i7 870 vs Radeon 6950

[pernice_brother]

Hi All

I'm not very tech-savvy so would appreciate a bit of help. My PC uses an i7 870 along with an AMD Radeon 6950hd 2gb graphics card and 8gb of RAM. Nothing is overclocked and I don't intend to go down this route.

Up until now I've generally been able to play most games at pretty much maximum settings. However, I've just downloaded 'Batman: Arkham City' from Steam and this is the first game I've played where there is noticable slow-down when there is a lot happening on-screen.

My question is this: what is most likely to be causing this slow-down? The processor or the graphics card? Is there a rule of thumb I can apply to work out if it's time to upgrade my graphics card or if it's time to upgrade my processor?

Thanks for your time.

Cheers, Paul.

 

[PP Mguire]

It's the GPU. If you have PhysX turned on, turn it off. Arkham was pretty hard on a single 580 as well.

 

[pernice_brother]

Thanks. In the future, if I have problems running games on max settings, is there a way of telling if it's the CPU or GPU?

 

[PP Mguire]

You have a quad with HT, it'll be a while before your CPU is a problem. If you turn HT off in the bios and your CPU is at 100% on all 4 cores then you have a problem. There are only two games I can think of that actually do this.

I know you said you don't intend on overclocking, but overclocking that gen of CPU actually has very good gains. Before I got my replacement board for the rig in my sig I was using my old standby which is an i5 750. Stock it did fine, but at 3.8GHz I actually got a nice boost while overclocking my GPU.