Low FPS in Infinity, what's the bottleneck?

[Naridar]

Hi everyone! I've been playing FTB Infinity for a while now, and recently I've upgraded my GPU (from a Geforce GT440 to a Radeon R9 380 4GB). Ever since then, my already not-so great (~20-30) framerate has declined to ~12-20 FPS, especially when looking in the direction of a large building (my main material farm, a 11x11 block 36 story cobble building with MFR planters and harvesters). Here's everything that could be relevant:

FTB Infinity 1.10.1
Additional mods: Magical crops, Rotarycraft, DragonAPI, Optifine; Fastcraft is enabled; Thaumcraft+related mods, Aroma backup, forbidden magic, MobiusCore, Mystcraft, Opis and Witchery are disabled
Default texture pack (tried Sphax PureBDCraft before, worked with minimal FPS loss on the 440 but is unbearably slow on the new card)
Graphics settings have barely any impact on FPS
3.75GB RAM allocated to Minecraft (tried with 4.5GB, was even worse, game won't start with 3.25GB or less)
Render distance Far (16), framerate drops a bit (to 10-15) when setting to Extreme (32), back with the 440, that was impossible (it literally froze in place for seconds)

System:
Core i3 2100 3.1GhZ
8 GB DDR3 RAM (686.6 MhZ according to CPU-Z)
Sapphire R9 380 4GB (non-overclocked, but still runs Metal Gear Solid 5 at near-60FPS)
1TB Western digital HDD (non-SSD)

Can anyone tell me a solution to increase framerate? I suspect the CPU is the bottleneck here, but I don't think it would result in a framerate THIS bad. Should I delete the world and restart? (I really don't want to do that...) Should I uninstall a mod? Any other trick I might have missed? Thanks in advance and sorry if it should be in technical support, from what I've seen it's for "not running" type of topics.

 

[ScottulusMaximus]

Your GFX card was a wasted purchase if you were aiming to increase framerate in MC.

Buy a new CPU, the i5-6600 probably your best bet at the moment.

And an SSD, or more RAM and run MC on a RAMDisk

 

[Naridar]

FTB was a 25th-most reason for the GPU purchase, but I didn't expect framerate to actually drop. I was planning on buying an i5-4690 for xmas but i'll have to upgrade my motherboard first (the current one only supports up to 3rd gen i3/5/7), is the 6600 that much better?. I might try ramdisk though, 2gb would be enough for MC and 6gb ram would still be enough to run it.

 

[lenscas]

FTB was a 25th-most reason for the GPU purchase, but I didn't expect framerate to actually drop. I was planning on buying an i5-4690 for xmas but i'll have to upgrade my motherboard first (the current one only supports up to 3rd gen i3/5/7), is the 6600 that much better?. I might try ramdisk though, 2gb would be enough for MC and 6gb ram would still be enough to run it.

RAMdisk won't improve fps, only loading times of chunks/other things

 

[ScottulusMaximus]

FTB was a 25th-most reason for the GPU purchase, but I didn't expect framerate to actually drop. I was planning on buying an i5-4690 for xmas but i'll have to upgrade my motherboard first (the current one only supports up to 3rd gen i3/5/7), is the 6600 that much better?. I might try ramdisk though, 2gb would be enough for MC and 6gb ram would still be enough to run it.

I honestly can't help with the difference between the 4690 and the 6600 but if you're upgrading mobo etc then unless you're getting a big discount on the older gen set I would go straight for the latest gen if you can afford it.

RAMdisk won't improve fps, only loading times of chunks/other things

It'll massively speed up write to disks(which MC does a lot of) so will remove one of the bottlenecks. Not saying it will definitely work but won't do any harm.

