Crysis - poor frame rates

[CK1]

I have recently upgraded my graphics card from a 8800GTS 640MB to a GTX260/216 and bought Crysis along with it as I was desperate to play the game with some decent hardware.

When I started playing I seem to get average frame rates of 12-15fps. I am running is a resolution of 1920x1200 with no AA and seetings on High. Even if i drop the resolution to 1024x768 I dont get more that a few extra fps. And not much changes when I drop the settings to Medium. You can see the rest of my PC spec or the left. The Nvidia driver version is 180.48

I really dont understand what is going on here. I have de-fragged the hard disk, shutdown all non essential programs and even stopped my anti-virus software running. I would have expected frame rates of around 25 or so.

Additionally I am running this on WinXP SP3. With Riva Tuner i have overclocked the card slightly but that seems to have a minimal effect.

Any help that can be offered will be greatly appreciated as Crysis seem to be a phenomenal game from what I have played of it so far.

Thanks & regards

CK

[Andy3536]

Thats not right, i had better than that with my 8800GTS 320 on vista.

Have you downloaded all the patches for the game, one of those was supposed to address poor fps.

[moogle]

Hmm, on high you should be getting at least 20fps or more. Have you tried a 3DMark run?

[handscombmp]

Got the latest driver and updates? Try uninstalling your drivers and then reinstalling then.

[Hicks12]

Hmm, could be poor power to the card(doubt it due to the corsair psu). Try 3dmark as moogle said because it could be that somehow or actually a faulty card.

[Haiku32]

I have the same card as that (8800GTS 640mb), and even at that resolution, settings on high, I can run it at a much higher frame rate with some anti aliasing. Weird problem mate.

[CK1]

Thanks for your help guys, I am now downloading 3D Mark 06, its the newest one that will run on XP.

What sort of results should I expect?

I have never used this program before but have read from various magazine that it'll return a large number based on how quick the card is.

[moogle]

Well you really won't be needing to look at the full score, just the broken down ones. Note down the individual scores (SM2, SM3 and CPU score) and then you can compare what others of the same system get.

I'd estimate you get more than 14000 marks (unless the problem is really really bad)

[CK1]

Here are the results - I dont understand the figures but by comparison to the other that the website gave me, they are pretty horendous.

3D Mark Score - 5684
SM 2.0 Score - 1923
SM 3.0 Score - 2434
CPU Score - 3021

I dont understand why my system seems tobe so slow. What can be going on here?

Please help someone!

[Haiku32]

This might be really stupid, but maybe your card hasn't been recognised correctly, and it's running on onboard graphics?

Or it's been disabled or something?

[matty-hodgson]

try GPU-Z and see what it says?

your 3DMark score is REALLY REALLY low
so there's obviously something up.

[CK1]

Right - I have identified the problem!!!

I just thought to myself that Windows XP is pretty standard on my system, even though I installed it 18 months ago I keep it quite clean, all my drivers are up to date. So I reset the BIOS to its defaults and then ran the benchmarks again. This is what I got....

3D Mark Score - 11075
SM 2.0 Score - 4911
SM 3.0 Score - 5983
CPU Score - 2152

I much better result dont you think? The CPU score is worse as it is now running at 2.4Ghz and not 3.4Ghz. So I have obviously screwed up the overclocking somehow.

I will start my overclock again and this time run the benchmarks after each change and see where I went wrong.

If someone has overclocked a P5B board would you mind outlining the setting you have. My previous overclock had the CPU running 1Ghz over its default but I think I must have gone wrong on the memory somewhere.

Anyway, at least I have identified the problem and can try and resolve it now.

[moogle]

Run CPU-Z and see what link width the card is running at. Should be on the 3rd tab.

[kalniel]

My previous overclock had the CPU running 1Ghz over its default

Temperature throttling?

[[DW]Cougho]

I would place a bet on the card running at 1xPCI-E rather than 16xPCI-E Only that could really cause the huge drop in performance. The GTX260 will eat Crysis on high (mine does) and yours is the more powerful 216 version with a quicker CPU.

[CK1]

Right - its all sorted. Although what a day I had yesterday and today.

The problem was definitely with my overclock. I don't understand as I had my CPU running at 3.4Ghz and it has been running at this speed for 18 months. However I think that there must have been something wrong with the memory settings as when the PC was booting it said PC4200 and not PC6400. This might have been to do with the BIOS settings as the RAM was set to be synchronous with the FSB.

Anyway, I tired to do my overclock again and this time I smelled burning from the case. Oh S**T!!! I quickly turned off the PSU but couldn't see anything visibly wrong, i.e. burnt circuits, smoldering capacitors etc. So I turned it on again and... nothing. The fans were spinning but no beeps or anything.

After saying a few expletives I then took my PC downstairs next to my HTPC and tested the RAM and the CPU in that and they all checked out OK so these hadn't blown. I couldn't test the graphics card as it would fit in the case of my HTPC but was sure that hadn't gone as booting up can't put that much stress on the graphics card.

Sunday night was a long night when I eventually went to bed....

After clearing it with the boss and taking a days holiday, I took the PC this morning to a local shop which was recommended to me by a friend. He was able to test the mobo and say 'yup, it's dead. Wanna choose another?' So I have no bought a Asus P5K Premium WiFi. He even helped take out the old one and put the new one in. Not bad for just the cost of the mobo.

Then, thankfully, my biggest fear didn't happen. I didn't need to re-install the OS. They guy in the shop was saying that when you change the mobo the OS doesn't like it and you land up re-installing it. Thankfully XP just installed all the new drivers and has been as good as gold ever since.

Now the good news

I have spent the rest of this afternoon with my non-overclocked PC playing Crysis at around 25-35 FPS.

I really dont know why an overclock of the CPU would slow a 3d game down the way it had. It was an expensive way to solve the problem (£105) but I guess I now have a newer mobo and can upgrade the CPU at somepoint if I get the urge.

Thanks for your help guys with recommending 3D mark.

CK