Upgrade advice

[Cully]

Im looking for upgrade advice please guys.
Recently i got a new 24" monitor with native res of 2048 X 1152,seriously nice image quality [well its borrowed from a friend]
I now find running at that res with BC2 online at times my fps drops to 40 fps with everything maxxed out.
A minimum of 40 isnt bad i guess but im just a stickler for high fps as 40 fps feels sluggish for me personally.
The game looks amazing and id prefer to run it with all the bells and whistles at the monitors native res but with consistently high fps.
Im thinking a new gfx card might help but would anything else in my rig cause a bottleneck or offer a better upgrade option?


Seasonic M12 700W PSU

Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3P, P35, Socket-775,ATX, GbLAN, DDR2, 1333FSB, 2xPCI-Ex16

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz

4 gig OCZ Platinum DDR2 PC6400 2048MB KIT

Powercolor ATI Radeon HD 4870 1024MB GDDR5 PCI-Express

windows 7  64 ultimate

2 X Samsung SpinPoint T166 500GB SATA2 16MB 7200RPM

[[GIT]Fairy]

Christ thats a pretty powerful rig you have already.  The Q6600 should be beefy enough to get the best out of the game, and in all honesty unless you are going for a top end card changing the gfx card isnt going to really add that much in the way of a % boost. 

Maybe wait a few weeks for a patch or two and see how things pan out?  I had to upgrade in my case as my dual core was never gonna cut it.  Then I had to improve the card as well as the 5770 would have been a possible bottle neck.

[Cully]

Yeah your probably right mate.
Ill sit on it for now to see what happens,cheers.

[[TiG]Lucutus]

A lot of us run games at 800x600, with custom sound and gfx settings tweaked to come out at less than the games default 'low quality settings'.

This means we can get upto a possible 80-100fps in most games like Quakeworld, Tribes and that CPU hog, Duke Nukem 3D!

technology, eh?  incredible... *shakes head in wonder*

Seriously though, at that (very nice) resolution, you will probably end up needing a couple of decent cards in SLI or similar to drive the panel at a very high FPS.

lower the resolution to 800x600 for the lol and post a screenie for us!

[Cully]

Ok ive turned down detail to low and left everything high and getting minimum 60 fps now,i messed around with shadows and effects but found the "detail" setting to be the biggest hit on fps, comparing with low and high i noticed little difference.


Im now running

detail - low   [big difference to fps here but nothing much lost going to low]
texture detail - high  [didnt see much difference in gfx guality or framerate so left high]
shadows - high  [same as above - not much difference]
effects - high  [same again]

FSAA X 4
2048 X 1152

Lucutus yeah i use custom configs myself for the likes of DODS etc when i was playing competitively, now i just want sweet looking games, guess im getting old

[[TiG]Grim]

what resolutions does that monitor support ?

try going below the 2k horizontal res and see does in make a diff

[[GIT]Fairy]

A lot of us run games at 800x600....

LOL maybe Karma still does.....  The rest of us have moved out of the dark ages.  I always feel its wrong to run a game outside the panels native resolution.  Maybe I'm wrong!

[[TiG]the_syco]

I always feel its wrong to run a game outside the panels native resolution.  Maybe I'm wrong!

Aye, but as the max of this thing is only 1280*1024, it's not saying a lot.

[Cully]

Got a tip form a tweak guide to turn sound from hifi to headphones and it improved fps.
ALso updated to the very latest drivers, seeing a nice performance boost now.
Aye Grim i tried other resolutions ,strangely im seeing the same fps at the monitors native as i am @ 1280x1024.

Tweakguide linkage http://www.fragcast.org/?p=433

[Cully]

Lads would one of the latest ATI cards improve things much?
While i realise the 5800 or 5900 series are a big performance boost would the Q6600 be a bottleneck?
I tried overclock the Q6600 with stock cooling and she wouldnt boot up, if needed i might get some decent cooling.

[[GIT]Fairy]

I'm getting 80+ FPS on an i5 with a 5850 and 4gb ram on DX11.  I could tweak it and get it higher but happy with that tbh.  If you have overclocked and it wont boot thats nothing to do with cooling afaik.

[[TiG]Molc]

I have an i5 w/ the ATI 5870 and it runs like a dream at 1920x1200. The only thing that causes some slowdown is someone dropping a building on my head from a tank spot. At that stage, FPS doesn't really matter

Gotta love the xbox though - no need to worry about this crud all the time.

[Cully]

Gotta love the xbox though - no need to worry about this crud all the time.

Indeed but trust me the difference in graphics between the two is massive in BC2.
I got it for the young lad on 360.
MW2 apart from lower res looked decent compared to pc but BC2 is like another game totally and runs at only 30 fps, using a pad makes this framerate less noticeable.


Was over at a friends lastnight looking at BC2 on his brand new setup and holy fuck is all i can say.

ATI 5970 and the very latest i7 950 or 075 ,not fully sure which.
Hes running it on a 32 " screen @ 1920 X 1080 and never drops below 100 fps , dx 11 absolutely everything maxed out.
Absulutely jawdropping stuff.

[Cully]

Ok have done some more testing, managed to overclock the cpu using my mobos inteli tweaker thingy, seems me being a noob changed something else in the bios lastnight which is why she wouldnt boot up.
It was very stable and no problems at all set to "turbo" not sure precisely what speed it was getting to but apparently it auto overclocks the cpu when needed.

Heres the strange bit, i swapped my highly edited settings ini out and replaced it with the origional just out of interest and straight away ingame fps were massively improved at stock cpu and gpu speeds

I guess i was reading too much into a few BC2 performance tweak guides on the net.
Im now seeing a minimum of 50 fps and max of 90,usually hovers at around the 60-70- mark even with building blowing up etc, im at medium settings @ 1650 X 1280 running set to auto  same as before but the difference is massive - oh and im running dx 10 now and shes rock solid

Lesson learned - dont always believe what so called tweak guides suggest.