Ubelievable, I got my E6750 at 3.2Ghz and its still bottlenecking my 8800GT. Shame, when Playing Sins of A Solar Empire, or an other RTS, the CPU brings my FPS down to the single digits when I have massive numbner of units on screen. Even games as far back as Rome Total War. I know that the CPU is the bottleneck because my GPU is at 42 C, and my FPS stays the same when I switch from 0xAA to 8xAA, yea it sucks. Stupid single threaded games and AI, pathfinding crap. There needs to be a CPU that excels at this kind of stuff, really.

What resolution are you running?

1280x1024, but it doesnt make a difference because if i switch to 1024x768, the FPS stays the same

How much RAM?

Mike.

Sounds like you might need a Wolfie or a Q9xxx overclocked to 4+Ghz!! Its difficult to see what else you could do... I guess the Nehalem architecture might help?? (Lower latency to DRAM and further architectural improvements...) A big overclock and low-latency RAM must surely help!!

I see the same kind of thing with my P4 3.2E @3.6Ghz versus my current 2x single-core Opteron @2.2Ghz. Multi-core is great until you start compiling a Linux kernel where brute single-threaded (integer) performance counts - the P4 wins hands down!!

Maybe you could do some core assigning (if you have background processes running) to take the load off one core to run the games in question? Even the rather inefficient MS Windows context switching on the same core as the game will eat into your FPS (i.e. even if a process/thread is idle)...

Bob

How much RAM do you have?

I've been running Sins well enough on my system at 1680x1050 but with no AA. It even runs on my laptop (1.73 Pentium M, 6600go) at the same rez but with most of the candy turned off. The only time it gets choppy is when I zoom WAY in to the ship to ship combat. I think something might be wrong. I haven't actually played in a while but I thought that the game was at least somewhat threaded.

-mcg

Not sure here but some games do have a limitation on FPS. For example Halo CE is set to 30fps on any res. by default.

no, games are not limited to single digits, thats just retarded. Anyway, I have 2GB of RAM. And thats another thing, Sins uses like 1.5GB of ram, incredible, its the most ram hungry app i've ever run. I understand if Sins runs well for most people, they dont have thousands upon thousands of units like I do. I really do hope that Nahelem helps with this a lot though. I used to think that when you had a lot of units, that the GPU was the limit due to lack of vertex power. Now though I clearly see that the CPU is the limit. Calculating all that stuff eats away FPS, which detracts from the experice. A lot of people say SupCom is multi Threaded, but come one, a quad offers like 2-4 frames per second over a dual:

http://www.extremetech.com/article [...] 342,00.asp
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2 [...] ad_q6600/6

What gives???

You've just answered the question!! Your game is best run on a blazing fast dual-core system as it only has 2 CPU bound threads. You are looking at a Wolfie for best price/ performance.

Bob

complete bollocks. Your processor is more than up to the job. You have another issue here. Suggest you check your overclock is stable and not throwing up errors.

check whats running in the background

Of Course I may be wrong but it seems odd that a new, and well clocked processor shouldn't struggle that much!

Is this a joke thread?


Your CPU is more than enough.

News Flash: That isnt exactly the best video card out there.

Agree with the last two posters, ur CPU shud b more than up2 the task, i've the E6420 OC'ed and can run crysis at high detail @ 1280x960 no probs, though i do have the 8800GTS.

Still think you have another issue here that needs adressing, suggest u follow gow87's advice and check ur OC for stability, and wat programs u have running in the background.

Could b driver related possibly try changing drivers. Uninstall, reboot in safe mode run driver cleaner pro, boot back in to windows install new drivers.

The thing is, for anyone who plays Sins, I upped the cap on the Capital Ships, and the fleet size, so that there would be more massive battles, im talking, over 20-30K units in total out there. I do not think my 8800GT is the bottleneck because, as stated, there is not decrease in FPS when going from 0AA to 8AA. RTS games, man, they need alot of CPU i guess. And this is not a joke thread.

20K-30K??????

matt, ocguy, and gow... your so ignorant... the processor still has to compute all those friggen little hundreds of units... it doesn't matter how good your processor or gpu is... the PROCESSOR still has to compute them all... even if its a new cpu... it doesn't matter when you have thousands of units doing different things... its going to slow down no matter what until the technology in this area surpasses that of software

does it take advantage of quad core? if it does I'd like to see an quad overclocked to 4GHz brought down to its knees by 20K-30K units
and hundreds? That's not a lot.

believe me it is, ant thank you Thogrom, you were the only one who understood what I'm saying. RTS games allow for a bunch of imagination and replayability. I like to have thousands upon thousands of unitsto have for Star Wars scale battles, ITS FANTASTIC, nothing like it. Unfortunatelym you'll need some super processor to handle the Human Imagination.