Dilemma - A New Rig or a More Thorough Look Under the Bonnett

[+Piecemeal]

Recently I've been thinking about buying a new gaming desktop as I'm sick to the gills from trying to solve a framerate issue when playing SF2. When playing the series, flying anything with a high polycount or being anywhere on any map with high AI activity (example: Hanoi) brings my framerate right down to single figures, making it pointless to continue unless I'm in the mood for a slideshow. I really don't get this as my rig should be well up to the task. Shooters like BF3/4 and the Call of Duty series are no hassle, with graphics settings on the higher scale.

 

So before I go marching into my local PC store with a wad of cash, I thought I'd try and see if I can "streamline" the performance of my unit.

 

These are my SF2 graphics settings (which I'd rather leave alone - there's been enough sacrifice there):

 

These are my desktop specs:

 

And these are my graphic card settings:

 

I'm wide open to suggestions as to how I can improve the current situation. Switching off certain unrelated or unnecessary background programs perhaps? Or maybe give the AMD Overdrive feature a go (although I'm a little apprehensive about taking that risk!) After all, it's only about two years old and was upgraded with a new graphics card last year. I'm sure there's still a lot of life left in the desktop. Any help here would be hugely appreciated; to be honest I'm sick and tired of it and would like to streamline instead of replacing.

Edited February 7, 2014 by Piecemeal

[+daddyairplanes]

Facing a similar issue my self, although i've decided just to load some registry cleaning software and get an aftermarket warranty to double check that the hardware is still good to go.

And i always thought disabling or eliminating unneeded progrsms to be good in general. Old habit from my compaq presario days eventho my current rig is vastly better. Hell i cleaned out a bunch of stuff even though i had over 500 GB available

[+Piecemeal]

Registry cleaning is something I've gotten into the habit of doing weekly, along with anti-virus scanning, defragging, etc. It's amazing the amount of crap that your PC can pick up over seven days.

[+Sundowner]

Probably the first thing you should do is add more ram, 4gb seems a little mean by today's standards, other than that you should really be able to run SF2 flat out.

[Snailman]

I don't really understand, this machine should be running SF2 without any probs. My notebook is about the same ... ok, with 8GB RAM, but it never uses so much.

[Happy308]

Hello Piecemeal,

 

I also have slow downs over Hanoi and when there is a lot of action on the ground and in the air.

I changed my graphics card from a Radeon 7770 to a Radeon 7870, but dit not notice any difference.

I gained a big boost from disabling mirrors, and putting ground objects on medium.(I know you dont want to change these settings)

I also disabled HPET in the bios and Turned DEP off in Windows.This gave me a huge boost in DCS A-10 and a small one in SF2.

 

So the bottle neck is my CPU.

 

These are my settings.(my system is in Dutch)

 

CPU intel i5 2400 3.1 GHZ

2x OCZ 120 GB ssd

Radeon 7870

8 GB Corsair RAM

 

Catalyst settings

 

 

 

 

 

 

INI settings

  

 

Game settings:

 

 

This is what is lookes like in game: (still a lot of buildings and trees)

 

 

 

I hope this information is useful to you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[+daddyairplanes]

Probably the first thing you should do is add more ram, 4gb seems a little mean by today's standards, other than that you should really be able to run SF2 flat out.

Missed that. Was 4 on my old comp, got free upgrade to 8 when i got my new comp. Differnce dropped my jaw first time i saw it. Well that and going from integrated graphics to a 2GB Radeon card :)

[+Piecemeal]

Thanks for the info there guys.

 

Happy: I did a bit of comparing between your AMD control centre and mine (with a little help from Google Translate!) and made some changes to mine. I'll try it out in a couple of minutes. The cockpit mirrors are something I may have to consider turning off.

 

daddyairplanes: Upsizing my RAM has been something I've been considering since I got my new graphics card last year. When he installed the card, my brother said that more memory wouldn't necessarily mean higher framerates - but then again my brother never played the SF2 series. Definitely something to consider.

[Snailman]

Yea, memory is needed... Just when I think about the sheer size of the mod dir alone...

if only fragments of those are loaded for a mission, well enough. And normally I don't use custom effects and terrain tiles

[+Brain32]

Guys I think SF2 simply favors nVidia cards, I was in the same situation back in 2008 when I got the 2nd best Radeon (it was 4850 back then) on the market but people with mid range nVidia cards were killing my shiny Radeon completely, not in the other games(mostly) but SF2 was almost no competition.

 

It would help if people with nVidia cards would share their experience and post their rigs so we can compare stuff and determine if my suspicions are true...

 

With prices and general performance of the two brands going neck to neck, I think that would be VERY useful for future upgrade planing for all SF2 players on CA...

[Centurion-1]

Gotta install SF2 on my desktop to try out the nvidia performance, got a GTX 760 on there.