OpenGL performance MoBo/Nvidia upgrade.

[dimko]

Hello there Fellows.

This thread might be off topic, but i have strong feeling that what i share can help others.

Please excuse me for my English.

Basically, I had quite old PC.(12ghz 4core AMD, PCIE 1st generation and 800mhz ddram3 8 gigs, GTX 470, 2000 bus speed mobo from AsRock). Ram was Mobo limited, they are actually faster than that.
My new righ FX8350 AMD, PCIE 2nd generation and 5200 bus speed, mobo from AsRock.
Thanks Michael for covering them here on Phoronix. They now have one good customer, until they screw up.

I found a lot of issues with modern games. Basically, lower frame rates. For example, Wargame: European Escalation, it was possible to play it, t worked quite well, but than, you zoom in, zoom out or rotate camera - major performance drop, but than it worked sorta ok. Heroes Of Newerth gave major headaches with below 40 DPS in major battles.

I got myself GTX 660. In some games improvements were noticeable. In some - not.

I am beta subscriber for a few games, I have slightly better way of testing hardware in this sense.
So i will notice some differences I found about my upgrades. I did some mixed tests between new and old mobo and video cards, specially for you my Linux brethren!


HoN, With new card = 0 improvement. With new mobo, old card - big difference to better. With new MoBo and new card - big difference to better. Looks like years of whining on them was my own fault.

With Unigine Heaven I did not notice any difference, but mind that, on old rig i used version 3.0, and on new one 4.0, which i believe is bugged.

With Unigine Valley, old righ was sorta ok without Anisotropy, Multisampling. With new mobo there was somewhat boost to FPS. With new Mobo and GPU - major boost. So upgrade was good all in all

With Torchlight. game was playable already, but with big amount of enemy's there was performance drop, very noticeable one. Like 20 FPS or something, but not too often. After Full upgrade all maxed out - still no performance degradation.

Legend of Athereus, major boost with both old rig and new card and new rig and old card.(no FPS counter, but i can notice low FPS quite easily here, as game is very intense with graphics) its currently Beta, but I am looking for it personally very much, its probably best looking game I encountered on Linux so far.(OK, together with HoN and Oil Rush and Serious Sam, but it's hard to compare those 4, Torchlight almost made it there) It's my favorite genre, Real time RPG/MMORPG.

Oil Rush, it was quite playable before, and FPS did raise noticeably with both old rig new card and old card new rig.

Serious Sam, Major boost after new rig, new card upgrade. may be mistaking here, but new rig, old card also did do some performance boost. But game shines much more now with bigger North bridge throughput.

I didn't bother testing games whose performance was above 60 FPS on old rig and card, games like, Valve's Team Fortress(OK, it did have occasional performance drops, but i didn't test it that well now. I am pretty sure it will be much better anyway), Counterstrike source, Killing Floor and Trine 2.

Unfortunately Wakfu did not have any performance boost Ou well...

Hope community ill find it somewhat useful.

Sincerely yours dimko

[brosis]

Dimko, congrats on your purchase.
Mind you the Ghz of cores do not sum up. If you CPU has 4 cores each 3 Ghz, its 4 core 3Ghz CPU, not 12Ghz CPU.
Imagine - you have a car that drives at 250 mph.
If you buy three more same cars, they still drive at 250 mph max. Not 1000 mph.
The performance in terms of capacity does go quadfold, but Ghz is wrong method to describe it. BogoMIPS - yes, but not Ghz...

Have you thought about installing PTS and doing a series of benchmarks with new/old components?
Thanks!

[KohlyKohl]

First I've heard of Legends of Aethereus. How does it compare to Torchlight I/II?

[dimko]

Dimko, congrats on your purchase.
Mind you the Ghz of cores do not sum up. If you CPU has 4 cores each 3 Ghz, its 4 core 3Ghz CPU, not 12Ghz CPU.
Imagine - you have a car that drives at 250 mph.
If you buy three more same cars, they still drive at 250 mph max. Not 1000 mph.
The performance in terms of capacity does go quadfold, but Ghz is wrong method to describe it. BogoMIPS - yes, but not Ghz...

Have you thought about installing PTS and doing a series of benchmarks with new/old components?
Thanks!

Thanks for the tip, I am very well aware of what you are saying, but it could be usefull to someone else.

And I did try PTS before, but I have very specific distro. Gentoo, and back than PTS didn't work too well for me. I still have a few Unigine HTML results.
I'd do test again, but my colleague, arrived to new country has big family... Well, he just needs this MoBo more than I do.

