[SOLVED] GTX 550 Ti Low FPS

[Wirmaple73]

Hi guys, I recently replaced my GT710 1GB DDR3 with a GTX 550 Ti 1GB DDR5 (Bought it yesterday). I played games (CSGO, GTAV) and I suprisingly saw that the FPS is almost the same as my Old GT710! (25-40FPS) But a GTX 550 Ti is much better than a GT 710.
I Reinstalled Drivers, Resetted NVIDIA Control Panel Settings (And setting Power mode to Prefer max peformance)
Also Lowered Game Resolution and Settings, but no Change in FPS!!
What's wrong?

PC Specs
Pentium G2020 (2.9GHz)
GTX 550 Ti 1GB DDR5
4GB RAM (DDR3-1333)
(Also my GTX550 Ti isn't overheating. Idles at 35-40c and 70-75c at load. I didn't overclock and touch anything.)

What can I do? Any solutions?
Please Help me!

 

[Phaaze88]

This is why you check resource usage in game before trying to replace anything... You should have monitored:
-cpu usage of each core/thread, because you can become cpu limited from just a single thread.
-memory usage
-gpu usage

You didn't do that, and just upgraded the gpu anyway, and from the looks of your specs, it's the last thing you should've changed!
-The Pentium G2020 only has 2 threads. CSGO runs 3-4, and GTA V up to 8! You are cpu limited.

-Only 4GBs of ram. CSGO only needs 2GBs minimum. GTA V is a known memory hog, and easily uses 8 or more! There's also the memory the OS uses when it's running in the background. Once the ram is full, the system starts writing temporary files to your disk drive.
The disk drive is much slower than the ram - everything slows to a crawl at that point. You are memory limited.

Fix both of those. The 550Ti isn't going to do anything until the cpu + ram can feed it enough frames.

 

[Darkbreeze]

Actual performance, is ALMOST identical between those two cards.

You swapped a fairly low end card for a fairly low end card that is two generations behind the card you already had. There is nothing wrong, you just bought an older card that is not going to offer much of anything more than what you had already. Unfortunately it is also so old that driver support is likely truncated at this point, so that is going to further diminish any expected performance on modern games.

Plus, as Phaaze has indicated, you have other serious bottleneck issues that are definitely affecting the lack of performance as well. I'm not sure though that even upgrading the CPU and memory would make much difference in this case. Maybe a little. Probably some, but that would be likely true with EITHER card installed.

 

[Wirmaple73]

Actual performance, is ALMOST identical between those two cards.

You swapped a fairly low end card for a fairly low end card that is two generations behind the card you already had. There is nothing wrong, you just bought an older card that is not going to offer much of anything more than what you had already. Unfortunately it is also so old that driver support is likely truncated at this point, so that is going to further diminish any expected performance on modern games.

Plus, as Phaaze has indicated, you have other serious bottleneck issues that are definitely affecting the lack of performance as well. I'm not sure though that even upgrading the CPU and memory would make much difference in this case. Maybe a little. Probably some, but that would be likely true with EITHER card installed.

Hi, thanks for your comment. Are you sure GT710 is like a GTX 550 Ti? Many Websites say GTX 550 Ti is much better. Like Here and Here. So the Problem should be only from Bottlenecking, right?

 

[Wirmaple73]

This is why you check resource usage in game before trying to replace anything... You should have monitored:
-cpu usage of each core/thread, because you can become cpu limited from just a single thread.
-memory usage
-gpu usage

You didn't do that, and just upgraded the gpu anyway, and from the looks of your specs, it's the last thing you should've changed!
-The Pentium G2020 only has 2 threads. CSGO runs 3-4, and GTA V up to 8! You are cpu limited.

-Only 4GBs of ram. CSGO only needs 2GBs minimum. GTA V is a known memory hog, and easily uses 8 or more! There's also the memory the OS uses when it's running in the background. Once the ram is full, the system starts writing temporary files to your disk drive.
The disk drive is much slower than the ram - everything slows to a crawl at that point. You are memory limited.

Fix both of those. The 550Ti isn't going to do anything until the cpu + ram can feed it enough frames.

So if my change my CPU to i3-2120 or i5-2500 the bottlenecking is fixed and I can reach higher fps? (Like 10-20 fps more)

 

[Phaaze88]

So if my change my CPU to i3-2120 or i5-2500 the bottlenecking is fixed and I can reach higher fps? (Like 10-20 fps more)

No, because you still only have 4GBs of ram. You need to fix BOTH cpu and ram. Doing one or the other won't be enough.

Upgrading only the cpu: CSGO uses 2GBs by itself, and with any background processes, will pretty much use up the rest.
Memory slows down the system over 75% usage. Once full, temp files are instead written to the storage drive; this is much slower than physical ram, so it affects the entire system.
You want to avoid using all of your memory because of those reasons.
You can get away with 8GBs with CSGO, but GTA V demands a 16GB setup.

Upgrading only the memory: the cpu only has 2 threads to work with for any task, be it games, background processes, etc.
CSGO can work with 2 threads - it's just far more forgiving on system resources - but GTA V can't.

 

[Darkbreeze]

Hi, thanks for your comment. Are you sure GT710 is like a GTX 550 Ti? Many Websites say GTX 550 Ti is much better.

Since I don't have both cards and have never done comparative testing myself, then no, I'm not sure, but based on what I CAN see, yes, I'm pretty sure they are very similar in performance.

https://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Nvidia-GTX-550-Ti-vs-Nvidia-GeForce-GT-710/3161vsm77649

http://gpuboss.com/gpus/GeForce-GTX-550-Ti-vs-GeForce-GT-710

I know the 550 ti is going to have somewhat better performance, but honestly, given how old that card is having been released clear back in 2011, 9 years ago, it is so outdated that it probably doesn't even matter. Plus as mentioned, your bottleneck is likely the bigger concern right now anyhow. You need better CPU and memory performance or you're not going to see any increase in FPS because with what you have you are already likely capped out.

And the performance benefit that that card DOES have over the GT 710, is not significant enough to have been worth purchasing it. You'd have been better, much better off, buying something like a GTX 750 or 750 ti, or even a GTX 1030. You always want to try and go with a NEWER architecture, not an older one. I'm not even sure Nvidia is supporting the 500 series cards under it's current driver support program anymore. Maybe, but I thought I had heard that everything from the 600 series and back was officially out of the support period now.

 

[Phaaze88]

I'm not even sure Nvidia is supporting the 500 series cards under it's current driver support program anymore. Maybe, but I thought I had heard that everything from the 600 series and back was officially out of the support period now.

It isn't. The last WHQL driver is from March of 2018...

 

[Wulfas]

It is very cheap to just get an fx 8350, a 1050 and almost free to get a crappy piece of 8gb Ddr3 man...

 

[Wirmaple73]

It is very cheap to just get an fx 8350, a 1050 and almost free to get a crappy piece of 8gb Ddr3 man...

Welcome to iran, man

 

[Darkbreeze]

Yep, I figured it was something like that. That sucks, because I know it's extremely hard to get modern hardware there, but it is what it is. Just because it IS hard and expensive, doesn't change the basic principles involving performance and what makes sense if you are trying to do modern things and run modern software/games with decent expectations.