Just How CPU intensive is SHOGUN 2?

**Gmoney39513** · July 17, 2012, 02:45 PM

I currently have a x4 955 @ 3.8 GHZ and am looking to upgrade my GPU to a GTX 670 from a ATI 5850. Will I see a noticeable increase or will my x4 955 bottleneck the GTX 670?

**Crazyeyesreaper** · July 17, 2012, 10:35 PM

wont see much if anything, CPU holds back Melee battles, you can upgrade settings graphically but your minimum FPS in melee engagements will remain the same.

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/searc...archid=8567100

granted the above is with an extremely high end gpu however the Bit tech article illustrates the point I made

at best your x4 will give you around 12-16fps in melee stock
overclocked the 1100T has a better memory controller so it eeks out a few more FPS due to 400 Mhz higher clock and better memory performance
so overclocked you could expect 14-18 FPS in heavy melee, this is a CPU bottleneck not GPU

**Gmoney39513** · July 18, 2012, 01:08 PM

Your link doesn't work.

**irishron** · July 18, 2012, 02:45 PM

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=531017 is one for though. Search the forum.

**Crazyeyesreaper** · July 18, 2012, 11:17 PM

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=542432

there try that

**Bolkonsky** · July 22, 2012, 07:12 AM

Very, especially compared to the older games.

You'll see a small change, but not much of one. This is because a better graphics card will allow you to raise the settings actually freeing up CPU usage. The lower the settings you have your game on, the more it assigns tasks to the CPU because that's usually more powerful than the GPU in the case of a low end computer.

Also, with the new dueling system, and more one on one combat, that means more agents to track. You can't do anything about this, and is my guess as to why the campaign lags so much, and the definite answer with the melee lag. When the units engage in melee, (and I'm doing a bit of educated guessing here) they probably get assigned their own agent (each individual guy that's in combat) to keep track of their hitpoints, energy, morale, and just oversee the individual combat. This causes CPU usage to go sky high, and with the terrible multicore support in Shogun 2, fact of the matter is you're going to get lag. So yeah you'll see slight performance, but you'd likely get better performance buying a good cooler and overclocking that thing to like 4.6ghz or something like that. In other words, the game is broken, and hopefully it will be fixed in Rome 2 because this is getting a little bit ridiculous.

**Crazyeyesreaper** · July 22, 2012, 10:15 AM

not quite Bolkonsky,

CPU usage remains the same no matter the resolution its a static senario

no matter WHAT resolution CPU usage will remain the same, if all features are turned on, using a better GPU can relieve a GPU bottleneck but this only applies to high resolutions

example CPU bench, no matter what resolution you apply via editing files will effect the CPU performance things like soft shadows etc will have an impact but if looking at CPU performance at max game settings across every resolution usage stays roughly the same. But otherwise yea better graphics card lets you turn up settings and youll still get the same minimum FPS so essentially

the 670 at max settings will take him from 30 fps to 60 fps but his minimum in melee combat will still be 12-16

**Bolkonsky** · July 23, 2012, 07:31 AM

Originally Posted by Crazyeyesreaper

not quite Bolkonsky,

CPU usage remains the same no matter the resolution its a static senario

no matter WHAT resolution CPU usage will remain the same, if all features are turned on, using a better GPU can relieve a GPU bottleneck but this only applies to high resolutions

example CPU bench, no matter what resolution you apply via editing files will effect the CPU performance things like soft shadows etc will have an impact but if looking at CPU performance at max game settings across every resolution usage stays roughly the same. But otherwise yea better graphics card lets you turn up settings and youll still get the same minimum FPS so essentially

the 670 at max settings will take him from 30 fps to 60 fps but his minimum in melee combat will still be 12-16

Really? Well that's a surprise and unlike almost every other video game in the world. Just when I thought their optimization couldn't get any worse...

**Crazyeyesreaper** · July 23, 2012, 11:42 AM

yup try it set all your settings to max and all low, but leave soft shadows etc on, make a melee army vs melee army katana samurai work well for this now zoom in youll notice FPS tanks, no matter what, essentially once Melee is joined in larger battles the CPU becomes the bottleneck, before fall of the samurai vram limit could cause issues, but with new shader code GPU load is less now than it use to be. so even something like a 5850 can offer an avg FPS of 30 at max settings 1920x1080, give or take but CPU is still the bottleneck their, AMD is just so far behind it hurts. even at insane clock speeds. Its rather sad but thats just the way it is.

so in smaller battles the 670 will give him a big boost but if the OP is expecting to run huge unit sizes and experience properly sized battles, well the CPU wont allow it, it wil lbe the bottleneck, that said in most other games the 670 will show a dramatic improvement its just a few select titles that AMD cpu will castrate his performance, granted being on Intel alone will offer a 15-20% higher frame rate, regardless so essentially on average out the gate with a GTX 670 hes already losing 10-20% performance due to CPU bottleneck, then add in a game like Shogun 2 and well it just compounds the problem, most of the time its unoticeable unless reviewing hardware or looking at performance reviews but
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/A...0_CPU_Scaling/
note AMD Phenom II x4 is slightly slower in SHogun 2 compared to the Bulldozer chip here but as you can see now imagine Ivy Bridge which i saw a 13% increase in AVG fps and 22% in MIN fps with the same GPU across all tests, so out the gate Sandybridge is 10% faster than the AMD setup same gpu and thats the FLY BY bench where nothing happens, just pretty graphics, add another 10-20% to that you end up with a 30% gap in Shogun 2, you will notice at low resolution where the game is CPU limited AMD is nearly 47% slower. That is a massive penalty especially when looking at high end GPUs. as Resolution increases GPU load increases and the CPUs balance out once you hit 2560x1600 or higher, but at 1080p and below CPU becomes a major bottleneck when looking at real gameplay.

