
1920 /1080 Resolution monitorI know that my card is absolutely horrid. My goal is to run the game smoothly on max, turned all the way up in supersample. I dont need to have flawless FPS in Wvw, I wouldnt mind hovering in the 40’s here but everywhere else in game im going for pretty much flawless FPS.
Basically my question is , with everything i currently have, If i were to upgrade my GPU to an AMD R9 290 (Or any card in the same tier) , would i fulfill my goal or will my CPU be my downfall?
The game runs great for me, even though I use high settings. Frames drop to the mid 30s for world bosses, but playing out in the world it’s a smooth 50-60. Could likely get 60 all the time by lower some things, but meh, looks great and plays well enough this way!
I am using this setup:
AMD FX-8320 locked at 4GHz
AMD R9 270 2GB video card
8GB DDR3 2133MHz RAM
ASUS M5A97 R2.0 motherboard
NZXT 650W PSU (which the FX-8320 required even at stock speeds)
Aftermarket heatpipe tower heatsink/fan
Screen resolution is 1600×900An R9 290 would do you well and if you can overclock your CPU to 4.2GHz you should be fine. 4.6+GHz would be better, but power draw on this CPU design gets exponentially worse after 3.8GHz, so anything over 4.4GHz might put too much strain on the voltage regulators on your motherboard or on the powersupply if it’s low-end.
Note:
The big difference between your CPU and mine isn’t that mine has 8 cores. It’s that mine has 4 Floating Point Units and your has 2.Traditionally, a CPU “core” was just the ALU for integer math. Back in the 386 days (1990s here) the CPUs had a “co-processor” for floating point math, called the Floating Point Unit. Later on both Intel and AMD added FPUs in a 1:1 ratio with every CPU. Eventually AMD decided to increase efficiency on their new line of CPUs by using a shared resource design originally created by DEC Corp years ago. This design shares 1 full sized 256Bit FPU between 2 ALUs in a cluster. While the FPU can still be used as two 128Bit FPUs, the trouble is that many common instruction sets used in game engines today are 256Bit FPU based, meaning they suffer.
Your CPU has 4 ALUs and 2 FPUs. Mine has 8 ALUs and 4 FPUs, making my CPU physically a full “quad core”. Yours, when it comes to 265Bit floating point math instructions, is a dual-core. It’s is POSSIBLE that could play into why I have a better time with my CPU than you have with yours.
Thank for all the info especially the lesson on CPU. However after consulting a friend i think ive decided on the GTX 970 sintead of the R9 290. It seems to be a better card for GW2 overall. I can actually Overclock my AMD 4300 CPU up to 4.3 without any heat issues. This, coupled with a GTX 970 makes me think il be ok to run on max?
