Hi,
I recently upgrade to an ASRock Challenger Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB GDDR6 from an a MSI Gaming GeForce GTX 1650. Googles AI led me to believe that with my set up and this new GPU I could easily run AOE IV at max graphics settings which seems to be true but at low FPS, and not “easily”. It initially said this GPU was overkill for AOE IV, now it is saying it’s a midrange card incapable of performing well in the most intense large unit battles. I’ve become obsessed with trying to fine tune it to have as high graphics settings as possible and achieve at least 60 FPS but after some testing I am even seeing low FPS on medium settings… roughly 54. I know this isnt really a graphics game but I wondered what peoples thoughts are, strictly in terms of performance and capbilities. I am considering returning this GPU (I think thats possible, bought from NewEgg a week ago) and getting the 9070 but I want to make sure the GPU is actually the issue here before doing that. I am also curious what people think about this graphics card in particuilar in relation to Age of Empires IV. Some of my research indicates that Nvidia interacts with AOEIV better for some reason - seems odd to me but I am relatively new to PC Building.
Google AI led me to believe I had a CPU bottleneck last night (due to single core demands of AOE IV and CPU utilization at 15%) but now is giving me different information. I feel like its kind of spinning me in circles and often confusing the Radeon RX 9060 XT (which I have) with the 7900 XT or 6900 XT because there is more information for these, on the web. Sometimes it says the 9060 xt doesnt exist… It makes pinpointing ths issues a little tricky so I am hoping humans will be better at figuring this out. If you are sub human or advanced biologics, I also appreciate your help.
I decided to run some pretty thorough testing to determine what’s going on. My peramiters and results are below. Any thoughts or advice would be appreciated. Thank you for your time in advance. I know this is a lot of information so, please, go live your life and ignore this. I have been lost in this black hole of CPU specs and graphics obsession all week.
My Gaming PC: (well above Ideal as listed on the AOE IV system requirements page)
AMD Ryzen 7 5800 X, ASRock Challenger Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB GDDR6, Gigabyte B550M Aorus Pro Micro ATX M4 Motherboard, Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4 3600 (PC4-28800) C18 Desktop Memory (dual channel A2/B2), 60 HZ 4k TCL Smart TV - 55 inch, HDMI Cable (maybe 2.1, not sure),
Western Digital 1TB WD Blue SN550 NVMe Internal SSD - Gen3 x4 PCIe 8Gb/s, M.2 2280, 3D NAND, Up to 2,400 MB/s - WDS100T2B0C (game is located on the SSD)
Game settings for test:
Offline, 4v4, me and 7 intermediate AIs, unlimited resources, 200 unit pop cap, gigantic map, no fog of war, late game, ~ 1600 units in game although not all on screen at once. Maybe 400-600 max on screen at once…
Graphics settings
3840 x 2160, Exclusive Full Screen, unlimited FPS, v sync off, hardware accelerate gpu on, SAM enabled, all AMD Software: Adrenaline Edition turned off, texturestreamingenabled: false, HDR off
Testing situations and results: (CPU and GPU temps never rose beyond ~ 65 C)
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The Lowest settings (Low to off): ~ 120 FPS, 40% CPU utilization, 50-70% GPU utilization
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Medium Settings (and Low for options with only Low or High): 40-55 FPS, 27% CPU utilization, 100% GPU utilization, *extreme stutter*,* *screen tearing
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Maxed out graphics (everything on and set to highest): 44 FPS, 27% CPU utilization, 100% GPU utilization, *extreme stutter*,* *screen tearing
Alternate game settings: 1v1, tiny map, othwise identical to above
- Great game play, 50-90 fps but mostly 50, cpu 20%, gpu 99%, some screen tearing
- When I turn on Vsync I get about 44 fps and everything works and feels great - probably going to stick to this. I fiddled a lot of Vsync, AMD free sync, AMD Fluid motion frames 2.1, enhanced sync, Radeon Chill, etc. but the in game Vsync seems to work best with all the AMD Software: Adrenaline Edition turned off
Conclusion: for my set up achieving max graphics settings is best with Vsync on and all other AMD software enhancement options disabled. It still underperforms my expectations in terms of FPS and the Adrenaline software reports performance as “Marginal” which annoys me but the game play and visual quality is very strong and I think 44 FPS is plenty for me but maybe things would be better with more FPS.
Still wondering:
- Would the 9070 perform better and is it worth it?
- Is there a better GPU option for AOE IV specifically? (It’s all I use this PC for and literally built it 4 years ago just for this game)
- Is my CPU creating the bottleneck and therefore upgrading the GPU with the same CPU would run into the same problem? (I think in gigantic game with 1600 units the CPU is struggling but I never really run into that situation and havent had any performance issues or lag on ranked ladder and have played a few 4v4s with the new GPU and a lot before I got it.)
- Would it be better to upgrade to the Ryzen 7 5800 X3D or the Radeon 9070 or both? or neither? What is the bottle neck?
- Any other settings worth tweaking?
- Is high FPS really beneficial in AOE IV or overated? Things looks smooth to me.
- Have I completely lost my marbles? Deffinitely.
Post testing: turned hardware accelerate GPU off, changed CPU refresh rate from 30 Hz to 60 Hz (was capping FPS at 30 with VSync On) - probably one of the biggest fixes so far to have higher FPS with in game vsync on
Pre testing tweaks: enabled Extreme Memory Profile (XMP) in the BIOS, changed the power to balanced from High performance (Ai recommended), tried 1920 x 1080 but hated it (for some reason the game gives me a warning exclamation until I go all the way to 1920 x 1080 but my PC recognizes the TV as 3840 x 2160 and that’s how the game looks best, tried many combinations of AMD Software settings like upscaling at 1080 p, Radeon Chill, Anti Lag, the Gaming experience presets like HYPR-Rx, Default and Quality, etc., etc., etc.,
*texturestreamingenabled: false changed itself back to true somewhere along the way of me tweaking the graphics a bunch. I initially changed this to eliminate “LOD pop in” which it solved.