What parts should I upgrade to run AC?

[glun34]

I'm very new to the whole PC gaming so apologies if I come across as I bit of an idiot! Built a cheap PC a few years ago and just got back on it to play AC. The specs are.

AMD A8-6600K 3.90 GHz
4 GB of RAM
AMD Radeon HD 7700 series
Gigabyte GA-F2A88XM-DS

I'm trying to play with some AI (10 to be exact) and I'm getting quite a lot of lag. The FPS are sitting at around 40 and iv turned down all of the quality settings to minimum. Tried over clocking the CPU and graphics card this afternoon and still have the same issue. Is it time to upgrade the parts or is there something I'm missing? Again sorry if I said anything wrong there, have half a clue what I'm taking about!

 

[HypoToad]

AMD A8-6600K 3.90 GHz
4 GB of RAM
AMD Radeon HD 7700 series

I have an i3 3220 with 8gb ram and HD 7770 video card, if you don't want to go for a complete motherboard swap so you can go to an i7 cpu etc. I would upgrade to 8gb ram and get a better video card for a start, your CPU is slightly faster than mine, so that shouldn't be a problem. Other more knowledgeable souls may chime in.

See here where your video card sits, the Geoforce GTX 780 for example has roughly 4 times the performance and if you go used they shouldn't cost that much:
https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?gpu=Radeon+HD+7700-serie&id=2317

 

[RasmusP]

Hi and welcome to ac
I'm not sure if it's the CPU oder the graphics card but you can test it easily:

- CPU test: change the resolution to 800x600 and put every slider to the absolute minimum. The graphics card now won't have any problem with the game.
Now test with some ai if it still stutters or not.

If it stutters it's the CPU. The CPU is just slightly affected by resolution and graphic settings so that an easy way to test it

If it runs butter smooth it's the graphics card!

 

[glun34]

Both thank you for the reply! I tryed the CPU test and the game was still stuttering so I guess I need go invest in a new CPU. Do you guys have any suggestions on what one to get?

 

[RasmusP]

Both thank you for the reply! I tryed the CPU test and the game was still stuttering so I guess I need go invest in a new CPU. Do you guys have any suggestions on what one to get?

If you have the money to spend always go for an Intel with a "k" so you'll be able to overclock it at some point in the future. My I7 2600k from 2011 still runs totally fine for 99% of all modern games. But I overclocked it now 2 years ago from the default 3.4 GHz to 4.4 GHz. Huge performance boost!
Oooor go for an amd ryzen CPU!

If you don't have the money to spend I would suggest an Intel xeon or a modern i3.

 

[Gaberacer241070]

You could try buying a new gpu like gtx1050 ti or gtx 1060. (and you could use it in a future new rig)
I´m playing Assetto with an AMD 965 x4 (older than yours, but mostly the same performance) an a 1060, all maxed out, not stutter at all, no bottleneck in this particular game.

 

[cpt_gandy]

I'm very new to the whole PC gaming so apologies if I come across as I bit of an idiot! Built a cheap PC a few years ago and just got back on it to play AC. The specs are.

AMD A8-6600K 3.90 GHz
4 GB of RAM
AMD Radeon HD 7700 series
Gigabyte GA-F2A88XM-DS

If you are on a budget then the 1050ti is all you need, i was running AC maxed out with a i7 960 ( stock speeds ) and had no issues and the game is very smooth

Ive just upgraded to a Ryzen 7 1700 ( no real plan to overclock but i need to get the memory running at 3200mhz ) and im getting more fps than the old i7 960 with the same card

Also you should really think about getting more ram, the sweet spot for windows 10 is 16 gig and but but 8gig is the minimum i would recommend so another 4 gig could fix the lag/stutters you have so i would try that first as that would be the cheapest part to upgrade first. You can use an app like cpu-z to find out the speed of your current memory so you can buy a stick of the same speed.

 

[Turk]

I wouldn't go buying ram for this system. I get the feeling you could be looking at a complete upgrade of the CPU and graphics card to get a good FPS out of AC. If you're going to replace the CPU you may need to replace the motherboard which probably means different ram. You could get a new graphic card first and see if that fixes it and if it doesn't then consider A motherboard/CPU/ram upgrade. The graphics card can go into any system so worst case scenario you could resell it.

My I7 2600k from 2011 still runs totally fine for 99% of all modern games. But I overclocked it now 2 years ago from the default 3.4 GHz to 4.4 GHz.

I have the same CPU and only overclocked it when I got the rift. It actually fixed my my PC as I was having freezes every so often and it turned out the bus speed was set wrong all those years. I'm currently getting 4.8ghz out of it now. I overclocked the turbo mode so it runs at it's regular speed when it's not under load.

 

[RasmusP]

So the OP here gets very different opinions.
Easy test:
download openhardwaremonitor
LINK
Load up the game and have a look at the CPU loads and the GPU loads, also at the RAM usage.
Example Screenshots from my system while running AC:
You can see that my CPU is running at it's right core clock. Also you see that no core is really used (that's a replay of an online race, so low CPU usage!).
Then you can see that 6GB RAM are in use, 10GB are still available.
The last important things are the GPU Core, which is at 47% so plenty of head room from my GPU and the Memory which is at 21,7%.
Please load up AC, run Open Hardware Monitor and have a look at these values too. It shows you black on white what is bottlenecking your system!

@Turk
To keep the energy saving active you only need to not-deactivate the c-states afaik. As you can see mine is still going down to 1600 MHz but I disabled Turbo.
Are all of your 4(8) cores running at 4.8? Mine isn't capable of more than 4.7 but then gets quite hot and needs a lot of extra voltage so I don't run it that high.
I did play Gothic 3 I bought in 2006 last summer (finally after 10 years) and that's a CPU hungry single core engine. So I disabled hyperthreading, disabled 2 cores and ran the active 2 cores with turbo mode on 4.9 GHz and the other around 4.2 GHz

 

[Turk]

To keep the energy saving active you only need to not-deactivate the c-states afaik. As you can see mine is still going down to 1600 MHz but I disabled Turbo.
Are all of your 4(8) cores running at 4.8? Mine isn't capable of more than 4.7 but then gets quite hot and needs a lot of extra voltage so I don't run it that high.
I did play Gothic 3 I bought in 2006 last summer (finally after 10 years) and that's a CPU hungry single core engine. So I disabled hyperthreading, disabled 2 cores and ran the active 2 cores with turbo mode on 4.9 GHz and the other around 4.2 GHz

I don't have a great understanding of overclocking, I watched a video on youtube of someone overclocking my motherboard CPU combination and just copied them.

There's a setting in the Asus bios for a multiplier I can't remember what the normal setting is, but the guy in the video set it to 45. I tried it up to 47, recently my thermal paste went bad (temperature would spike up to 80+) so I replaced it and then set the multiplier to 48 and it just about touches 70 degrees while playing AC. So as you can see I'm just chancing my arm and don't really know what I'm doing, but AC runs buttery smooth so I'm happy out.