FPS and resolution

[MrCasualGamer]

hello,

I have an old intel Q6600 2.4Gh stock on DP45SG mobo with 4 GB ram and HD 5670 gfx card. This satisfies Planetside 2 minimum requirement and I can play with all low settings 1600x900 with around 40 FPS ....Now, if I choose lower resolution, without changing any other setting, the FPS goes down .. and lower I go, worse the FPS becomes .. How so? Should the fps not Improve? Everything is at stock speed, nothing overclocked ...

thanks.

 

[Cristi72]

hello,

I have an old intel Q6600 2.4Gh stock on DP45SG mobo with 4 GB ram and HD 5670 gfx card. This satisfies Planetside 2 minimum requirement and I can play with all low settings 1600x900 with around 40 FPS ....Now, if I choose lower resolution, without changing any other setting, the FPS goes down .. and lower I go, worse the FPS becomes .. How so? Should the fps not Improve? Everything is at stock speed, nothing overclocked ...

thanks.

Hello,

Lowering the resolution leads to lower GPU influence and the system will do graphics rendering mostly on software, so the CPU will do the heavy lifting. Open Task Manager and you'll see that the CPU will go 100%; as soon as you will augment the resolution, the CPU usage will go down. Remember that graphics relies heavily on parallel computing, so you CPU, even if it is a quad-core and still has some punch, cannot match the power of many stream processors working together (your GPU has 400 stream processors).

 

[MrCasualGamer]

hello,

I have an old intel Q6600 2.4Gh stock on DP45SG mobo with 4 GB ram and HD 5670 gfx card. This satisfies Planetside 2 minimum requirement and I can play with all low settings 1600x900 with around 40 FPS ....Now, if I choose lower resolution, without changing any other setting, the FPS goes down .. and lower I go, worse the FPS becomes .. How so? Should the fps not Improve? Everything is at stock speed, nothing overclocked ...

thanks.

Hello,

Lowering the resolution leads to lower GPU influence and the system will do graphics rendering mostly on software, so the CPU will do the heavy lifting. Open Task Manager and you'll see that the CPU will go 100%; as soon as you will augment the resolution, the CPU usage will go down. Remember that graphics relies heavily on parallel computing, so you CPU, even if it is a quad-core and still has some punch, cannot match the power of many stream processors working together (your GPU has 400 stream processors).

Thanks .. is there any chart which shows at what resolution the gfx load starts shifting from cpu to gpu as the resolution goes up ? thanks

 

[Cristi72]

Thanks .. is there any chart which shows at what resolution the gfx load starts shifting from cpu to gpu as the resolution goes up ? thanks

I think nobody did such test yet, because of the complexity of the issue. Just think of all the games, the huge amount of graphics settings possible, the DX version compatibility, then multiply with the number of display resolutions available.

There are articles where you can see the influence of the CPU speed vs the number of cores, or how the FPS changes when the display resolution changes:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/game-performance-bottleneck,2737.html

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/balanced-gaming-pc-overclock,2699-8.html

Download MSI Afterburner and test your game at different resolutions and different image quality settings. Probably in 1280x1024 you will have the highest CPU usage and the lowest GPU usage; if you will go down to 1024x768 or lower, the CPU and GPU usage will both drop, and if you go over 1440x900 the GPU usage will be higher.