Upgrade from a 5870 for Diablo 3 RoS?

[Jumpem]

I get tearing with VSync disabled, so I leave it enabled and the frame rates are capped at 60. However, it will go into the low forties on occasion. I have all of the settings on high, and play at 1920x1200.

What would be a good upgrade to keep the minimum frame rates up? I still have an i7-860. Is there any reason to upgrade to a newer CPU, or will just a video card suffice?

 

[BallaTheFeared]

You sure it's GPU related and not CPU?

Might want to verify that before you start tossing cash at a problem.

 

[Jumpem]

You sure it's GPU related and not CPU?

Might want to verify that before you start tossing cash at a problem.

How might I do that? I wouldn't think that the CPU running at 3.33GHz to 3.46GHz would be fine.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

Run MSI Afterburner, with vysnc it should be pretty easy to detect.

You'll see say 60% usage and 60 fps, then go to an area where you can easily reproduce the fps drop and check the gpu usage, does it go up or down? If it's climbing towards 99 it's a good bet the GPU is choking, if the GPU usage is decreasing with your FPS than you're cpu limited.

 

[blackened23]

Having upgraded several lynnfield systems myself to ivy and Haswell, there is a huge performance jump associated with a CPU upgrade. That said, Diablo 3 will benefit more from a GPU upgrade rather than a CPU upgrade at 1080p - so yes, I would start looking at the 280X or GTX 770 to play games at more fluid framerates. You should also consider upgrading the CPU, because for games that are CPU limited the jump to a Haswell will be absolutely huge - in my experience with lynnfield, CPU limited games that were choppy on the 870 were butter smooth on the 4770k. Case in point, SC2: Hots went from being a bad experience on Lynnfield to a great experience on Haswell @ 1600p. Like I said though, Diablo 3 benefits more from GPU grunt at maximum detail settings rather than CPU grunt. Tom's has some diablo 3 benchmarks IIRC that you can look up.

 

[blastingcap]

Blizzard games are notoriously poorly multithreaded so if you want a performance increase you may want to simply get a faster CPU. The fastest quadcore you can reasonably afford. That will help you with Diablo/Starcraft/WoW more than a graphics card probably.

 

[blackened23]

Blizzard games are notoriously poorly multithreaded so if you want a performance increase you may want to simply get a faster CPU. The fastest quadcore you can reasonably afford. That will help you with Diablo/Starcraft/WoW more than a graphics card probably.

I was initially inclined to say the same based on my observations from SC2: Hots and WoW, but Diablo 3 seems to be more GPU dependent at maximum detail settings. Case in point:

CPU:

GPU:

So Diablo 3 and D3: ROS differ from SC2/SC2 HOTS and WoW in this regard. CPU benefits the latter games more, GPU benefits D3: ROS more.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

Case in point:

If you ever actually played the game you'd know those cpu graphs are complete malarkey.

All it takes is a run over the Act III bridge solo to see those graphs are based on Tristram.

Add 3 players in a group and well, it can be cpu bound as all heck.

 

[Jumpem]

If you ever actually played the game you'd know those cpu graphs are complete malarkey.

All it takes is a run over the Act III bridge solo to see those graphs are based on Tristram.

Add 3 players in a group and well, it can be cpu bound as all heck.

So now I need a i5-4670 and a GTX 770? Is there any reason to get a GTX 780 or 780 Ti just for D3?

 

[blastingcap]

So now I need a i5-4670 and a GTX 770? Is there any reason to get a GTX 780 or 780 Ti just for D3?

780 is overkill unless you are playing at 1440p or more, or are serious about keeping that framerate permanently locked at 60.

And you don't NEED a 4670, you can probably do great with just something like a 2500K or 3570K.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

So now I need a i5-4670 and a GTX 770? Is there any reason to get a GTX 780 or 780 Ti just for D3?

I don't think you really need a new video card. I could be wrong, but you can discover what is happening yourself with MSI Afterburner as stated before.

5870 is very powerful for the game.

