1FPS Battles - Bottleneck Identification Help.

Hey everyone. first post, trying to figure out what the bottleneck in my system is. I play between 40-60fps usually but when mass forces become involved and battles start getting bigger, i lag horribly and drop to 1-2fps. it's completely unplayable. My specs are as follows:

AMD Phenom X4 9500 2.20GHz
MSI K9N6VGM-V Motherboard [different series of motherboard, but this board has no official page, and apparently they are the same or use the same bios at least]
4GB (2x2gb) DDR2 (crucial i think)
GIGABYTE Radeon 5670 1GB PCIe Card. GDDR5 (Overclocked as far as AMD Overdrive allows)

I know that the CPU and Motherboard are both budget. I believe the card is fine, along with 4gb ram but i dunno. let me know anything you can that will help. I have tried re-formatting windows multiple times, updating drivers, minimum settings, lower resolution, etc. I run my computer on a 32" HDTV (1360x768) and i just tried it on my brothers smaller monitor (22" 1920x1080) and had the same issues..

would enjoy an upgrade anyway, as i know this isn't cutting it. if upgrading, prefer to stay cheap still but have some OC abilities. i tried to OC this phenom but both the cpu and mobo suck for OCing. got to 2.4 barely, but it wasnt even stable. just under 2.4 didnt make a difference in SC2 anyways.


thanks in advance. Here's the dxdiag report in the next post. ps, change the maximum file size, i wasn't even allowed to upload the .txt.....

 

ok i guess not. not sure what you guys expect me to do...cant post it in a reply or a upload, so i guess ill post my own upload in a minute

Edit: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=JXA4L97C

 

Stop the overclocking.

On a 1gb card, you should have plenty FSB to run most games, aside from specifically hi-def ones, and OC'ing can lead to huge compatibility problems.

The funny thing is that your bro's smaller monitor actually has a much higher resolution.

You might try turning down/off particle effects (stuff like protoss auras, explosions, fancy looking spells), and AA.

 

Well that's the issue. i have turned literally everything as low as it will go. and it happens regardless of the OC, but ill turn it off. and yeah my TV is also budget 720p with a low max resolution and his is a smaller full HD. i knew that would have an effect (his having higher resolution) but to be honest it seems like its gonna happpen regardless. i saw no diffference at all in performance. anything else?

edit: also, i went through CCC and turned all the 3d settings to performance mode a while ago, and i havent seen improvement. I was running at 1280x720 for a while to try to improve the performance but didnt notice any fps difference. it seems hhigh graphics settings arent even that bad according to fps, until i get into large battles.

also i was comparing with a LAN buddy yesterday, his system is stronger than mine (not sure exact specs. core i5, 8gb ram, radeon 5770 i think) and he was an avg of 30fps throughout the game, while mine stayed much closer to 60. but during intense ****, his lowered to like 8-10fps but it was much more tolerable than what i get, thats for sure

 

How large of battles are you talking here?

2v2 mass battles or 8v8 mass battles?

 

2v2 mass battles. 2v2 is usually all i play, but its the same situation with the higher modes, just requires less per team. im what one would call a noob, and i fiend just massing marines and medivacs all day so ya im kinda causing my own downfall

 

Hrm.

I really have no idea.

I've got a 512 and I do fine until I hit 4v4 battles.

 

is it the CPU? i've heard SC isn't good with quad cores or something? also its only 2.2 and a budget one like i said

 

SC2 only uses two cores. Crap, I know.
I'm currently using a 2.6GHZ Athlon 620 which is, mostly likely, even more budget than what you have. The Phenom series has an L3 Cache, which the Athlon series doesn't, amirite? I think that might make up for those extra .4ghz.

Anyway, along with my AMD 5850 I can run the game on Extreme at about 60fps, dropping to about 20 (or maybey 15) in an all out, maximum supply army battle in 2v2.

I really have no clue what the problem could possibly be, but it doesn't sound like the CPU to me. Then again, I don't know very much about these things. =p

- Dark

 

I've got a quad 2.4. It doesn't utilize the second two cores to the max, but it still runs.

When was the last time you updated your graphics drivers?

Also, the reason you couldn't upload directly to the forum is because it doesn't allow .txt... Put it in a .zip or .rar next time

 

oh, it had said it didnt allow that large of a file size for "selected file type" which was .txt lol

i reformatted less than a week ago, updated with the latest drivers for everything that i could find