where is my FPS bottleneck?

[onesoul]

Where is my FPS bottleneck?

With medium settings and one nVidia 8800 GTS, I was getting 20-30 FPS.
I upgraded to one GTX 465 and get 20-30 FPS on high settings.
Needless to say, I'm disappointed with a card that's 5 years newer.

Rig is not GeForce SLI capable, but *is* Quadro SLI capable.
I think my power supply can handle a GTX 590, but my wife would shoot me for spending $700 on a video card.   

Dell Precision 690
Intel 5000x chipset
Dual Quad core Intel Xeon X5355 @ 2.66GHz (8 CPUs)
8GB  RAM (667 MHz DDR2 ECC)
1 TB hardware RAID1
nVidia GeForce GTX 465 1GB
dual 21" LCD
SigmaTel High Definition onboard audio
1KW power supply
Windows 7 Professional 64-bit

[=KoS= Eldragon]

Dual Quad core Intel Xeon X5355 @ 2.66GHz (8 CPUs)

That's probably your bottleneck. Crysis is really CPU intensive.

Download and install the Crysis Wars CCC.

You FPS should improve quite a bit.

Beyond that, maybe edit application.ini directly and try turning off various settings such as particle effects. But offhand I don't know whats CPU only.

[Mitchpate]

Crysis isn't programmed to fully utilize a ton of cores.  Your dual-quad is a nice setup but at 2.66GHz per core, and Core2-era code execution speeds, it just isn't enough for Crysis.  It works best on a few very fast cores as opposed to many slower cores.

I don't know that I'd be too concerned though.  On the vast majority of games you should be just fine.

[onesoul]

Download and install the Crysis Wars CCC.

This?  http://wiki.mechlivinglegends.net/index.php?title=MWLL_Performance_guide
Thanks.  I'll give it a shot.

[Come and See]

Only 1 GB memory on your video card plus the GTX 465 isn't too high end on performance.

I have the Sapphire 6950 Toxic Edition with 2 GB and it's flashed to 6970. My CPU is a quad-core i5 2500k OC'd to 4 GHZ with 8 GB of RAM and a raid 0 -- 2 hd. I can play ultra settings without a sweat now and can even run fraps with no fps drop!!!

[onesoul]

Only 1 GB memory on your video card plus the GTX 465 isn't too high end on performance.

I have the Sapphire 6950 Toxic Edition with 2 GB and it's flashed to 6970. My CPU is a quad-core i5 2500k OC'd to 4 GHZ with 8 GB of RAM and a raid 0 -- 2 hd. I can play ultra settings without a sweat now and can even run fraps with no fps drop!!!

Your cores are considerably faster than mine.

Will a much faster video card (ex:  GTX 580/590 or AMD 6950/6970/6990) help me or will I still be CPU constrained?

I'll pay closer attention to CPU usage while playing MWLL.  Pretty sure only 2 CPUs are used, one at 30%, the other at 90%.  No CPU is pegged.

[Eximo]

Definitely the CPU being your limiting factor. Crysis seems to utilize only three cores (if you shift the physics off to a separate core)

Your video card is plenty for running MWLL at medium to high settings with a minimum FPS of around 25 during heavy combat (Usually around 5 mechs on screen at once). I used a GTX280 for a while and it didn't do too badly on high.

Athlon X2 6000 + 8800GTS 640mb + 2GB ddr2 800 = 25FPS (5 combat) CCC level 3
Athlon X2 6000 + GTX280 1GB + 6GB ddr2800 = 30FPS (15-20 combat) CCC level 3
--== Someone fill in some stats for a Core 2 Duo, Q6600, Phenom I or II or something ==--
i7 950 @ 3.37GHz + GTX280 1GB + 12GB ddr3 1600 =  60FPS (25 -35 combat) CCC level 4
i7 950 @ 3.37 Ghz + GTX580 1.5GB + 12GB ddr3 1600 = 55 minimum FPS CCC level 4 (Tried 4+,  but made everything shiny...and I mean everything...ground, rocks, trees...)
Quite a few stats for i5 and i7 sandy bridge floating around on the forums.

[onesoul]

How can I force the physics to a separate core?

[CHHš Aurailius]

I would disagree with all the people thinking his CPU's the limiting factor.  While crysis is CPU intensive and not coded for multi-core very well, it WILL still use at least 4 cores roughly evenly if given the chance (i have an I7 920 myself, and it loves all of its cores equally).  I had a similar experience of performance with my GTX 260, it IS most likely your video card. 
The 465 is also only a mid-range card, it doesn't hold a candle to something like the 580 or 590.  A 580 packs just under twice the processing power.  There is however an easy way to check, type in "Profile 6" into your command line, and check the frame time.  That shows you how long it takes for the engine to render each frame, for each subsystem of the engine.  Physics would be the CPU munching one, and if it's low, then it's your video card, vice-versa if it's high.
(you may need to type "con_restricted 0" first)

Edit: Xarg's right.

[~SJ~ Xarg Talasko]

Profile 6 IIRC.

[=CJW= Bin Fish]

I have done lots of testing on my rig and the CPU is THE biggest limiting factor for playing above medium settings.

See what you average GPU usage is with v-sync turned off. I was getting around 50% usage until I upgraded my CPU and overclocked the bejesus out of it.

If you can overclock that CPU you should see pretty good scaling in FPS up to the point you hit full usage of your GPU.

[Mitchpate]

It's extremely rare for Xeon-based workstations to allow overclocking, especially Dells.

The game may be using "all the cores" of a Core i7 but if the game only has 2-3 threads then it'll always be CPU bottlenecked.  The CPU can spread that usage out but it'll never be able to use more than 2-3 cores worth of computing power.  That's just how CPU architectures work.

[onesoul]

Thanks for everyone's feedback.
I installed CCC, used value 3 and got a steady 10 FPS improvement to 30-40 FPS at 1440x900.  I experimented moving the CCC physics CPU binding to 1 and 2 and didn't see much difference on perfmon.  CPU0 peaked around 90%, while CPU1 or CPU2 never crested 30%.

It's entirely possible I'm single thread bound on whatever the Crysis 'parent' thread/subsystem is.

Pretty sure I cannot overclock in the Dell BIOS.

This weekend I'll:
- get GPU load values from either GPU-Z or the nVidia tools.  Hope the GPU is maxed out, though I doubt it.
- use command line 'con_restricted 0' and 'Profile 1' or 'Profile 6' to get game subsystem frame render values.

[(TLL)CapperDeluxe]

I have a Q6600 (stock at 2.4Ghz per core), and I got a pretty decent boost out of overclocking to 3.2Ghz per core. You may want to try overclocking if thats possible to be done safely from your 2.66 to something around 3.0 or higher if possible.

[~SJ~ Xarg Talasko]

If the BIOS won't let you overclock, it's possible there are other ways, by means of putting things on the pins of your CPU. Freeborn_Toad would be the person to see about that, he seems quite knowledgable on the subject, finding me a way to overclock my e7200, which I ended up not needing to use.