What I think you need is to either overclock your 860 until you get acceptable performance, or upgrade it a SB+ with moderate OC... Either way I think you need to OC the CPU.

 

[Ieat]

My guess is you don't need new hardware at all and its just Blizzard's crappy servers. But the easiest way to tell is to OC your video card and/or cpu to see if it makes a difference. If you do need an upgrade I'm pretty sure its the gpu.

 

[Jaydip]

No dude 5870 is definitely not fine for the game.Hell I had a 680 and experienced slowdowns.If you typically run with friends in inferno 5870 won't cut it.

 

[Ieat]

No dude 5870 is definitely not fine for the game.Hell I had a 680 and experienced slowdowns.If you typically run with friends in inferno 5870 won't cut it.

The slowdowns are sever side. I had a gtx 670 and it didn't even boost all the way when playing Diablo 3. I just did a public run of the Keeps and cpu usage never went above 14% cpu while my 7950 never went above 36% usage. Honestly, I think you guys are barking up the wrong tree. OP may need a slightly better card like a 7870 or gtx 660ti but some of the claims here are ridiculous. I've actually used a 7850, 7870 Myst, 7950, gtx 660ti and gtx 670 over the last year and a half to play Diablo 3 and didn't notice a difference experience wise with any of the cards.

 

[Silverforce11]

GPU usage is not an issue in Diablo 3, I ran it on a 7850 and it was barely loading, still, you get random slowdowns in a lot of areas and near launch, it had massive stutter bugs which took them months to patch up.

 

[Stuka87]

I play a lot of D3, and my CPU is most definitely the limiting factor. The game will only use two threads. My Phenom II (Even at 4GHz) drops frames quite often in upper inferno difficulties. Especially if I am playing with demon hunters and sorcerers. I will drop into the 20's for split seconds when a lot of bad guys die.

My 7950 however sits at idle practically. Everything maxed and it spikes to maybe 50%, but hangs around 30%.

I also play the game on my laptop at times. It has a Quadro 1000M with DDR3 on it. Its beyond gutless, but plays the game fine at low settings.

 

[frozentundra123456]

The performance is weird. I only play single player, and my HD 7770 is pegged while the CPU is less than 50% usage on the highest used core. Strange part is that even at 40 to 50 FPS the game is really choppy sometimes, and I don't really see framerate dropping down in the choppy parts.

 

[Stuka87]

The performance is weird. I only play single player, and my HD 7770 is pegged while the CPU is less than 50% usage on the highest used core. Strange part is that even at 40 to 50 FPS the game is really choppy sometimes, and I don't really see framerate dropping down in the choppy parts.

There is a bug that I used to get that acted similar to what you are seeing. The game has two frame rate limiters that interfere with each other in my experience. There is the vsync option, and then there is two settings for max FPS. One for when the game is in front, and one when it is in the back ground. I am not at home right now to check, but I think I disabled the limit in foreground, and left vsync on. Then my game experience got WAY better.

 

[nwo]

No dude 5870 is definitely not fine for the game.Hell I had a 680 and experienced slowdowns.If you typically run with friends in inferno 5870 won't cut it.

A 5870 is more than enough to run the game at 1080p.

However, if you run at mp10 inferno, you will need two things:
1) A wired connection or a really high quality wireless connection (high quality router + wireless card).
2) A fast CPU because when you encounter huge groups of mobs, that's when your CPU gets overloaded and no matter how good your GPU is, you will still get slowdowns, that goes for having a wireless connection too.

I ran the game with my 7870 and i5 4670k, when I was on wireless, I would get huge lag spikes even on medium sized groups. As soon as I switched to the wire, I never encountered a lag spike again.

Edit: I was also playing D3 maxed out on my office rig which was running an i5 3570k and a 4870. However, the resolution is 1280x1024...

 

[24601]

A 5870 is more than enough to run the game at 1080p.

