Assassin's Creed 2 CPU or GPU dependent? M17x R1-2

hi,

I have been trying to figure out if Assassin's Creed 2 is mostly CPU or GPU dependent on my M17x R1 with a dual 260M.

I own two CPUs: T9900 3.06GHz and Q9000 2.00GHz

when I first bought AC2 I had the T9900 installed and was getting very decent FPS at the beginning of the game with settings on high. even through the city I wouldn't get anything below 35 but mostly it was between 40 and 60 FPS.

now that I reached a point in the game where there are no buldings, but rather the horizon is very open wide with lots of vegetation and NPCs walking here and there, in specific camera angles, I even get 21 FPS and it really makes me want to cry.

so I decided to do a test and wanted to switch to the Q9000, assuming that because of the lower clock freq, the game would perform even worse, therefore I would deduct the problem would be the CPU.

surprisingly enough, after I installed the Q9000 I didn not see any difference whatsoever.

I couldn't believe it. the performance would be the same wherever I'd go in the game. I even disabled 2 out of 4 cores, proving that the game does not accept more than two cores, the engine simply distributes all calculations among the 4 cores but do not fully exploit them, the equivalent of only two cores are being fully exploited.

even on that particular spot I just mentioned above, I was still getting 21 FPS. even when I disabled completely Anti Aliasing.
very annoyed.

so, is the game completely GPU dependent? it certainly looks like...
but then, I was also wondering if it had to do with the fact that the M17x R1 only uses PCI-E link at 8x although the videocards support up to 16x.

is there a correlation to the poor FPS and the PCI-E at 8x in the M17x-R1?
if so, is there a way to get it to work at 16x instead?

anyone playing AC2 with an M17X-R1 dual 280M?
can anyone post some personal comments about their experience with the M17x either R1 - R2 and AC2 please?

I really like this game but would like to understand if the low framerate can be avoided.

thank you,

p.s. I am not very much looking to hear if I should or should have not gotten the game, rather I am looking for constructive answers that preferably go into tecnical detail. thanks

 

Yeah I just bought the game, have the exact same issues you are having... tried a heap of nhancer settings and all.

Such a shame the first game ran so well but the gameplay sucked... now apparently the gameplay is good but the game runs like crap -_-

 

RUns fine on my m17x-R2 with dual 4870's i7-820

 

Most of the new games are bottle necked by GPU, only some RTS are more CPU dependent.

 

tried a driver update? It seems to run alright on the newest drivers my friends with the m17x tell me. I have the m17 and it does alright as well with newer drivers.

 

how do u disable 2 cores? do u set affinity at task manager and untick 2 cores?

mine runs fine on my r1 and r2. but my r1 is using dual 4870s. i think its more cpu intensive than gpu intensive considering its the same engine as the first AC despite slight improvement in aa and af quality. there are lots of npcs in cities etc so they all need some cpu power to let them walk around and interact with eg if you bump into them.

your frame drops could be some sort of driver issue because i have never experienced it with the atis. have u tried using 1 gpu instead? maybe sli has issues with the game

 

Update the driver here, i am getting about 60-30 frames a second on my asus g73JH, i agree this gameplay is so much better. The drm does suck.

 

I'm using t9800 + dual 280m. fps is about 30~50 with sli on, 20~30 with sli off. GPU does help but considering this ac2 is something like a sandbox game, it should be heavily dependent on CPU. The reason u get low fps is probably because of the bad port from ubisoft, the game never utilise wad ur system has to offer, the same goes for other games like Splinter Cell: Conviction.

 

Wait what do you mean as this comment?

 

I went from Q9000 to QX9300 @3.06GHz and there is really no difference. But I think the SLI is not really working well, because only one GPU gets hot.

 

I played the game when it went out with my R1 Sli 280m and never got under 30FPS, loved the game i'm pretty sure i used the P06 beta drivers.

 

What about the SLI support in P06, I am pretty sure the game is using only one card or a poor optimization for SLI, or P06 (100% sure) does not have a SLI profile for ACII.

 

You don't get SLi support with P06 in AC2