but CA isnt the only company with terrible coding and efficiency Skyrim suffered heavily due to Bethesda forgetting to set the proper optimization flags in the compiler

these are just a few examples in other games AMD does just fine, Alien Vs Predator, Metro 2033, etc all their CPUs are competitive but in the big name titles right now they are just plain doing terrible. And considering a Phenom II x4 quadcores are now 4 years old their fairly ancient in terms of CPUs by todays standards.

I still remember when i made the switch from AMD to Intel from a 4 GHz Phenom II to a 2500k with 2x 5850s, in Bad Company 2 i went from 80-90fps to 140 fps, in Crossfire, in single GPU i went from 60 to 90, the fact the Intel system with 1 gpu was performing as well as the Phenom II system with 2 gpus was staggering to say the least, It is what it is,

in about a 50 / 50 split the OP will see massive benefits in performance, but will equally be disappointed by the CPU holding him back.

**Gmoney39513** · July 24, 2012, 05:55 PM

If Intel wasn't changing sockets for Haswell I would pick up the i5 2500k within the hour! Now I am at a loss...

These are my full specs:

CPU- AMD x4 955 @ 3.8 GHZ -C3 revision-stock voltage (1.4)

CPU COOLER- XIGMATEK HDT-SI283

MOBO- ASUS M4A79XTD EVO AM3

RAM- 4GB G.SKILL DDR3 1600

GPU- GIGABYTE ATI 5850 1GB

PSU- CORSAIR TX-750 watt

Here are my options:
1) Pick up the graphics card now and be disappointed because my CPU is holding me back (then upgrade when Haswell comes)...
2) Buy i5 2500k and mobo (keep 5850)
3) Wait till winter and purchase the graphics card with the i5 2500k (then I would have to change mobo as well)...
What should I do? It seems all the games I play seem to be the most CPU intensive (BF3, Skyrim, Shogun 2)!

**Totalheadache** · July 25, 2012, 04:05 PM

i'm leaning toward gpu then haswell..

just dont expect great perf with rome2 but then i dont either because of the engine. they are apparently optimising it but how much is anybodies guess...

(670's are good cards).

**Crazyeyesreaper** · July 25, 2012, 05:57 PM

correct its why i said 50 / 50 in many games you will benefit, in others you will not its just one of those rough situations, but if you have other games you play besides shogun 2 etc that needs more performance get the GTX 670, if Shogun 2 is what you primarily play then get a new CPU mobo ram combo, both situations are a hard sell but Haswell isnt out till 2013 as welll sometime around april so a year away, newer gpus are coming as well before Rome 2 releases, essentially new CPUs and new GPUs should be out before Rome 2 but as they say if you wait wait wait for the next big thing you will never upgrade.

Id also lean towards GPU if playing many games.

Shogun 2 will still run better, just melee battles will still lag due to CPU, so general playability will still be greatly improved.

**Gmoney39513** · August 23, 2012, 09:21 AM

So I bought the card because it was on sale with a free Borderlands 2. My findings are as follows: Shogun 2 is a game with horrendous multi-core support. Even on huge melee battles my total cpu usage never goes above 50% causing my brand new gtx 670 to bottleneck horribly.

**irishron** · August 23, 2012, 10:13 AM

It's not the card bottlenecking. As you already said, bad multicore support and this is your bottleneck. We have multiple threads on this in the Shogun2 Tech forum.

**Gmoney39513** · August 23, 2012, 11:37 AM

How would upgrading to an intel i5 improve things if Shogun 2 has atrocious multicore support. I am guessing IPC is what makes the difference?

**Crazyeyesreaper** · August 23, 2012, 11:45 AM

IPC and memory controller performance

going from 1066 to 1333 on i5 IVY bridge gives 1fps 1333 to 1600 1fps 1600 to 1886 1 fps

so essentially going from cheapest possible memory to some decent sticks nets about 2 FPS,

however overclocking the CPU can gain anywhere from 20-30% in terms of minimum frame rate on IVY and its a combination of clock speed and IPC

essentially if you want 30 FPS minimum in larger battles you need an Intel i5 3570k at around 4.4 GHz +

**Gmoney39513** · August 23, 2012, 02:01 PM

So correct me if I'm wrong, but I would have to spend over $300 in new hardware so that the game runs the way it would have if it had proper multi-core support. Seems fair enough.

**Bolkonsky** · August 23, 2012, 04:37 PM

Spot on.

**karamazovmm** · August 23, 2012, 04:53 PM

I dont know what you expected, your amd cpu is old, its been out since 2008 (not your version, yours is just a higher binned of the one that was launched), the boost in performance by going to a i7 3770k is just absurd.