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Discovering Bottlenecks in PCs Built for Gaming?
QMan asks: "I, like many others here at Slashdot, am an avid gamer. Recently, I've been thinking about upgrading my gaming PC, but with all the mish mash of components in the box, I don't really know which components are slowing down the rest, and would be an ideal candidate for replacement. I'm looking for advice on how to discover the inherent bottlenecks in my system, whether they be from my video card, RAM, CPU, or other components. I've tried various benchmarking utilities, but they generally give an overall performance rating, but not much info on which device(s) had the most impact in limiting that rating. I'd imagine many of you out there have encountered the same problem, and might have ideas on where to start."
Perhaps you should give us the OS you are running. That will greatly impact the answer(s) you will get.
For example, if you were running Windows 2000 or greater, there are various performance monitors that will give you a good clue about what is actually going on while your game is playing. Otherwise, you are in a guessing game.
Alternatively, you could swap out components and do observation based tests. However, this tends to be subjective, and less reliable.
Bottom line: give us more details, and someone might be able to help.
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What are you using to keep your gaming PC cool?
How ya like dat?
I wanted to clarify the original question because I'm looking for this kind of utility myself and was getting annoyed at everyone simply asking for specs.
Make sure you have 1 gig of ram and at least a 2.5 ghz equivalent processor. If so, then your bottleneck is 99% likely your video card.
Bzzzt fail. Some good points from the parent - but, the pagefile thing is just wrong.
Windows will run fine without a pagefile. In fact it does run much better. I've disabled my pagefile and home and left it that way for quite some time.
Some applications, Photoshop being one of them, absolutely require Windows to be running a pagefile. These applications account for less than 5% of the software that an "avid gamer" would be running.
The only proviso is that you must provide more than enough RAM for your system to ever need, or you are going to run into problems when you try and allocate more memory than you actually have.
Perhaps the parent tried disabling his swapfile when he only had 128MB of RAM?
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
I have a dual boot computer between Windows XP and Linux. Experimenting with "America's Army" and "Unreal Tournament 2004", the speedup when using Linux is actually very significant.
Now, if there were only more commerical Linux games!
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Games vary quite a bit in terms of utilization. Deus Ex 2 hit the main processor pretty hard. Half Life 2 destroys RAM. World of Warcraft sucks no matter what you do thanks to the server on the other end.
There is really no way to benchmark every game out there, so you have to go on the "feel" of the games that you are playing.
If your game experiences sudden large performance hits, you probably have run out of RAM and are hitting the hard disk. Any time you hit the hard disk is bad.
If you want to see if your CPU is maxed out, go to a relatively visually quiet section of the world and start knocking objects over. This shouldn't increase render times, but will show you if you have processor clock to spare.
If you want to see if your graphics card is maxed out, find a relatively static section of the world without NPC's or moving objects, and go from a very narrow view to a fully pulled back vista. Assuming you aren't hitting a we-render-it-so-we-add-physics-to-it wall, you should be hitting the graphics processor pretty hard while staying light on the other components. This should also be able to be sensed in gameplay... if your framerate glitches vary a lot from moment-to-moment based upon your vision cone, you're probably hitting the graphics card. If your framerate glitches are relatively constant within an area or an encounter, you're probably hitting something else.
FSB speed is tough to judge, as that effects everything else. But really the only way to improve that is to get a new motherboard, at which point you should be upgrading everything anyway.
To complicate matters further, which "bottleneck" you hit depends upon what your graphics settings are. Want to max out your graphics processor? Turn on 8x sampling and turn the resolution all the way up. Want to max out your ram? Use the maximum texture size on the largest maps.
The ______ Agenda
1) get a high-end logic analyzer
2) get or build a socket shim and appropriate decode modules for your cpu fsb(assuming intel)
3) track down the physical addresses for your graphics device and memory. the bios should map these the same for each boot if you are lucky.
4) get some traces and write some analysis software to correlate bus issues with responses. one good metric would be the time spent waiting for memory vs the time between issues
5) look at the driver for the graphics card to figure out the indication of when the graphics command pipe stalls. extend your trace analyzer to track these
6) dig through the intel performance event documentation and write or run monitoring code which logs these over time
this should give you a general indication of whether its your cpu, memory system, or graphics card that is the bottleneck. it may be none of the above. you may have to dig deeper because interpreting all that data can be difficult.
good luck!
(note that your system may not work at speed with the analyzer hooked up..in that case stop whining, buy reasonably high end parts and forget the whole thing)