Benchmark analysis part 1: over water. VRAM bottleneck ?

[Skinny]

HI all,

Ive been doing some benchmarking with CoD and thought you might be interested in the results so far.

First of all, in this post, all results where obtained using my Turkey Shoot track, which is pretty light, and only over water, ~10 planes. You can watch it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Or6pe...layer_embedded

I intend to add benches over land later, but I might need a better videocard to make that useful.

My specs: Core2 Quad @ 3 GHz, 4870 512 MB, 4 GB RAM.
Reference settings I used, is the best balance between visuals and performance for my rig:

resolution: 1360x768  
anti aliasing: 4x 
Epilepsy: Off
Model: high
building: low
land:low
forest:low
effects:high
damage decals:medium
buildings:low
land shading: low
grass: off
shadows:off
roads:off

Lets check performance impact of some of the relevant IQ settings. First I wondered about damage decals:



There is barely any difference, but I should add I can also not see any difference in the track. Perhaps this only applies to the players own airplane?

Next, I quickly toggled a few other options:



Note that 'reference' refers to the settings I quoted above. Setting model detail to low (or even medium) seems like a pretty damn stupid thing to do. It only affects your own plane which then looks worse than a 1990's flightsim, and the difference in frame rate is pretty small. Do yourself a favor, set it to max.

"Visual Effects" does impact FPS when you would expect it (when bullets are fired and hit), but the performance penalty is modest and the IQ impact huge. Cant see much difference between medium and high here, but you dont want to set it to low I think.

Lastly, As you can see, shadows is a real FPS killer here. A shame, as it look pretty damn nice, but my rig cant cope with it.

Next, lets look how resolution and AA impact framerate on my venerable videocard:



Reducing AA does help framerate, but only in those segments where they are already quite playable. In the segments where I struggle to maintain 30 FPS, AA settings dont matter much, if at all. In short, I better leave it on to compensate for the reduced res, since going to 1920x1080 native res of my monitor is not really playable, even with AA disabled.

One would think I need a faster videocard. But is it that simple?
To find out, I tried over/underclocking my videocard:



Surprising, no? Running my videocard at 50% lower speeds, makes no difference whatsoever, not at 1360, not at 1920 res. My bottleneck is elsewhere, one would suspect the CPU.

Lets see what happens when I underclock CPU and RAM:



Not a whole lot! 50% lower cpu speed again makes almost no difference. RAM speed is even less of an issue.

So what is my main bottleck (again, over water) ? I can only imagine its the amount of VRAM.

Before I start testing over land, I would love to confirm this. Therefore, if anyone has a rig similar to mine, but with a 1GB 4870, please see this post:
http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showpos...4&postcount=15