What's my computer's bottleneck?

[bladesamurai]

I've been having lackluster performance, even on the lowest settings (800x600, everything to low), but I figure that my computer should be able to manage a playable experience at those settings. If I'm wrong please don't hesitate to set me straight

Here's my machine:
Intel Core Duo E8400 @3.0 GHz
8 GB of Corsair XMS2 RAM
8800 GTS 640
Onboard Audio by Realtek

I manage 30 FPS in the hangar but once I get outside and into battle it is not uncommon to see 0 or 1 FPS for a bit, with maybe 8 being an average. What is the bottleneck of my machine? Should this rig be able to handle MWLL, and my poor performance is because of a driver or config issue instead?

[LoKiPP]

drivers.

You can also try a clean install of windows.

[Malecite]

Trust me, I know.

I have spent nearly a FULL DAY tweaking the video settings on my rig, and its easily twice or more as powerful as yours. The best I can manage is around 15-30fps despite using every optimizer and graphic config I can find. The mod is not currently optimized as its in BETA form, the maps are somewhat ludicrous in scope, and the net code is particularly brutal. But all mods have growing pains.

What I CAN suggest is googling "CCC Crysis 1.31" and following the autoexec instructions, setting sound quality to low or medium, and just accepting that this mod pretty much rapes most computers. Also there appears to be a handful of us that just get shafted for whatever reason, time will tell if its resolved I guess.

[KingLeerUK]

That 8800GTS 640mb probably isn't doing you any favours.  I originally had a pair of those SLI'd together and I was in the 20-30fps range with HIGH and no AA.

It is strange that you are getting such poor performance with LOW settings.

[bladesamurai]

Forgot to add that I'm running Windows 7 x64, although I hope that doesn't make a difference. I don't notice much of a performance difference between running crysis in 32 bit or 64 bit.
I've already updated sound and video drivers to the most recent version.

I will give that CCC Crysis config tool a shot. Thanks for the heads up

[(TLL)Frosted]

I have an e8500 oc at 3.8ghz and a 8600 gt 256mb I get about 20-30 fps everything on low and resolution at 1280x720.

Can't wait to get my Gtx280 next week

[Vatek]

Your video card is bottlenecking you, and to be honest the onboard sound card probably isn't helping.

[Stahlseele]

Just what the hell does an on board sound card have to do with frames per second?
An on board sound card is STILL a dedicated chip that does all of the sound computing.
Not the CPU or ANYTHING ELSE doing it. So nothing else gets hampered.

Furthermore: i guess it's the CPU. MWLL is the first application that i have ever seen getting ALL FOUR cores in my Q9650 up to 80% and more usage.
RAM should not be the Problem. RAM Usage while playing is at 4Gigs, which is 66% in my Case, due to the Board not wanting to run with 8Gigs.
What kind of HDD do you have? My HDD's are putting out some good work too when i play. The 8800 with 640 Megs was the medium of the series,
but it was and still is a pretty strong card.

[Shivapt]

thats odd.
I have a E6600 (2.4ghz) overclocked to 3.0 ghz, and a 8800GT (540MB). I clock in at 70 fps in the hanger and 20-30 in combat, with 18-ish during intense, mindblowing combat. This @ 1650*1024 and all on HIGH (except shadows and postprocessing and motion blur - those on as low as I can).

[bladesamurai]

Just what the hell does an on board sound card have to do with frames per second?
An on board sound card is STILL a dedicated chip that does all of the sound computing.
Not the CPU or ANYTHING ELSE doing it. So nothing else gets hampered.

Furthermore: i guess it's the CPU. MWLL is the first application that i have ever seen getting ALL FOUR cores in my Q9650 up to 80% and more usage.
RAM should not be the Problem. RAM Usage while playing is at 4Gigs, which is 66% in my Case, due to the Board not wanting to run with 8Gigs.
What kind of HDD do you have? My HDD's are putting out some good work too when i play. The 8800 with 640 Megs was the medium of the series,
but it was and still is a pretty strong card.