However, if you run at mp10 inferno, you will need two things:
1) A wired connection or a really high quality wireless connection (high quality router + wireless card).
2) A fast CPU because when you encounter huge groups of mobs, that's when your CPU gets overloaded and no matter how good your GPU is, you will still get slowdowns, that goes for having a wireless connection too.

I ran the game with my 7870 and i5 4670k, when I was on wireless, I would get huge lag spikes even on medium sized groups. As soon as I switched to the wire, I never encountered a lag spike again.

Edit: I was also playing D3 maxed out on my office rig which was running an i5 3570k and a 4870. However, the resolution is 1280x1024...

This. The people who claim you need to upgrade your GPU obviously haven't played much Diablo III.

The game is literally designed to run on an Intel HD 2000 to Intel HD 3000 range GPU.

It also does one of the worse dynamic loading I have ever seen, and will purposefully not use the ram that is available to it for cacheing and will instead prefer to load everything from the hard drive every single time. It can't benefit from automatic ram cacheing in Windows (or any other OS) because it has a custom dynamic loading system, the same sort of problem that Rage had.

If you truly want to play the game well, get a 4670k @ max OC and get a decent SSD.

 

[Stuka87]

The game is literally designed to run on an Intel HD 2000 to Intel HD 3000 range GPU.

Low end GPU, yes. HD2000? No. I have tried it a few times on an HD2000 at unless you play at 1024x768, its unplayable. And thats just Act I normal. But like I mentioned above, my Quadro M1000 plays it decently at 768P. Very little frame drop with 2 players and Inferno (MP0). But thats with all settings on minimum.

But, the game is far more CPU limited than GPU.

 

[24601]

Low end GPU, yes. HD2000? No. I have tried it a few times on an HD2000 at unless you play at 1024x768, its unplayable. And thats just Act I normal. But like I mentioned above, my Quadro M1000 plays it decently at 768P. Very little frame drop with 2 players and Inferno (MP0). But thats with all settings on minimum.

But, the game is far more CPU limited than GPU.

That was the design target, I didn't say it runs well, it just runs o.o

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Diablo-III-Benchmarked.74918.0.html

 

[Jaydip]

It seems majority here played solo or didn't play in groups much.I have played 700+ hours and people saying a HD2000 or 3000 will run it, well gl with that.I must also add you need a faster cpu for this as well.There is a reason why I don't take any mmo benches seriously because of this, the reviewers have just no clue how to bench it.

 

[blackened23]

It seems majority here played solo or didn't play in groups much.I have played 700+ hours and people saying a HD2000 or 3000 will run it, well gl with that.I must also add you need a faster cpu for this as well.There is a reason why I don't take any mmo benches seriously because of this, the reviewers have just no clue how to bench it.

Completely agreed here. D3 isn't the most super GPU demanding game in the world, but HD4000? Yeah, no. That aint happening. I tried it on HD4000 once and it wasn't pretty. Slide show.

D3 is truly one of those games that demands both a balanced CPU and GPU, they both make a difference, Your settings (max vs min) determines which is more useful.

 

[24601]

It seems majority here played solo or didn't play in groups much.I have played 700+ hours and people saying a HD2000 or 3000 will run it, well gl with that.I must also add you need a faster cpu for this as well.There is a reason why I don't take any mmo benches seriously because of this, the reviewers have just no clue how to bench it.

Completely agreed here. D3 isn't the most super GPU demanding game in the world, but HD4000? Yeah, no. That aint happening. I tried it on HD4000 once and it wasn't pretty. Slide show.

D3 is truly one of those games that demands both a balanced CPU and GPU, they both make a difference, Your settings (max vs min) determines which is more useful.

Good job not reading the title of the thread. OP has a 5870, which is more than plenty for the game. Also good job not ready my wording.

The game is literally designed to run on an Intel HD 2000 to Intel HD 3000 range GPU.

That was the design target, I didn't say it runs well, it just runs o.o

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Diablo-III-Benchmarked.74918.0.html

But obviously no one actually reads posts or threads, so discussing is pointless.