The only game I play is ROII, except when I want to take a relaxing walk in the woods, when I go into Lord of the Rings Online and that one runs flawless only current PC.
I was thinking of getting Win7 installed to improve my ROII performance, along with more memory and a new graphics card.
But I thought perhaps I might just invest in a new system. Mine is not that old, just over 3 years. But you get a lot more for the money now than 3 years ago.
There are tons of review sites out there, including Game sites, but I am sure some are bias toward certain brands.
I was curious which sites avid gamers trust most for such things.
What video card do you currently have? What resolution do you play at? I'm sure we can give some recommendations here.
The sad truth is that RO2 is heavily bounded by single threaded CPU performance. In my case - for instance - on my AMD Phenom II X6 @4.0Ghz and two Radeon HD6970's in crossfire, I am hopelessly CPU bound.
I can get about 60FPS (with occasionally drops to the mid to high 40's) at high settings with low post processing at 2560x1600, and the single card GPU utilization is in the upper 80, lower 90% range. If I enable both cards in crossfire (effectively doubling GPU performance, less crossfire overhead) with the same settings, I get the EXACT SAME performance, just now the GPU utilization on both cards is in the upper 40%...
So even at 4.0Ghz, my six core Phenom II is not sufficient to power through this game and get me a higher frame rate.
Some theories I have read is that since the game is DX9, it all the render calls to the GPU are done on the same CPU core (whereas in DX11, they would be spread over all cores in the system) which makes the CPU the bottleneck in a hurry (you don't see this in the task manager, as the Windows Scheduler is constantly moving threads between cores faster than it updates, so you just see an average load, rather than that once core is constantly maxed out).
The only reason I'm mentioning this is because I don't know what resolution you play at, and what video card you currently have, but in many cases, if you already have a semi-decent video card, upgrading it won't improve anything, as chances are the problem is your CPU.
My theory is that the best performance in RO2 (at least until they can get a DX11 patch out, which I hope they are working on) will be had with Intel's Sandy Bridge core CPU's (Core iX with 4 digits, like Core i3-2100, Core i5-2500k, Core i7-2600K, etc.) since even the cheapest ones have better per core performance than the top AMD models. (wow how things have changed in the last 10 years)
Also, it's probably best to couple this with an Nvidia 4xx or 5xx series card of reasonable performance (460 or better or 560 or better) because these cards have hardware PhysX compatibility which helps offload physics calculations from the CPU, allowing it to focus on the game rendering calls to the GPU where it is currently bound up.
