Build 118 and AMD Graphics Question

I did set same settings that you have, only AA I could not set to level2 as that caused screen to be black from some odd reason.

I took Megane trophy 16 opponents at Mills track of Megane trophy, starting at place 16 myself. I did formation lap and at one corner fps was 59 for a second, but constantly over 60, gpu ram was used 500MB, so not sure if even could use level 2 aa because of so little gpu ram free.

Now I have of course wrong brand card, but it is ancient one, mild overclock to 700Mhz and 1000Mhz ram. Alone at Mills track GPU usage is 30-42% only when limiting fps to 60, so at least 120fps alone on the track. A10 APU can't be worse than my setup, can't believe that, also I would doubt AA lvl2 causing so much of hit to fps, so there must be some other reason why so low fps?

Oh yes, I also have Core 2 Duo e6750, dynamic overclock to 3Ghz (2.66Ghz std) via motherboard bios.

 

Can you confirm that I should use either fxaa or aa, not both? (I do not understand what these setups even do )

What is that green bar in game next to fps counter? It is about 80% green. Where can I see my GPU/CPU usage during the game?

Sorry for being such a noob

 

In all honesty jtbo, the APU's are not that powerful for gaming right now. They are equal to a pretty low end graphics card even though they carry a number that would suggest they are a lot more powerful. System ram is a big issue. Partly due to the timing of the ram, partly due to being only DDR3 instead of the DDR5 that is on all new graphics cards, and partly because the pipeline from APU to system ram is slower than the pipeline that is on regular graphics cards. The only advantage that the APU has is that it is capable of utilizing more ram than most graphics cards can, but with slower speeds, it isn't worth it.

 

Interesting, I think that review I found earlier was either not so good quality or had some other gpu added to it.

Silent PC Review has tested A10 APU among some other stuff here:
http://www.silentpcreview.com/article1303-page4.html

I got in Heaven 3.0 benchmark with same resolution rest setting default this result:
FPS:
40.3
Scores:
1015
Min FPS:
24.9
Max FPS:
82.1

Compared to A10 in their test that scores 807, my card is slightly better, however I could not spot if they used default settings or not, some testers use more AA or AF and it changes scoring, can't really believe that my setup would be at that level compared to other stuff in review.

I did found however mention of 512MB RAM being with A10 APU for GPU, that is probably fast RAM and rest is slow system ram? No review seem to bring up that part, but if it has 512MB faster memory, then limiting memory usage below that should give better performance than using more ram.

TIG_green, drop AA and see if you can spot the difference, FXAA from my understanding is quick AA for less performance hit where AA is more of quality stuff.

Drop texture quality to high, but enable 2x Anisotropic filtering, try if you can get away with 4x AF, thing is that with more AF lower texture resolution can look better than higher texture resolution with no AF.

Look up my earlier post that has link to MSI Afterburner, use that to see GPU usage and GPU ram usage in game, so you can tune up settings accordingly, however if you are not using Afterburner's fps limiter GPU usage is probably 100%, at least it should be.

CPU usage you can see by hitting ctrl+C, purple bar is for physics, never should be at full length, green bar is for graphics, for me that is always 100%, no matter what I do and no matter if I limit fps by Afterburner or sync. Using software sync actually reads 100% gpu usage for me, even it is not.

Trying to find settings that provide best looks while keeping memory usage around 500MB would be what I would attempt as if there really is 512MB dedicated ram, staying within that limit should give best performance.

It is all about getting most with limitations of hardware, no point of wasting gpu processing for things you don't notice, so try and lower one setting at the time and see if when driving quick you can tell the difference, if not, no point to have higher setting, one can always ramp up settings when taking screenshots etc.

When I do quick laps at Mills for example, I really can't spot difference between shadows low or off, so I keep them off and gain a lot of fps from there.

Now I have learned that with AA built into my eyes, I really can't tell difference of 1920x1080 vs 1365x768 resolution in Heaven benchmark, must test same with rF2 also, if I can't spot lower resolution yagginess, then what is the purpose of using higher resolution. Eyes and monitors are different, so adjust for your preference, but using same principle you can probably find combination that gives best visual quality while maintaining decent fps. I would drop AA and use 2x AF first, then try high textures and details with 4x AF, performance might be the same, but for me it would give better looking sim as there would be less smudge on textures.