intel i3 or i5?

[Berwulf]

D3 absolutely uses 4 cores (or more).

Are you sure? Beta ran flawlessly on my Core 2 Duo P8600, which is a 4years old laptop processor.

[Tilitoon]

Isn't the Q9450 on socket 775 ? If so, you will also change the motherboard ?
In any case, even if your CPU is slightly bottle necking, it can't be as bad as making the frame-rate drops below 15fps with a GTX 560, you certainly have another issue.

[aerial]

It doesn't use 4 cores, there is always some activity, but you can disable 2 cores in service manager, works just as well as with 4 enabled.

[Namik]

On one of polish IT websites tested beta (patch 14 or 15). They compered same processor (i5 750) using 4, 3, 2 or 1 core. With 1 core game was barely playable, while 2 or 4 cores had basicly same FPS. The funny thing is that game had more FPS with 3 cores.
You can check it here:
http://www.benchmark.pl/testy_i_rece...ona/16942.html

[Artemis]

Isn't the Q9450 on socket 775 ? If so, you will also change the motherboard ?
In any case, even if your CPU is slightly bottle necking, it can't be as bad as making the frame-rate drops below 15fps with a GTX 560, you certainly have another issue.

I would be changing the motherboard. The heavy fps drop is based on worst case scenario. Using the wizard, I wait until I'm surrounded by skeletons and blast them all at once. The fps drops to about 10, even if it's only for one second. That's a lot of physics and math going on at once. When I do that, two cores spike right up. I also have physics set to high which is higher precision calculations.

If disabling two cores offers the same performance as four cores then I don't know how to explain that. I've just done a test on a six core i7 990 and it used all six cores but not the hyperthread 'cores'. Perhaps the sound is using a dedicated core? I don't know, I guess only Blizzard can provide the true answer. As it is now, it seems that using more cores offers smoother play and that's enough for me.

[Tilitoon]

Well, going from your Q9450 on 775 to a Sandy Bridge with an i7, I can't say it won't be a good upgrade. Your explanation of the worst case scenario makes a lot more sense too. Also don't forget that the game is still in Beta so there are a few optimizations to be made until the release.

[aerial]

That test with 3 cores giving best performance is intriguing, some could say it is because d3 was first optimized for 3 core processors from consoles

[Tilitoon]

I'd consider it more an oddity / error in their bench process. I don't see how you can optimize it more for 3 cores than 4.

[SMK]

Hi all,

I'm looking at any easy upgrades I can do to my laptop to improve performance on D3. Current specs are:

I3 - 370m (2.4ghz)
ATI Radeon 5470
4 Gig DDR3 RAM

I have been playing the open beta lately and have noticed that the game can become unplayable at times. I have been thinking of upgrading my graphics card and possibly increasing RAM but not too sure how much of an improvement it will provide given the processor.

[gruenel]

Are you sure you can upgrade your laptop's graphics card? On most laptops this isn't possible.