[SOLVED] Going from 250GTS to 450GTS, mixed bag..

[Baleur]

Core 2 Duo E6600
4gb ram
Asus 250GTS (before), Gainward 450GTS GLH (now)

It's....... wierd.
With my 250GTS i got smooth sailing (panning the view and zooming) at pretty much all levels except for the very max zoom. I mean dont get me wrong, i got 15-20 fps, but it felt smooth anyway for a strategy game. Enough to be playable for hours on end.
Did have to turn the Terrain Tessellation setting ingame to Medium for that though.

Now, with the 450GTS, its.... Wierd. I get stuttery panning the view and zooming, but "between the stutters" the framerate is soaring high.. Enabling vsync helped a bit. (something i rarely do in games, because it generally lowers your fps in demanding scenes below your monitor refresh rate).
But its still chuggy and stuttery, odd. I guess i'll try putting Terrain Tessellation to Medium again, but thats kinda like, being stagnant in your "epeen evolution".

Now i dont know if its because with the new graphics card i went from the 258.96 drivers to the 260.63 drivers, or if it's actually the card itself (dx11 running rather than dx10 with the 250GTS).

I however never had the 3 minute turn time problem that many people with uber-cpu's seem to report. Its funny, it seems like older hardware runs better than newer hardware.
I'd love to hear from someone else who's ran it with older hardware and then upgraded.
Thanks!


Edit, possible fix for blind noobs like myself;
Well, turns out the new drivers (and the new dx11 card) had a setting hidden in the driver control panel that i've never seen before, power saving/management..
By default it's set to clock-down the gpu during low load, to save power, when set to "prefer max preformance" it doesnt do this.

I checked with GPU-Z, and sure enough, when i ran Civ5 the GPU constantly clocked down from 930mhz to 430mhz, sometimes as low as 30mhz!
After changing that setting, it now constantly runs at 930mhz, no downclocks. The 100-turn slowdown is now gone (so far).
Thats what happens when you havent changed your hardware in 2 years and become rusty and blind to common sense

But this does suggest that Civ5 has some bug that causes the GPU to think its not running a 3d application anymore, hence lowers its clock as if you were out in windows.

 

[tokala]

For some strange reason the GTS450 might put a higher load on your CPU. That "scroll-stuttering" should not be GPU-bound if you get much higher fps while stationary. Try to play a bit with the settings, made quite a difference for me
(On a GTX260, though)

 

[Baleur]

For some reason, after restarting the game several times, trying with vsync on or off, it now runs fine scrolling and zooming, as it did before with the old card, (apart from the obvious generate-terrain-from-grey-blocks stutter).
Very odd, i swear it ran poorly at first, maybe i just had to turn off and on some settings for it to register my new graphics card or something O_o

 

[McLMan]

I haven't upgraded anything yet, but I'm not getting any of the super long turn times with my 3 year old Q6600 CPU. I can run into glitches with my 8800 GTS (g92) video card, but I think I've isolated what causes those problems and can easily avoid them. Other than that it runs really well. I plan on upgrading my video card late winter/early spring so I'm watching everybody else's results with great interest.

 

[Baleur]

Seems i spoke too soon again, after finally having time to play the game again since i got the 450GTS, it seems that after 100 turns or so it starts ultra-slowdown through syrup, even after complete restarts and loading the savegame.
What a pity.

 

[tokala]

For some reason, after restarting the game several times, trying with vsync on or off, it now runs fine scrolling and zooming, as it did before with the old card, (apart from the obvious generate-terrain-from-grey-blocks stutter).
Very odd, i swear it ran poorly at first, maybe i just had to turn off and on some settings for it to register my new graphics card or something O_o

Seeing something like this, too. Sometimes it runs pretty good, no jerkyness. After alt-tabbing or a restart sometimes it gets really choppy again. Interesting thing is, in "choppy mode" the CPU load is only ~60%, in "smooth mode" it's ~90% (dual core). There was a behaviour like this once in another game (Supreme Commander). What happended there was that the two most CPU intensive threads ended up on the same core, with all the rest (non performance critical) running on the other(s). It took a guy from the community to write a tool to fix that

 

[Baleur]

I think i fixed it... Updated main post

 

[tokala]

WTH

There's no chance in hell a non-tech savvy person would have found out something like this
Good that that power saving stuff is diasabled for my card when running two monitors

 

[The_J]

Even a tech savvy person would not necessarily have found this.

Not that i could understand why the card does not have a big data load during a 3 D game...

 

[Tkrens]

So where exactly is this setting located?

 

[tokala]

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