Computer Build, Upgrade & Buying Resource Thread - Page 191

On January 19 2014 21:02 Thalandros wrote:
Alright, here we go again. Same issue: Friend and teammate brought something up for me yesterday.

I still want to upgrade my PC, particularly my motherboard/CPU and I've been looking around, wanting to overclock. I asked around here and I thought I was good to go. Now I asked a friend of mine to look at a motherboard and while we were there, he told me overclocking got me basically no benefit, especially in games like StarCraft. He said it's very unlikely I'll need it and maybe in a couple of years (for other games) but right now it's completely unnecessary. Is this some wise advice? I got a bit confused now since some people say it's good, some people say overclocking is not worth the hassle and extra money. Personally I would like to experiment with overclocking, but if the performance increase it gives (in games such as Starcraft 2 and Planetside 2) is too little, then never you mind. Is there any truth to his statement?

On January 19 2014 23:05 MisterFred wrote:


Yes and no. Pretty much everything is going to be playable without overclocking. You can play single-player StarCraft 2 and 1v1 ladder to your heart's content without overclocking and probably never notice a difference. (I wouldn't. Some people would - as there IS an FPS benefit to overclocking.)

There will be a difference around the margins though. If you're one of those people that really wants 45 FPS rather than 30 FPS, then you'll want to overclock. If you're one of those people that plays 4v4s all day, or custom maps with a high CPU requirement/unit count (I think there was a TRON one that was notoriously demanding), then you'll notice a difference.

SC2 is a demanding game, so your friend is wrong that overclocking will get you no benefit. Next to no benefit? Well... that depends on your use pattern and desires, as stated above. You ask if the performance decrease is too little for the benefit, but really that's a question only you can answer. Hopefully what benefits there are is a little clearer now.

Overclocking IS expensive. Its benefits are (in my opinion) quite limited. But if you want those benefits, you can't get them any other way. You have to overclock.

P.S. Your friend is right in that for many games there will be basically no benefit. But SC2 is an odd duck that loves CPU power. There are a few other odd ducks out there. Planetside 2 may also see a small benefit, but probably more in the realm of not dropping down to fairly respectable FPS from very high FPS once in a while.

On January 20 2014 00:20 Incognoto wrote:


Battlefield 4 also takes advantage of overclocking, I think Guild Wars 2 is also another example. Basically, poorly written games take advantage of overclocking. :p

On January 20 2014 02:57 Cyro wrote:


sc2 and planetside are the two games i would say that overclocking is a big focus for on a midrange build. They both starve to death in intense situations on the best CPU's available, nothing performs better than i5-4670k on either of them as they don't scale past 2 cores (in sc2's case) or ~3? in Planetside's case.

sc2 scaling in a 2v2 fight not near max supply or the most intensive, but pretty damn hard hitting, big ling army.





^That's CPU, Uncore and RAM frequency on a Haswell quad core.


Planetside 2 performance in a big fight, think 50+ vs 50+ maybe quite a few more, hard to count numbers, but sustained performance for a long time - this shows four minutes of outdoor stuff, sieging a tower



^I have a big FPS lead over my friend with a stock 4770k in ps2. Not sure what is is, could be 20%, could be 40% - It's hard to bench unless we were to both do a bench run for example, and even then it would be approximate at best due to the extreme volatility of a continent map with hundreds on each side. Likely it's somewhere near linear scaling with clockspeed (so @4.5ghz, it's be a 22% advantage over stock 3.7 boost as the game utilizes 2-4 cores enough to avoid single core turbo)

That's with the best performance i can get, on Haswell@4.7ghz - and i was running 120hz strobed backlight display, can sure as hell use the extra FPS. I love this game, but sometimes you just gotta accept when you are in a closed environment during a peak time fight, you can just be staring at sub-30fps on stock haswell like worst case scenario, and that's how it is. I find it more enjoyable to power through, have sweet hardware and good OC knowledge, and then shoot everyone that can't shoot me because they have half of my FPS ^.^

In both games, i would make the upgrade to OC CPU before upgrading past an r9 270 or gtx760 (or even ~650ti?) on the GPU.




The more FPS you want, the more CPU limited you will be. On one system for example, if you was targetting 120fps on 1080p, you need a CPU capable of scaling to 120fps on the game engine. You can turn graphics settings down, you can have 2 high end gpu's, whatever - if your CPU isn't capable of more than 80fps, you'll get 80fps. sc2 and ps2 are extremely cpu demanding and >will< choke here in intense situations, so it's a big focus for them.

Lets say one person is running 1080p, at med settings for 120fps. His friend wants to run 1440p - so lets cut fps down to 70 for that. His friend also wants to run max settings with AA, so say 40fps.

That friend wants FPS to go to 60, so he purchases 50% faster graphics hardware, and now has 60fps at 1440p.

You have two people with two different needs - the 1080p guy will require a CPU capable of processing twice as much FPS in order to get his 120fps image for his wonderful awesome motion clarity strobe backlight screen, while the 1440p guy - he only needs half as good of a CPU, yet would lose performance massively if he was to sacrifice on graphics hardware due to the higher graphical demand of the much higher resolution as well as higher settings - so you can make the point that generally, the higher resolution you want to run, higher settings you want to go etc - that's what you buy a GPU or GPU setup for.

You buy a CPU for an FPS target in a given game engine.

In most games, like bf4 or crysis 3 - people like to run rather high settings, and they don't have amazing GPU's. Most people have like a 760. They often don't really find themselves seriously CPU bound, even though the engines will both be, if you want to target high FPS in some areas. They scream for CPU, but only when you want higher FPS than a lot of people are happy with, as long as you have something decent.

Other games like sc2 and planetside - you're dealing with hundreds of units. Sc2 could probably have been coded significantly better, but there's been a lot of work on planetside. The reality of having over 200 individual players and simulating every bullet in an area of like a square mile will crush any CPU 10x over, so regardless of graphics settings, CPU becomes a major, major player - for not just the people with a high FPS target, but for everyone, so that they can actually run the game well in large fights.

On January 20 2014 03:18 Cyro wrote:


Yea, you need to do stuff in a reasonably scientific way and can't just throw settings up, but it should be reasonably easy - and if it's not stable, what's the point?

4670 is still good, OC is a much better focus if you enjoy it and like tweaking etc, but it does make a real solid difference and especially if you prefer FPS to graphical settings it's a good choice