07-31-2010, 04:47 PM
(07-31-2010, 03:05 PM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]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.
Well I'd like sources on that data, because I could only find to the contrary.
Here is for example a study with a e6850 dual core and a gtx285 card when experimenting with downclocking or overclocking either one
http://alienbabeltech.com/main/?p=13454&page=3
Quote:In Call of Duty 5, Stalker Clear Sky and Crysis Warhead we see absolutely zero movement from the processor. This confirms the GTX285 is bottlenecking the system by 100%, even when my processor is running at 2 GHz. In fact, the latter two games show a perfectly linear performance drop of 33%. This is a text-book bottleneck.
Here is an article that for example explains the major bottleneck a gtx280 will experience when used with a core 2 quad 9650 at non-overclocked frequencies.
http://www.benchmarkextreme.com/Articles...is/P9.html
If you were to use such a card with a weaker processor, say a 3.0ghz core 2 duo, it would very likely perform exactly the same or slightly worse than say gtx8800 because the processor simply cannot accept the amount of rendering requests as a weaker card could.
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/General_FAQ.html
Newer ATI and nvidia cards make much more cpu-costly calls to buffer, they are much more efficient at blending ops, the card makes a lot more r/w to the hard-drive when operating.
Just the memory bandwidth on a 8800 is 57.6gb/s whereas on gtx280 it is 141.7gb/s. There are more reasons why a strong card could perform slightly worse on a low-end cpu than a midrange card due to the heavy bottleneck
but that's too theoretical and the OP is probably not interested in such a technical debate.
________________________________________________________________________
If I were you, I'd also primarily update the drivers from the link in the previous post to rule out the possibility of outdated forceware. Also optimize the settings
http://www.dolphin-emu.org/configuration...ation.html
Should those fail, I don't see other explanations than either a broken card, cluttered OS lagging your system or bottleneck