Performance tips and tricks for Nvidia users.

[hellob]

I have the power saving features enabled on my CPU because this quad draws quite a bit more power than my old dual core.(it runs 1.5x faster at a lower temperature) I leave them on to reduce wear and lower the idle heat on my CPU to 37C. With power saving disabled, it jumps to 46C, so I leave it on for this reason as it just kicks back up to its maximum clocks the second it encounters a load.(anything running will kick it up) I guess it can affect you if you are CPU limited, but this game is 99% GPU limited, and since my CPU usage is only 40% overall with one core near maximum, one core around 60% and the others at 25% load I am not going to really worry about changing this setting. I will try the prerendered frames though as I have noticed some significant stuttering since the last update.

[AnthonyDa]

I have the power saving features enabled on my CPU because this quad draws quite a bit more power than my old dual core.

I don't think that disabling such features inside the BIOS changes anything, it's probably another lie related by poor website who can't try it first.

Now, your CPU might be the bottleneck, all the graphics things are running on a single thread (sort of), and you should see that the 1st core of your CPU has a massive load there it should be quite low on the others core when running the game. This means that if you can see your first core reaching 100%, the your CPU is the bottleneck. I suggest you to try monitoring your cpu & gpu load for few round and see the results :)

[Silent_Killer]

I suggest dont let your GPU run at 100c while gaming

[Spanner_]

Pre-rendered frames to zero definitely helped. Average frame rates are about the same BUT there is much much less freeze-frame stutter. I was on a server with only 4 other people though sop the acid test is yet to come.

[PvtHudson]

I don't think that disabling such features inside the BIOS changes anything, it's probably another lie related by poor website who can't try it first.

Now, your CPU might be the bottleneck, all the graphics things are running on a single thread (sort of), and you should see that the 1st core of your CPU has a massive load there it should be quite low on the others core when running the game. This means that if you can see your first core reaching 100%, the your CPU is the bottleneck. I suggest you to try monitoring your cpu & gpu load for few round and see the results :)

Enabling AMD's Cool & Quiet or Intel's SpeedStep in BIOS allows you to use the "Balanced" power saving setting in the Control Panel which automatically throttles down your CPU when it's not using anything intensive. It's very cereal and is a nice way to cut down on power and heat, especially during these summer days.

My AMD Phenom II x4 940 at stock is 3.0 ghz at 1.34v. Enabling Cool & Quiet will have it run at 800 mhz at 0.96v. It runs at that speed whenever you're doing simple tasks like web browsing or listening to mp3s. Whenever you start doing anything that requires more power, it automatically goes back to default settings.

And I HIGHLY doubt his Q9550 is a bottleneck. Cereally, the Q9550 is 10% faster than the recommended Q6600 clock for clock, has a larger L2 cache, and is 400 mhz faster out of the box.

He said the first core is near maximum, it's like that for everyone. He didn't say it was 100% completely utilized. Mine is like at 80% when gaming. It's true that rendering is on the first core but there's no way in hell that his CPU is the bottleneck.

Because if his CPU is the bottleneck then by that logic we'd all need i7 980x processors to run this game... which we don't. Almost any quad is fine.

[AnthonyDa]

Cool story bro !
Now it seems that you have misunderstood my post.
I said that disabling speedStep is useless, unless you want to do some weird overclocking.
I have a Q6600@3.0Ghz, and sometimes it's the CPU who is the bottleneck, and I have only a poor 8800 GT with it, so I don't remember exactly what are q9550 spec, but it MIGHT be the bottleneck for hellob, which is why I suggested him to take a look first :)

[Phantomewzick]

The reason for changing the C1E and EIST for me is, with them on, if i have cpu-z running while i'm playing sh, it shows my clocks bouncing back and forth from normal to half, it may just be an error on my hardware, but it cant tell if i'm playing or not for some odd reason.

[Silent_Killer]

AnthonyDa, what GPU do you have? because you run it at 100c while gaming, which is not good, unless it's a Fermi or something highly hot like it, so sometimes people wont want to understand what your saying if your running a GPU at un-safe temperatures.

[PvtHudson]

Cool story bro !
Now it seems that you have misunderstood my post.
I said that disabling speedStep is useless, unless you want to do some weird overclocking.
I have a Q6600@3.0Ghz, and sometimes it's the CPU who is the bottleneck, and I have only a poor 8800 GT with it, so I don't remember exactly what are q9550 spec, but it MIGHT be the bottleneck for hellob, which is why I suggested him to take a look first :)

Oh! My mistake!

I don't know about Intel CPUs but if you want to OC on AMD ones then Cool & Quiet needs to be disabled.

I still doubt that his CPU is the bottleneck. It's impossible really. The only way his CPU would be a bottleneck is if he would be trying to tri-SLI 3 GTX 480's or something like that.

He may be trying to push his card too far. The GTX 260 is not enough to max this game out.

And there is no way your Q6600 is bottlenecking your 8800 GT. That card is 4 years old and is the bare minimum to run this game. As was stated in the FAQ, minimum reqs mean you get respectable framerates on the lowest settings at 1280 x 720.

[AnthonyDa]

Oh! My mistake!

That's because you are thinking that SH is "ideal" and is multi-threaded perfectly. But in reality it's far from being perfect, there is 1 major thread of gfx and this one cannont be split. And if this thread comes to use 1 core @ 100% then the CPU is the bottleneck, you see ?

To make it more simpler, if you have a software (game) using on 2 majors thread, then you'll get better results by using a dual core @ 3.0 than a quad @ 2.0 since only 2/4 cores are going be used with the quad. It's the same for SH, you are suspecting that the game can use 100% of a quad core but in really it isn't. Yes there is much more than 4 threads used by the game, but excepted few of them, they are minor threads which can be ran easily in a single core computing multiple tiny threads at the same time.
The gfx thread, as already said dozen of times, uses 1 core heavily, and on my Q6600@3.0ghz I have sometimes my first core at 100% and I can see my GPU utilisation going under 100%, and this without reaching the 60 fps limit.

And if you don't trust me, then just take a look at FM post here and on getsatisfaction, I've tried to sum up what they said on this post and hopefully it's done correctly :P Best thing you can do is read the latest patch thread, they made things pretty clear to me.