 

[XxX_P0zzyf4cKir69_XxX]

Hello Naridar, i think i know the problem. From my perspective its possibly 2 things. Firstly you should install the new drivers for yout grapichs card. This will increase the fps with 5-80. The reason is that it makes your pc start using smarter and more optimized performance. The second would be to upgrade your ram to 1400MHz/h. This will make it able to performe more. But a 8-16gb 1400 MHz/h would give the best value. Im taking hardware engineer studies so you trust me. If not search for linus tech tips on youtube. He is really good with IT. Gl Hf
Btw. Good choice on the gpu. With 4 gigs v-ram its good for minecraft

 

[LuisAdeur]

graphic cards won't increase FPS on minecraft , since minecraft is more of a RAM game. unless you running hd graphics aka resourcepacks.

your processor is the bottle neck you can't expect to play more than 30fps with your current setup specially for infinity when is such a high demanding modpack.

 

[Hambeau]

I honestly can't help with the difference between the 4690 and the 6600 but if you're upgrading mobo etc then unless you're getting a big discount on the older gen set I would go straight for the latest gen if you can afford it.

I'd upgrade to a Mobo that supports what you have now as well as an upgrade path to the next level, if they make such a thing for Intel chips... ASUS at least does this for AMD, particularly since the CPU now has the Ram controller built in.

I ran my current Mobo with the older dual-core chip I had before with 1666mhz DDR3 ram, then when I could swing it picked up a FX8350 4Ghz and dropped it right in using the same ram. I could overclock both the CPU and Ram but I like my systems running cool (about 118 F)

The new CPUs are faster and support faster ram (up to DDR4) but I can still drop in a new CPU now, update the ram now, or upgrade to DDR 4 afterwards without needing a mobo.

I'll probably go with a mobo first, though, to divest myself of the USB 1.0 and 2.0 ports in favor of USB 3.0... I've got more external drives than I have fast ports for

 

[JaRyCu]

your processor is the bottle neck you can't expect to play more than 30fps with your current setup specially for infinity when is such a high demanding modpack.

This I'm going to disagree with - I'm running a dual core Intel chip, 8GB RAM total, 4GB towards Minecraft, and I've managed to get 30-40FPS consistently after a few tweaks. The biggest tweak was changing the max view distance. I've mine set at 8 - no, I can't see stuff 10 miles off, but I can see far enough to play the game and accomplish every thing that I'd like to accomplish.

The second thing we changed on my server was spreading things out. Huge farms like the OP states s/he has (sorry don't know if you're male or female) were found to be the biggest cause of lag after we installed OPIS. Once we dismantled them, spread things out, put machines in buildings so they weren't all visible at once, and even put things underground to hide them completely, FPS went from 8-10 for the players with systems like mine to the 30-40 I'm getting now.

 

[GreenZombie]

What is your frame rate if you go someplace "fresh". Deleting a world to restore the FPS is only going to work until you start building again.

To that end, it helps first, if you are playing single player, to run the world using a dedicated server as that splits TPS and FPS issues into separate processes. Ideally run the dedicated server on another PC, but assuming at least a few spare cores, running the server even on the same machine will give the client process more CPU time to render frames as the server ticks and client rendering will be able to be scheduled on different cores.

Next - you need to understand that minecrafts rendering model is optimized to render plain, solid, blocks, optimally. But tile entities, and blocks that are not solid, defeat its ability to to simplify what needs to be drawn.

Cables and machines are typically not problematic as the number of entities involved grows linearly with increasing machine room complexity. However, as soon as you get involved contructing walls, or solid objects out of tile entities, the tile entity growth becomes exponential.

For example, a 12 high, 9x9 railcraft tank is a bunch of blocks, and a single tile entity to manage them. As an OpenBlocks tank however there would be 1000 tile entities to manage the same liquid volume.
Using carpenters blocks to trim walls is ok. Building entire structures almost exclusively from them will result again in many 100's to 1000's of tile entities.

So, use Opis to get an idea of how many tile entities you have in your base / areas of low FPS, and consider how you might redesign them.

 

[Fuzzlewhumper]

I have a very old machine and I was getting periodic lag spikes on my single player game (wasn't a server issue). My solution was to change Journey map for Map Writer and the spikes went away. It was a solution that worked for me, but I don't know if it would work for your issue.