I currently play an MMORPG (Vindictus) and find that I'm lagging a bit and so I wanted to ask what would be an upgrade.
Here are my current specs incase you can't see on the left:
CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1240L v3 2.0Ghz (3.0Ghz Turbo) - Similar to a low clocked i7-4770 from what I know.
RAM: Samsung Green 16GB
Storage: Samsung 830 256GB SSD x2
Graphics card: MSI Gaming GTX 960 2GB
Resolution: 2560x1440
I mainly find that just running Vindictus + Chrome and a Skype call in the background doesn't really have any issues apart from when I host but I find that when I run an additional client of said game in VMware to just stand in town crafting whilst I do raids on the main client, I end up lagging. When I say lagging, I mean my average fps drops to around 30-40fps and also sometimes the cursor/keyboard is actually somewhat unresponsive. I used to have an i5-4570 before upgrading to the Xeon E3-1240L and the system would actually completely freeze for a bit and I thought the Xeon would completely solve it but unfortunately, it hasn't done so.
Here is a screenshot of the load on my PC when doing a dungeon with only 1 client and said background processes:
Here is a screenshot of the load on my PC when doing the same dungeon with the extra client and same background processes:
GPU usage seems to stay roughly the same at around 70-80% load mostly but CPU usage shoots right up to 100% on all threads.
Now my main thought is that I should upgrade to an i7-4790k and try to overclock it as it is basically the same CPU but if it runs at 4.0 Ghz stock and 4.5Ghz turbo out of the box that's already a doubling in stock clock speed and 50% increase in turbo clock speed which could give a performance difference? Is my line of thinking that same CPU but with clock speed increase should yield tangible performance benefits correct? On the other hand, if it's effectively the same CPU with the same number of cores and threads, will simply increasing the speed in this case here actually give me better performance?
Alternatively I could upgrade to a GTX 970 to make my system more balanced but MSI Afterburner indicates that it's only using 70-80% on load and VRAM usage is only 1-1.2GB on load despite gaming on 2560x1440. However, the GTX 970 is between 40-50% faster on most benchmarks.
What would yield a bigger performance increase?