Where's my performance bottleneck?

[Zumbador]

I got a system primarily for photo and video editing...
C2D E6300
Asus P5B-E mobo
Corsair XMS2 DDR2 800 (1GB)
Gigabyte 7300GT
Seagate Barracuda 320gb HDD
Viewsonic 22" (the costco one)

No overclocking. Works just fine for editing, but recently I decided to buy a radio-control flight simulator, Realflight G3. If you're not familiar with this product, it's basically a program designed to help RC Airplane/Heli hobbyists practice at home so they crash less when they're flying the real planes ($$$).

On some of the maps where objects and trees are sparse, the program runs beautifully around 180-220FPS. On the more heavily loaded maps, the FPS goes down to 60-120. In this program, even 100FPS is choppy. I'd like to get it up 200 FPS on the heavily loaded maps.

Obviously my vid card needs upgrading... 'twas a cheapie at $75. Will a 7900/7950 cure this problem? Do I also need to add another stick of DDR2 800? Overclock the CPU?

Thanks for the advice.

 

[AlgaeEater]

Might just be the program itself not being optimized. When "100fps" isn't smooth, then something is obviously wrong.

Your setup looks fine, just probably get a stronger video card, but that won't gurantee your problems will go away.

Do the usual routine before upgrading, which is defragging, updating drivers, and removing uncessary programs from the start menu.

 

[dBTelos]

For slight or even light gaming I would upgrade to a 7900GT or 7600GT/S.

 

[pkme2]

GIGABYTE GA-965P-S3 Socket T (LGA 775) Intel P965 mobo
would be another to consider.

Money saved can go to a better PSU, Corsair is nice.

I recommend the 22" Viewsonic, got one from Costco too.

 

[Zumbador]

I think I'm gonna go with this one http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814150195

Any thoughts before I place this order?

P.S. My PSU is already a 550w, so I think this should run okay.

 

[Zumbador]

Originally posted by: pkme2
GIGABYTE GA-965P-S3 Socket T (LGA 775) Intel P965 mobo
would be another to consider.

Money saved can go to a better PSU, Corsair is nice.

I recommend the 22" Viewsonic, got one from Costco too.

I actually already bought all the stuff about 2 weeks ago. This viewsonic monitor is sweet.

Gonna have to RMA the 7300GT.

 

[pkme2]

Since you have a PSU, may we ask what's its brand?

 

[Zumbador]

Antec

 

[pkme2]

I would get a Fortron, Enermax, Enhance Corsair, or Seasonic as my PSU and use the Antec as backup.

Check jonnyguru.com and the AT threads about Antec. You got a mighty fine rig in the making, so I suggest another PSU.

 

[imported_goku]

OP, when you say choppy, do you mean that like every 3 seconds the screen seems to 'stop'? I had an issue where I would get a high frame rate on my 9800pro but if I would move forward in the game like a FPS, the screen would like 'stutter' every 3/6 seconds and it drove me nuts. No matter what, it seemed like the screen would freeze at an interval, turns out it was a defective card. It was a PITA to prove that the card was defective but I eventually got to RMA the card since it began to overheat and corrupt 2D images. When I got the new card back, the 'stuttering' stopped.

 

[Duvie]

Antec 550watt is more then ample...dont waste your time with that...

i agree with the others....why is 100fps choppy? I dont get it. Anything that never goes below a min of 30fps should be smooth. I think you have other issues causing the choppiness or pausing...

What resolution and/or refresh rate?

 

[Zumbador]

You guys are right, 100fps is fine. I wax mistaken because the FPS keeps jumping around. The problem is that it reaches 100fps but then drops to 60-70 FPS, which starts to get choppy. Once it goes below 50fps, it's way too annoying and I have to start turning off graphical features... trees, clouds, shadows, etc.

My main concern is that the price of the 7900GT is going to drop soon. My dilemma is that if I don't get a new card within the next 2 weeks, I won't be able to return my 7300GT.

 

[myocardia]

You need more RAM, much worse than you need a faster video card: your entire system, including the video card, is having to wait for the hard drive to supply data, because you're using virtual memory, instead of physical memory. Of course, a $109 7600GS will make that 7300GT look like it was a PCI video card, in terms of performance.

 

[Duvie]

Originally posted by: myocardia
You need more RAM, much worse than you need a faster video card: your entire system, including the video card, is having to wait for the hard drive to supply data, because you're using virtual memory, instead of physical memory. Of course, a $109 7600GS will make that 7300GT look like it was a PCI video card, in terms of performance.

good though...hit ctrl alt delete and under performance see what you page file usage is.....perhaps as Myocardia is suggesting you have no ram resources left so your pagefiling to the HDD which is far slower....

Also in the bios what do you have your agp aperture set to??? Should be 1/2 of the total system ram...set it to 512mb

 

[Zumbador]

Hmmm... when I'm running the RC flight sim, the HDD light hardly goes on. Blinks one every 3-5 seconds. Also, when I turn off shadows in the sim, performance increases quite a bit. Would shadows have affected system memory?

I did an experiment and ran a bunch of programs at once... Quicktime playing a movie, WM playing a movie, Firefox with a few windows open, Word, Excel, Photoshop, Solidworks, and of course the flightsim. Available RAM dropped to about 270Mb, and page file usage went up to about 650MB. When no programs are running, PF usage is around 200-250MB and available RAM is 650MB. How do these performance figures sound? I haven't got an idea... last time I dealt this closely with hardware was 6 years ago.

In any case, another gig of DDR800 is on my short list, but I'm thinking the 7900GT has more priority right now since I actually have to exchange a piece of hardware rather than buy a second add-on.

Thanks for all the help, btw.

 

[benplaut]

Originally posted by: Zumbador
You guys are right, 100fps is fine. I wax mistaken because the FPS keeps jumping around. The problem is that it reaches 100fps but then drops to 60-70 FPS, which starts to get choppy. Once it goes below 50fps, it's way too annoying and I have to start turning off graphical features... trees, clouds, shadows, etc.

Anything above 40 should be quite smooth... i've done alot of flight sims, and anything above 30 looks good enough; even 20 is usable, in a pinch.

I'd guess you have other problems...