Cpu bottleneck in games ?

[praveen77]

Hello all,
I have upgraded my GPU from a gtx 550 ti to a gtx 960. I was able to play battlefield 4 with very smooth frame rate with all the settings on ultra. Grid autosport was also smooth with 73 fps on ultra. I even tested Metro last light with very high settings and advanced physx turned on with no lag whatsoever. However when it comes to Crysis 3, on high settings there was occasional lag. Nfs rivals ran like crap with whatever settings I tried. My main reason for the upgrade was nfs rivals but it turned out to be a disaster with lots of lag. What is the problem with these two games ? Or is my CPU bottlenecking my GPU ? I saw videos where people had smooth gameplay for nfs rivals on gtx 960 at least with 30 fps.

My system specs are
I3 3220
Corsair 4gb 1600mhz
Gtx 960
Gigabyte b75 motherboard
Corsair 600w psu

I play games at 1600*900 resolution

 

[sincreator]

Well lately the NFS games have been terrible console ports, and run like that anyway. Crysis 3 likes a strong CPU as well as GPU, so both your video card and CPU are holding you back there. The game is really demanding.

 

[sincreator]

This should answer your questions about Crysis 3: http://www.techspot.com/review/642-crysis-3-performance/page6.html

 

[maddogfargo]

NFS Rivals is locked at 30 FPS because it's a bad port.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDA37BmvNwM

Crysis 3 is extremely demanding.

I had a Phenom II x6 1090t and 2s HD 7950's in crossfire. It could run Crysis 3 on max settings with 2x SMAA (Tom's recommended AA for best performance/appearance balance for Crysis 3) and would get 40-60+ FPS with 50 FPS average.

ALL 6 cores were at 95-99% and Both GPUs were at 95-99%. Crysis 3 likes more cores and powerful GPUs.

 

[praveen77]

But aren't these specs enough to handle these games at 1600*900 resolution? A review by Digital Foundry on gtx 960 with I3 4130 showed fps of 40> at 1080p with high settings. The 3220 and 4130 are almost identical. Why am I not getting the same performance?

 

[shadows1234]

But aren't these specs enough to handle these games at 1600*900 resolution? A review by Digital Foundry on gtx 960 with I3 4130 showed fps of 40> at 1080p with high settings. The 3220 and 4130 are almost identical. Why am I not getting the same performance?

nope you are gettings close to same performance you should be getting i had a 4150 i3 and a 960 and it runs around 40-50 fps on 1600x900 highest settings and nfs games are not what they use to be and are badly ported , the problem might be you have very little ram the games uses around 3 whole Gigabytes for me on crysis 3 might explain the dips because i don't get any unless staring a level the fps stays avg of 45 on highest settings

 

[martinch]

At a guess, I'd say possibly either the i3 or 4GB of RAM could be an issue. According to HardOCP's review of the GTX 960, at Very High settings (1080p) with 2x SMAA AA, you should get ~52fps on average, with a minim of 35fps, which is enough.