My bottleneck was not CPU, i never seen it being used for 100%. It was PCIE 1st Gen MoBo.
Point was - it's not CPU limit that gives head aches. It's MoBo through-output. I have seen a lot of butthurt in HoN forums, etc.

[dimko]

First I've heard of Legends of Aethereus. How does it compare to Torchlight I/II?

Hard to say. I didn't see Torchlight 2. But I enjoy Torchlight on my PC now.

I will probably break a few NDA's, but heck, I ain't saying anything bad. Graphics wise, it's better. Nicer more open world. Graphics is realistic, as opposed to really nice cartoon like graphics of Torchlight. A lot of textures. I noticed a few bells and whistles along the way, pretty nice effects, etc. However, like i said, I am under NDA. And I don't want to loose my beta access.

Sign up and support the studio behind it! They worth it and I can see them as future of Linux gaming!!! They are on Steam Greenlight, support them there please! Ill ask them if I can post any screen shots here.

[dimko]

Requested to get permission for NDA lift, to get a few screen shots here. fingers crossed.

[Kano]

I don't get how somebody can buy amd cpus for gaming. Most games need high single core performance and even the cheapest intel i3 cpu beats the top amd ones there. Ok, if you find a game that works heavyly multithreaded and does not use many fpu commands then amd can win one benchmark too. The amd "8" cores are basically 4 full cores with 4 extra integer units. i5 or i7 is the way to go for gamers usually. Most gamers with amd systems need to force the cpu to performance mode for Linux games - this has something to do that the Linux sheduler is different to the Windows one and changes more often the load from one core to the next. Maybe amd should optimize that a bit as they are unable to build real fast cpus. Even amd itself uses intel systems to benchmark their own graphics cards!

[JS987]

I don't get how somebody can buy amd cpus for gaming.

AMD shouldn't stop selling CPUs or Intel CPUs will cost at least 3 times more than current prices because of monopoly.

[dimko]

I don't get how somebody can buy amd cpus for gaming. Most games need high single core performance and even the cheapest intel i3 cpu beats the top amd ones there. Ok, if you find a game that works heavyly multithreaded and does not use many fpu commands then amd can win one benchmark too. The amd "8" cores are basically 4 full cores with 4 extra integer units. i5 or i7 is the way to go for gamers usually. Most gamers with amd systems need to force the cpu to performance mode for Linux games - this has something to do that the Linux sheduler is different to the Windows one and changes more often the load from one core to the next. Maybe amd should optimize that a bit as they are unable to build real fast cpus. Even amd itself uses intel systems to benchmark their own graphics cards!

Intel Core i5-2500K 3.30GHz LGA1155 6MB = http://www.dabs.ie/products/intel-co...essors%20Broad = 204 Euro.
Please also add money for cooler that, AMD provides with every processor for free, and I felt sorry for ever buying a third party one, since original JUST WORKS(R).


AMD FX8-8350 Black Edition Vishera 8 Core AM3+ 4.0GHz 16MB = http://www.dabs.ie/products/amd-fx8-...XF.html?src=15 = 187 Euro

Now please, tell me, where is it stronger? Its not I3, I3 is raped. I5 is raped performance and money wise.
Add difference in average of pricing between AMD MoBo and Intel MoBo and we are talking hundreds of Euro here probably. My whole mobo+CPU upgrade cost me less than 300 Euro. 185 + under 80(MoBo) it cost me less than 270. Now, can you beat me with this exact budget? Money/performance wise? Nope. Can you proudly say, I support competition? Nope.

So 270, challenge accepted, MoBo with Several PCIE-16 2nd generation, CPU, cooler. Good luck!(you gonna need it)

And BTW, in most tests Vishera wiped legs with I5 and if not mistaking in some it even beat I7. Just check HERE on Phoronix.

So far I have not came across 1 game that would be under-performing and I got EVERY good looking game on Linux.

[Kano]

If you use intel BOXED then you get a cooler with it, whats your problem? When you buy amd tray you dont, same for intel. Btw the cpu you mentioned is outdated, use i5-3xxx or i7-3xxx now and in a few months i5-4xxx/i7-4xxx. Money should not be the huge problem, it if is for you get a console. Btw. in germany the diff is not really much:

http://geizhals.de/intel_core_i5-357...k_a761856.html

vs.

http://geizhals.de/amd_fx-8350_fd835...x_a852989.html

A suiteable Z77 board you get for:

http://geizhals.de/?cat=mbp4_1155&xf=317_Z77&sort=p

So you would save impressive 27€. That must be a joke when you calculate that in % of your complete system. Why do you consider that expensive when you get MUCH more speed?