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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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Get as much ram as you can afford. Presume you are
running Windows -- so turn off the swap file if you
have 1.5 - 2GB of ram. The difference in performance is
astounding.
Besides that, turn off unneeded services and keep your
system clean of spyware. Most "slow" systems I come across
aren't that slow at all, they are just poorly configured.
What are you using to keep your gaming PC cool?
How ya like dat?
My 386sx 16 is just not not enough to handle Falcon 4.0! The box specs IBM PC compatible, 286 min, 640k and an Ad Lib sound card ... and I am at least 1.5 those specs. I mean WTF man??!!
Call me an AMD fanboy, but one place where you can be most certain that there's not a bottleneck is where you have fast and innovative access methods. If you're using an amd64-based system, you're probably okay with the CPU and probably motherboard. Integrated memory controller. Relatively short pipeline. It's very nice to have this stuff integrated and be maxing out the speed.
In my personal experience, I've found that upgrading the video card impacted the performance within video games more than any other upgrade. The only exception would be in the case of RAM; RAM is one of those things where if you have enough, everything goes well, but if you're lacking, it can really hurt. Just be sure to have 1gb of RAM and then upgrade your video card if you're looking for the biggest bang for your buck in terms of performance within a video game.
Like many other people, I assume that you are locked into Windows for most games. But, if you do play games and if they are available for Linux, try to play them on Linux. Your performance may be augmented by very much.
Now what you should do is, first of all, make sure that you have enough RAM. Observe your hard disk drive activiy LED while playing games. If your game stumbles, you'll need more RAM. And let me make this clear, the minimum today for gaming should be at least 1GB. If your games require more, feed the beast with fresh RAM DIMMs.
The second thing you want to do is to open your task manager and then starting and playing your game. The task manager will then create a graph of the CPU usage which you'll be able to look on later. Does the CPU spike for a while? Is it always on the edge? A new CPU will cure!
Otherwise, it is safe to assume that your video card is up for an upgrade.
Really, there aren't many bottlenecks possible in a gaming system. Everything is logical.
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This will let you work out which pieces of hardware are not up to scratch. Then you just have to work out whether they're responsible for whatever 'bottleneck' you're trying to get around.
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.
Here are some simple steps that you can take to figure out where the bottleneck is:
1. If you see the disk activity LED lit up a lot, you probably need more memory. The system is trying to extend the memory of the system by swapping data from RAM to disk and back. If you had more memory, the system would be able to keep more data in RAM. You can also confirm this by looking at the memory usage statistics in Task Manager (assuming this is a Windows box).
2. Another thing you can see from Task Manager is the CPU utilization. If it maxed out at 100%, the CPU is probably the bottleneck, so you may benefit from having a faster processor.
3. If neither of these things is the issue and the game you are running has a lot of complex graphics going on, then the issue could be your Video Card.
In my limited experience with benchmarking games, these seem like the three most common bottlenecks.
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www.moneybythenumbers.com
I think you should add flashing lights. Maybe one of those fishtank windows. Don't forget to paint your case and don't buy a power supply unless it's painted black.
Be sure all the fans you buy have LEDs in them, and your front panel should be covered by a motorized door that you can open by remote control.
Then you will have a "gaming rig" instead of just some workstation with a video card in it.
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.
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Outside those general things, another thing to keep in mind is the more hardware devices like printers and scanners that you have plugged into your machine the more often the CPU polls those devices during each cycle. Also allowing third party applications to automatically launch and idle while you play will hurt performance.
Hope this help. Game on.
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Free your mind - Flush your toilet
My credit card doesn't have an unlimited limit and I'm penalized if I don't pay it back. Whatever happened to God Mode in real life?
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)
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
RAM- you need enough RAM so you don't hit swap. For today's games, thats 1 GB. After that, the number 1 thing you can do to improve system performance is to get low latency RAM. Your CPU will be waiting for RAM, minimize the time that it is.
Well, ok, it's not trash-junk, but it's not up to the hype either. There was a review on TechRepublic a while ago that I'm pretty sure made it to slashdot (if not, then digg). Basically it showd that Low Latency RAM in itself made little to no difference and more RAM was always the way to go.
That said, Low Latency ram is not entirely a waste of money. Low Latency ram has a better shot at overclocking (like turning DDR 400 into DDR 450 by relaxing the timings and pumping the clock rate.) It's also more likely to be higher quality and thus less likely to go bad on you. As an asside, if you're interested in RAM in general, I've found this site very informative/userful.
But I would minimize the value of Low Latency in and of itself.