The hard drive that I keep my OS and programs on is a 7200 rpm seagate and I haven't had any issues with it. Is there a program I can use to log the usage of my CPU, RAM, and Video card? This would help me gauge where the problem is on my machine. I will look into overclocking my CPU a bit (within safe bounds, of course) and see if my situation improves.

[Zurechial]

Just what the hell does an on board sound card have to do with frames per second?
An on board sound card is STILL a dedicated chip that does all of the sound computing.
Not the CPU or ANYTHING ELSE doing it. So nothing else gets hampered.

Most onboard sound 'cards' are just codecs (such as those by RealTek or Analog Devices) which handle audio processing via the CPU, fed from a controller on the PCI bus.
They rarely if ever comprise a dedicated processor for audio and using a dedicated sound card in a PCI/PCI-Ex slot does alleviate a certain workload from the CPU.

However, in this day and age of multi-core CPUs, the main benefit of using a dedicated sound card is that of superior quality. The performance issue is negligible in most cases and unlikely to have much bearing on the OP's performance problems.

[KingLeerUK]

The 8800 with 640 Megs was the medium of the series, but it was and still is a pretty strong card.

In my experience, my eVGA GeForce 8800GTS 640mb card was bent over and handled rather roughly by Crysis.  Adding MWLL to the mix only made the card whimper harder.  I tried to offset this with an SLI configuration of two 8800GTS cards, but Crysis only laughed and said "do the laundry".  Seriously, I could barely get 30fps on HIGH with two of those things teamed together.

After an upgrade to a GTX285 2GB the tables have turned and now Crysis is doing the housework.

[Thorbinator]

Same, my 8800gts 640 struggled to run anything, even on low.

Eventually with r_texturestreaming 0 and running at 1280x800 (as opposed to 1920x1200 native) It is playable (30+ most of the time) on medium.

I'm also running a fairly large overclock on this 8800gts 640.

Still, I have my GTX 275 on order.

To be honest, disabling texture streaming improved my fps IMMENSELY. I guess the poor 8800gts 640 cant handle all that memory accessing, but it has enough memory to simply store all the textures all the time.

If you have the same card, i advise you to use that command.

[Malecite]

I have a 3.2ghz Q6600, gtx295, 8 gigs of ram with a creative xfi and I get around 20-30fps while playing at 1920X1080. Though sometimes the FPS will drop to around 15 on clearcut, this is with everything on custom tweaked settings. Everything looks beautiful but I think my cpu is bottlenecking my graphics card, Crysis runs at an even 40FPS with everything maxed so this mod is crazy in its requirements.

I cant wait for some kind of optimization and or hardcapping the players at 24 until the netcode gets fixed and the maps tweaked to make them less demanding.

[Stahlseele]

Just what the hell does an on board sound card have to do with frames per second?
An on board sound card is STILL a dedicated chip that does all of the sound computing.
Not the CPU or ANYTHING ELSE doing it. So nothing else gets hampered.

Furthermore: i guess it's the CPU. MWLL is the first application that i have ever seen getting ALL FOUR cores in my Q9650 up to 80% and more usage.
RAM should not be the Problem. RAM Usage while playing is at 4Gigs, which is 66% in my Case, due to the Board not wanting to run with 8Gigs.
What kind of HDD do you have? My HDD's are putting out some good work too when i play. The 8800 with 640 Megs was the medium of the series,
but it was and still is a pretty strong card.

The hard drive that I keep my OS and programs on is a 7200 rpm seagate and I haven't had any issues with it. Is there a program I can use to log the usage of my CPU, RAM, and Video card? This would help me gauge where the problem is on my machine. I will look into overclocking my CPU a bit (within safe bounds, of course) and see if my situation improves.

Windows Vista has this allready built in.
Taskmanager>Performance, klick on Ressource Monitor Button in the lower right corner.