Alright, so yesterday I got my second GTX 560 and enabled SLI.

Here are my specs at the moment:

Intel Core2Quad 3.00GHz OC @ 4.00GHz
8gb of DDR2 ram, OC in 1:1 ratio to FSB
2x GTX 560 Ti
Windows 7 64-bit

So, in multiplayer, everything maxed, dx11 and hires pack on with 1980x1200 I'm getting between 30 and 60 FPS.

The thing is, when it drops to around 30, both GPU's show as only performing at 50% of their capacity, and the CPU is only doing 60% ever. This is ofcourse, unplayable FPS but since it's pretty much what I was getting before (only then my GPU was at 80-90%)... am I doing something wrong?

SLI is enabled in nVidia control panel and I have the focus on the right monitor, and set it to performance mode.

Another thing... the FPS is pretty much the same if its maxed or in 1440x900 and with lowest settings(dx11 on)

What's up with that? Surely there should be a performance increase by lowering the settings..!

I am confus, help get pl0x

The game in it's present state is basically broken, wait till nvidia sells a few more 590s then they'll probably release the driver that's gonna optimize it.
Watch your card temps, and throw in a faster CPU if you wanna be able to have them running at their 'maximum potential', ...'The Grid. A digital frontier. I tried to picture clusters of information as they move through the computer. What did they look like? Ships? Motorcycles? Were the circuits like freeways? I kept dreaming of a world I thought I’d never see. And then, one day, I got in.'
One day we'll all get in and max this mofo.

SO.. if I turn dx11 off, all settings to low(high), and take the resolution down to 1680x1050 I'll again, be around 50-70 with occasional drops to 30.

Oh, and when it drops to 30 fps, the GPUs are also only running at 30% which is bogus. The CPU is always at about 50-60% which is also pretty useless.

So basically, I have all this power and Crysis isn't even using it.

I upgraded in hopes of being able to FRAPS some gameplay but since that always drops me down to 30-40 SLI or not, I can't really do anything.

Any fraps tips then?

So, umm even when I'm staring at a wall at 120 FPS it always drops down to 30-40 when recording.. the recording is set at 60fps.

Why the hell is it like that?

So, umm even when I'm staring at a wall at 120 FPS it always drops down to 30-40 when recording.. the recording is set at 60fps.

Why the hell is it like that?

That is due to your hard drive or CPU not keepin up. I have been recording single player with fraps at 1920x1080 60fps with force lossless rgb capture checked over the past few days. All ultra settings with dx11 and texture pack. With vsync on, my fps dropped below 60 only a hand full of times. I now have 2TB of uncompressed video to sift thru. File size is over 4gb roughly every 18 seconds recorded. I'm using 2 spinpoint f3 1tb drives in raid 0 dedicated to recording with 128k allocation unit size. My CPU usage also goes from around 35% to over 80% when I start recording.

Yep. Your vid cards are being bottlenecked by your cpu (plus your ram and hard drive). This is usually the case when you lower the settings but see no increase in performance

Your Vids are being bottlenecked by your CPU and possible your HDD. I wold suggest going to a 10K RPM HDD and getting your CPU speed in the 3.5-4.0Ghz

My CPU already IS at 4GHz! Are you seriously telling me a 4GHz quad core is bottlenecking my system?

I think I mightve found the problem though, my RAM is DDR2, rated at 888 MHz... could this be a serious issue? lol

My CPU already IS at 4GHz! Are you seriously telling me a 4GHz quad core is bottlenecking my system? Mine is at 4,4 and it's not enough sometimes lol.

I'm using Fraps a alot to records my vids, latest 3.4.5 atm. A very fast dedicated HDD really helps here. It's not only about the high sequential write speed you need, you also need to make sure absolutely nothing else is accessing this HDD. If you have windows installed on it or the game it will never work well. I use a Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB just for recording and editing my gaming videos. System, games and storage are on different SSD/HDD. I set Fraps to record at 60 fps, its ~75MB/s at 1920x1200.

Mine is at 4,4 and it's not enough sometimes lol.

I'm using Fraps a alot to records my vids, latest 3.4.5 atm. A very fast dedicated HDD really helps here. It's not only about the high sequential write speed you need, you also need to make sure absolutely nothing else is accessing this HDD. If you have windows installed on it or the game it will never work well. I use a Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB just for recording and editing my gaming videos. System, games and storage are on different SSD/HDD. I set Fraps to record at 60 fps, its ~75MB/s at 1920x1200.

Are you recording with half size selected? Mine show ~220-250mb/s

Why are you using a TB for gaming ? You should be using a TB for storage not as a prime drive.

Why are you using a TB for gaming ? You should be using a TB for storage not as a prime drive.

If you are refering to me it is because once these particular drives are short stroked, the access times go down into the 7ms range while still having fast read/write speeds and can use the rest of space for unindexed storage if you wanted to without effecting performance.

For indexing and cache you can have that setup on a secondary drive. For example. I have two Velociraptors both are 10k RPM. I have indexing and cache wrighting to the second HDD and not drive C: where my Crysis 2 installed filed are on. This frees up the burden on drive C: so the GPU and CPU dont have to be waiting on it.

Having a TB even partitioned to have indexing & cache writing will still lower performance

For indexing and cache you can have that setup on a secondary drive. For example. I have two Velociraptors both are 10k RPM. I have indexing and cache wrighting to the second HDD and not drive C: where my Crysis 2 installed filed are on. This frees up the burden on drive C: so the GPU and CPU dont have to be waiting on it.

Having a TB even partitioned to have indexing & cache writing will still lower performance


When you short stroke the 2 500gb platters in the f3 1tb drive, the heads have to move a very tiny amount to access data quickly. This does not lower your performance. You get quite a boost in performance. The access times for my OS/game partition is less than 1ms slower than a velociraptor. The bonuses are they read and write large files much faster, all the extra storage space, and I got them pretty cheap. When I want to upgrade to a fast ssd, I'll have the option to make the F3's pure recording/storage drives. When I got these drives I was thinking bang for buck and future use. They are quite fast tho. It takes around 30 seconds to power on pc and be on the desktop. Loading maps in crysis 2 take no time. The load bar goes from empty to full instantly and I'm typically the first one in.

Why are you guys talking about hard drives? The game doesn't load up significant data off the hard drive as you walk along. It's all loaded up into the memory at the beggining of the level. You guys should know that. The very idea of being bottlenecked by a hard drive in anything other than an open world rpg type game is ridiculous (and even that would only lead to stuttering at some points, not an overall low frame rate).

His memory can't bottleneck him either. Just because he is using DDR2 doesn't mean he should suffer any loss in performance at all. It's obviously caused by crappy sli support atm.

As for the 4GHz core2quad, I dunno. In DX11 mode with everything maxed, it seems to use nearly all of my 4.5GHz i5 2500k. Also, I think they may have made this a 4 core game now (it used to use only 3 cores back in the day, maybe still does in DX9 mode). In DX9 mode, I think it's much less CPU usage in general. I used to have a 3.4GHz Q9550 and it was ample for how crysis was back in April with only 1 5850, but I'm not so sure about now..