Geforce GTX 260 performance downgrade?

[Mugdog]

I see to have found some sort of issue...I used to have an old ATI Radeon HD 4650 that was a budget card. I recently got a new video card, a GTX 260. My performance on the 4650 was a lot better but my GTX is a tons better of a card. And I should be having the ultimate performance. My GTX 260's FPS on my games have dropped by 20 or so. I get around 60 - 40 on some games. I excepted better at least.

Can someone please help me here?

[Glurion]

i had a 4650 512mb ddr2 and now a gt240 512mb dd3, havent noticed any difference, and you definatly shouldn't since dolphin is more CPU dependant, any midrange graphics card can play dolphin well (so long as it has the requirements), have you changed any settings at all?

[Mugdog]

I have, and nothing seems to work when I do. I have even tried old settings. Nothing at all. I know it's more CPU dependent but what I really meant was a basic FPS boost from my original.

[Ocean]

I dare say your GPU could be too powerful for a amd athlon x2 which could be causing a big performance bottleneck, if you are absolutely sure your config is identical to your previous one.

Alternatively try ugprading to a newer forceware. http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us
Note: If you try running very powerful gpus (gtx480 for example) on low powered cpu's, you will actually get extremely low performance compared to midrange cards.

[Mugdog]

That might be the case. Regardless. All my games work a lot better than what my old card did. So my video card might not be all up for ultimate performance. But it runs all my games extremely better than my old one did. And it can't be to big a bottleneck really.

[naoan]

(07-31-2010, 12:50 PM)Ocean Wrote: I dare say your GPU could be too powerful for a amd athlon x2 which could be causing a big performance bottleneck, if you are absolutely sure your config is identical to your previous one.

Alternatively try ugprading to a newer forceware. http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us
Note: If you try running very powerful gpus (gtx480 for example) on low powered cpu's, you will actually get extremely low performance compared to midrange cards.

So you're saying that gtx260 made his overall performance slower? ridiculous!

Say he get 40FPS with his cpu and old card, with better card he'd still get 40FPS if supposedly cpu is the bottleneck, it won't degrade the performance at all. The GPU will just be held back by what the cpu can deliver!

[Ocean]

(07-31-2010, 01:51 PM)naoan Wrote: Say he get 40FPS with his cpu and old card, with better card he'd still get 40FPS if supposedly cpu is the bottleneck, it won't degrade the performance at all.

It's not ridiculous. An older card can be better on a slow cpu than a new card with billions of transistors, higher memory bandwidth, etc.

Here is a good explanation from nvidia.
http://developer.download.nvidia.com/GPU_Programming_Guide/GPU_Programming_Guide.pdf

nVidia Wrote:In an ideal case, there won’t be any one bottleneck—the CPU, AGP bus, and GPU pipeline stages are all equally loaded (see Figure 1).

PerfHUD’s green line shows how many milliseconds the GPU is idle during a frame. If the GPU is idle for even one millisecond per frame, it indicates that the application is at least partially CPU-limited. If the GPU is idle for a large percentage of frame time, or if it’s idle for even one millisecond in all frames and the application does not synchronize CPU and GPU, then the CPU is the biggest bottleneck. Improving GPU performance simply increases GPU idle time.

Having a disproportionately fast gpu compared to the cpu is not ideal. The card will just be unused for the most part and choking the cpu with it's output.
It could perform *worse* than your old, slower card if the processor is too weak to handle it.

I tested this with an old rig years ago, pentium IV simply would not handle a radeon 3850 in benchmarks (it was dragging at very slow fps), but the older x600 would run just fine and better/smoother than the newer card.

Note: dolphin is very cpu-dependent unlike many pc games which largely rely on the graphics card.
The bottleneck scenario is just a theoretical explanation why he would be getting lower fps now on dolphin than he did before with a weaker card.

Mugdog Wrote:GTX 260's FPS on my games have dropped by 20 or so

If all settings are 100% identical as earlier, same revision, all drivers up to date, feel free to support some other theory to his problem

[NaturalViolence]

Sorry to say this Ocean but naoan is right on this one. Also you misinterpreted that part of the document that you highlighted. They are saying that having a better gpu would only increase idle time if it was bottlenecked by the cpu and therefore would have no improvement in performance. It does not suggest anywhere in that document that in such a circumstance having a weaker gpu would improve performance. Also please explain to me how having a lower bandwidth/lower throughput card INCREASES bandwidth and cpu throughput to alleviate the cpu bottleneck and improve performance. Because mathematically that is the only way to improve performance when the cpu is the bottleneck.

I have done extensive testing with this in a variety of applications where the cpu was the bottleneck throughout my life and have spent the last 10 years obsessively reading video card benchmarks so that whenever it comes time for me to upgrade I make the right choice, and yet I have never seen a shred of evidence to support your claim, but I have always seen the data show that a better video card will offer no slowdown or speedup when the cpu is the bottleneck. This is commonly accepted as fact among hardware enthusiast communities, electronic engineers, graphics designers and programmers, and even both major gpu manufacturers have stated it.

Quote:If all settings are 100% identical as earlier, same revision, all drivers up to date, feel free to support some other theory to his problem

More likely either the application/drivers are the cause or he changed something else.

Also ati and nvidia drivers have had a long history of requiring different amounts of cpu overhead (usually the difference is very small). I doubt it but that could have something to do with it. Also the dx10/11 plugin MIGHT run faster on the 4650 for obvious reasons.

Quote:I tested this with an old rig years ago, pentium IV simply would not handle a radeon 3850 in benchmarks (it was dragging at very slow fps), but the older x600 would run just fine and better/smoother than the newer card.

What game? It may have forced it to use a different wrapper. bf2 for example would run faster with a 5800 fx than with a 9700 pro even thought he 9700 is better just because it forced it to use a different version of the pixel shader. I would imagine that you would have the same problem with two cards that are so far apart in age. Also it has always been the other way around for me (newer card = no improvement but no loss).

[naoan]

ah beaten by NaturalViolence, though he said it better than I would. :p

Up to date driver won't always mean trouble free, older driver may work better for older cards as manufacturer focus on improving newer GPU performance.

Also ATI 38/48XX cards were known to have performance degradation on non multi core cpu, it was alleviated with release of newer driver, I bet it was the cause of your problem before, ocean.

[NaturalViolence]

Quote:Also ATI 38/48XX cards were known to have performance degradation on non multi core cpu, it was alleviated with release of newer driver, I bet it was the cause of your problem before, ocean.

That's true! I can't believe I forgot about that. They had a lot of people hammering them about that on the forums for awhile.