720QM bottlenecks 6970M !!

Would you believe it. Playing Crysis Warhead at 1600x900 with everything set to max including AA I was a little stumped as to to why things were lagging!

So I bumped the core and mem up to 750/950 to compensate and still same lagging!

I was to say the least surprised. Then I took post-processing down one notch and hey presto frames shot back up again.

Would a rubbish processor so glad a 920XM is waiting for me to install in less than a week! In the meantime wish I had my core 2 quad back!

 

I'm fairly certain Post Processing is GPU bound.
And a fast dual core is more than enough for Crysis Warhead.

 

Looks like you are right lol I thought otherwise. That is odd. The 6970 should have no problems running warhead at all! Perhaps it is a driver issue...

 

I feel bottlenecked by my 740qm in crysis warhead also. I am going to purchase a 920xm soon.

 

No way that a Quad core is the bottleneck when a i3 is sufficient in almost all gaming scenarios.

 

Crysis Warhead is almost completely GPU bound at max settings. The fact that lowering the settings raised your framerate proves that the CPU is not the culprit.

 

Edit.

I made a fool out of myself x_x good thing no one quoted it.

 

Depends, that is true for most games but not BF3 and Starcraft 2.

However for Warhead, it relies on the GPU primarily, which is why Crysis owned systems (Processors reached the ability to max the game before GPUs did).

 

Sorry for the INSANELY old bump..

But say a scenario should occur where the 720QM actually would bottleneck the 6970M
- how would this scenario look like? (GTA4 excluded haha)

Can't see any decent reason to invest into a 920XM (nor the 940XM) when I can play on this for a whole year and get haswell.

 

It really depends on which games you want to play

There are a few games that make better use of your CPU, strategy games like Civ 5, Starcraft 2, and some that are optimized in a way that a faster CPU will improve your frame rate, like BF3, Skyrim, most Valve games, open world sandbox games with lots of NPCs onscreen, most MMOs.

On the other hand there are games like Crysis, Metro2033, where a fast CPU doesn't help as much or, in the case of Witcher 2 only seems to make a difference when you already have a super high end desktop graphics card.

 

If lowering the res and/or graphics settings does not have a noticeable effect on framerate, you are CPU-bound. Otherwise, the GPU is the culprit. IMO, if you're happy with the level of performance your 6970m provides (and it should be running things at 1080p, albeit on lower settings, 2-3 years from now), you should just get the 920xm, clock it somewhere between 2.5-3.0 ghz, and keep your current machine. I don't think you'll be having any problems from that CPU within that timeframe.

 

+1
Perfect.

My knowledge is limited when it comes to CPU's, but as far as I know the GPU is almost always the bottleneck (especially with a premium CPU) but anyways this laptop should survive a year (or two if I have a good reason to hang in)
- lived my life with my current XPS M1530 with a T9300 and 8600M GT.. getting tired not being able to play games (even at lowest now).

Thanks for the replies, very quick and simple.