Game time colour and GFX card

[strudo76]

Hey there.

I know the game time changes colour when the system is under load and physics ticks are taking longer. When I install something like SVE, EVE or even just scatterer, I'm often getting yellow when physics warping, and sometimes red. Is that an indication that my processor cannot handle the additional workload of those mods, or will a faster GFX card help that? My system currently has an i7 7700, so I rarely see even yellow when not using visual mods, but my GFX card is only a HD7870.

[Galileo]

Yeah, you are bottle necking pretty bad with that card. Every visual pack relies damn near solely on the gfx card. Upgrading that would help a lot.

Edited July 28, 2017 by Galileo

[strudo76]

Yeah, that's pretty much what I figured. The GFX card was the only thing that survived the power supply crapping out, that's why it's a bit miss matched. Would have been better if that had been fried too...

[Galileo]

Well fortunately, cards are relatively inexpensive these days. 5 years ago I bought a gtx 980 for a little more than $500. Now, I could go out and get a gtx 1060 for less than $200. So, that's one way to look at it  

[soulsource]

I wouldn't speak of a bottleneck, as long as your timer stays green without physics warp. Most players will have a yellow/red timer during physics warp, also if no mods are installed. Your GPU is upper middle class nowadays, the HD 7870 GHz Edition is (nearly) identical to the R9 370X, and the HD 7870 XT is even slightly faster than that.

From my experience EVE causes quite some CPU load (maybe, if I get extremely bored, I might profile it one day...), and most visual mods have EVE as a dependency. For that reason I would not automatically assume that upgrading your GPU will yield green time display during high physics warp when EVE is installed, though it will certainly help.

[Vanamonde]

Technical kind of question has been moved to the technical subforum.