Getting the upgrade itch...

[dannyboy75]

What games are you running OP??

I have a Xeon E3 1230 V2 and a GTX1080,and at qHD only FO4 is really CPU limited in anyway for me.

If I were you,and things are fine,its best to wait. Coffeelake will probably be a nice upgrade,but so will a Ryzen 5 1600 or Ryzen 7 1700,but TBH I find most games run fine on my setup,outside FO4 OFC.

In terms of non-VR stuff (@1440p), mostly Arma 3, GTA5, Witcher 3 and BeamNG. Then some Oculus VR stuff too, such as Elite Dangerous, and The Lab.

TBH, they all run pretty well unless I start to crank up AA, but then you don't really need much AA at 1440p anyway. I guess my 1070 is probably the bottleneck there though.

Get Threadripper... it is what I'll be purchasing next year.

I look the look of Threadripper, but not the price tag! Think it's a bit beyond my budget, sadly

[dannyboy75]

Necro-ing my own thread here, but I ran some tests today using Perfmon and GPU-Z, to monitor CPU/GPU load in two of the games I'm playing at the moment (GTA5 and Aerofly FS2). GTA was running at QHD, and Aerofly was running in Oculus VR.

I had detail levels in both set pretty high, but not to the point where performance suffered, and only moderate amounts of xxAA and AF.

I know this is only 2 games, and would be interested to test others, but the results are very interesting. In GTA my CPU is being worked, but with plenty in reserve. In Aerofly, it's barely breaking sweat. In both cases, it suggests any kind of CPU upgrade would be pointless, and my money would be better spent upgrading my 1070 instead.

Edit: updated to include working images (bye bye Photobucket)

[dannyboy75]

After seeing those test results last night, it convinced me to heed most of the advice in this thread.

I've decided there's no point upgrading mobo/RAM/CPU for at least another 6-9 months, so I ordered myself a shiny new 1080Ti instead. After factoring in the money I should raise from selling my 11-month old 1070, this should work out quite a bit cheaper than the CPU upgrade, and hopefully give a decent performance increase too

[Dashers]

You'll have to rerun those benchmarks and share the results.

[dannyboy75]

You'll have to rerun those benchmarks and share the results.

Indeed. Voila

This Ti is something else. I've always said I could never justify more than ~ £400 for a graphics card, but rationalised this on the basis that it's cost me less (after selling the 1070) than upgrading my RAM/CPU/mobo would've done, and I've almost certainly got more to show for it. Just need to pick the right moment to tell the wife now

Graphics settings were left exactly the same as for the previous tests. Interestingly, the CPU is now working harder than the GPU in GTA5, though still only averaging around 60%. In Aerofly FS2, it looks like the CPU is basically only using one core, and even the GPU is only averaging ~ 50-60%, even though I was flying over the Alps, which is one of the hi-res texture regions.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

It wouldn't surprise me one bit - I found some games like W3 and Deus Ex:MD were more GPU limited than CPU limited even with a GTX1080 and my Xeon E3 1230 V2(which is basically the same as your Core i7 3770).

[dannyboy75]

It wouldn't surprise me one bit - I found some games like W3 and Deus Ex:MD were more GPU limited than CPU limited even with a GTX1080 and my Xeon E3 1230 V2(which is basically the same as your Core i7 3770).

I was trying to think which types of games would tax the CPU more - I guess RTS's would be one example, although I never play those.

I did find one game last night that still struggles quite badly with everything maxed out - BeamNG Drive. This is a driving game with uber-realistic physics and damage modelling, which must be very CPU and GPU (PhysX) intensive. The fact it's still in Alpha probably doesn't help either, as I'd imagine there's still a huge amount of optimisation to be done.

So far everything else I've thrown at the new card runs beautifully though, so I think I made the right decision.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I was trying to think which types of games would tax the CPU more - I guess RTS's would be one example, although I never play those.

I did find one game last night that still struggles quite badly with everything maxed out - BeamNG Drive. This is a driving game with uber-realistic physics and damage modelling, which must be very CPU and GPU (PhysX) intensive. The fact it's still in Alpha probably doesn't help either, as I'd imagine there's still a huge amount of optimisation to be done.

So far everything else I've thrown at the new card runs beautifully though, so I think I made the right decision.

FO4 in large settlements and mods hammers my CPU and so will some online games.

Also alpha releases will be just poorly optimised - ARK was like that for years although apparently it's now OK as it's close to release.

[dannyboy75]

FO4 in large settlements and mods hammers my CPU and so will some online games.

Interesting - I hadn't expected an FPS to be particularly CPU-intensive. Haven't tried FO4 though, only FO3 and NV.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Interesting - I hadn't expected an FPS to be particularly CPU-intensive. Haven't tried FO4 though, only FO3 and NV.

It's more open world and based on a very old engine. It does show gains to a Core i7 and is usually OK but is limited by one or two threads. However once you start building large settlements,increasing npc numbers,using machines,etc it gets much worse.

My extensively modded fo4 playthrough can hit under 30fps in settlements with my GTX1080 at 60% or something silly like that.

I would like a CPU upgrade but ended up spending the money on my camera setup so will need to just deal with it TBH.

I might try and rejig the mods in a fresh playthrough though.