Holy stuttering, Batman!

[sze5003]

These are from my VR settings thread. Try these and see how it works.

 

 

 

i7 6700K OC @4.0

 

16GB DDR4 G-SKILL RAM

 

Asus Strix OC 1080Ti

 

 

Samsung 850 250gb ssd and ocz 960gb ssd

 

Gigabyte gaming 7 z170x motherboard

 

Oculus Rift

 

 

 

Flying in the Nevada map I get a solid 90 FPS everywhere except downtown Vegas. Seems to run smoother in caucus map using dcs 1.5.

 

This is what I run the settings at:

 

Textures - High

 

Terrain Textures - High

 

Civ. Traffic - low/Off

 

Water - Low

 

Visb Range - High (a lot of people say it is a big performance hit and to turn it down, I like it higher)

 

Heat Blur - High (again I didn't notice a difference one way or an other)

 

Shadows - Off (Big FPS hit here)

 

Res. of Cockpit Displays - 512 (Depends on the aircraft, but I notice a hit in the A-10 with it higher)

 

MSAA - 2x (I use the Nvidia control panel to "enhance the application" up to 8x. I find it works great)

 

DoF - OFF ( Big FPS hit here)

 

Lens Effects - None

 

HDR - Off

 

Deferred Shading - Off

 

Clutter/Grass - All the way left (Minimums)

 

Trees - All the way left (Minimums)

 

Preload Radius - All the way right (Maximum, use all that nice VRAM)

 

Chimney Smokes Density - I leave it at the default, never noticed a difference

 

Anisotropic Filtering - Off (Nevada map I can up it to 4x)

 

Terrain Objects Shadows - Off (Big FPS hit here)

 

Cockpit Global Illumination - Off

 

I run pixel density at 1.8 or 2.0 depending on how I'm feeling. 1.6 or 1.8 will do fine to the point of 2.0 being barely noticeable.

 

 

 

Sent from my Nexus 6P using Tapatalk

[hansangb]

I'll give it a shot as well later in the week

[Fri13]

Been there, got the fix.

 

The problem was the AMD Turbo Core Control! It is the overclocking system that try to dynamically overclock the CPU cores when needed and drop down when not needed. And it was constantly in steady periods dropping voltage low because it thought it didn't need the CPU cycles. So voltage dropped across the system, meaning GPU voltage dropped to half as well.

 

So after every boot/wake I need to launch a AMD "Overdrive" software, go to the Clock/Voltage and disable the Turbo Core Control! After disabling it, the CPU doesn't try to overclock itself and then drop speed when not needed dynamically, but keeps the steady voltage and processing speed and there is no any kind stuttering in any game.

 

AFAIK there is no way to disable the Turbo Core Control from BIOS, but there might be a way to disable it with Windows power plan by changing 99% to 100% or something, but haven't tested it yet.

[33-DFTC]

Been there, got the fix.

 

The problem was the AMD Turbo Core Control! It is the overclocking system that try to dynamically overclock the CPU cores when needed and drop down when not needed. And it was constantly in steady periods dropping voltage low because it thought it didn't need the CPU cycles. So voltage dropped across the system, meaning GPU voltage dropped to half as well.

 

So after every boot/wake I need to launch a AMD "Overdrive" software, go to the Clock/Voltage and disable the Turbo Core Control! After disabling it, the CPU doesn't try to overclock itself and then drop speed when not needed dynamically, but keeps the steady voltage and processing speed and there is no any kind stuttering in any game.

 

AFAIK there is no way to disable the Turbo Core Control from BIOS, but there might be a way to disable it with Windows power plan by changing 99% to 100% or something, but haven't tested it yet.

 

Why not overclocking permanently your CPU (considering you have the right cooler to do it) ? Setting the CPU at its maximum stable capacity should fix the problem as well. Are you running a Ryzen CPU ?

[Fri13]

Why not overclocking permanently your CPU (considering you have the right cooler to do it) ? Setting the CPU at its maximum stable capacity should fix the problem as well. Are you running a Ryzen CPU ?

 

You can overclock if you want, but you don't get benefits when your CPU doesn't go past 100% in factor clocks anyways. Higher frequency doesn't mean your code is executed faster when bottleneck is waiting something to happen anyways (faster clockspeed can't predict the future).

 

The problem is with the AMD booster technology that when your CPU ain't hitting the 100% all the time, it will drop the speed so it is maximized. Now when the CPU peak after the throttling happens, it causes bottleneck to CPU and everything else, dropping data push to GPU etc and then drops everything else down, until the CPU booster kicks back in and clocks things up and all continues normally.

 

The problem is somewhere in the booster delay and timing, as it doesn't do the speed throttling constantly in instant time, as it is not worth the time and heat process to try follow the processing peaks all the time.

Instead it is like that once the processing time averages to below 50% in time of X seconds, it gets dropped for a 5-7 seconds to 50% of the processing. And when the peak happens that requires more, it causes a serious delays in the multitasking of the process where both/multiple threads are waiting to each other to complete. And when that happens, everyone is throttled down to wait that one thread/process is finished.

 

In my cases it seems that trigger was the thread that is responsible for the sound. The sound is coded to be played back in X packets (lets say 100ms long packets) and the game engineis waiting that the sound playback is completed before it continues, and then it means that 3D drawing is halted for every 100ms to wait that sound is buffered and played.

And that drops the CPU and GPU requirement, throttles the CPU down and makes it even more worse before either sound is played to end or the thread/code of the AI logic, graphics etc (that can anyways be the actual source, not the sound) is done and CPU algorithm detects the increase in CPU usage (100% drop to <50% and peaks to require a 55% and CPU jumps back to 100% with delay) and answers to increased requirement and all works perfectly for the time when the delayed timer of the peak requirement counts again that it is possible to drop CPU down.

 

When it is a game that is very CPU/GPU heavy, there doesn't come the problem as the throttling doesn't get a change to notice that processing power is possible be lowered. But DCS isn't CPU nor GPU heavy (4K everything maxed out and DCS process takes around 40%, GPU goes around 35-40%. Or Rift VR and all maxed out, only resulting now and then warping when FPS drops below 90).

 

The only syndrome I got in every time in every game that suffered from this serious stutter was that sound started to stutter same rate as the FPS did (about 10FPS) and none of other game that has sound processing synced with the rest of things (meaning the sound ain't prioritized but just dropped as sound latency is so short) it doesn't happen even at the lower or higher CPU/GPU demand) and then other games that just got low framerate didn't anymore play the sound to finish or simply cut the graphics from a audio and audio came in delay out of sync.

 

Not even a high end sound card fixed the problem as the game seems to be waiting that the sound is played back and everything else is waiting it.

 

The interesting part that I noticed too was that with ARMA 3 I got away from the stutter when I removed the sound card so the system didn't have any audio device to use, BUT.... The game stopped working as every AI operation in the missions were scripted for the audio playback! Missions didn't anymore work at all! So only a self made simple mission as shooting range worked. But every other mission that required to have a audio played back in the timing etc didn't work, so AI just got looped to 3D animation without way to get out as the audio wasn't finished.

 

The solution to problem wasn't overclocking as it didn't help the processing. It seems to be that it was the audio thread/process that causes problem to be synced with the graphics and AI and all rest in DCS World is waiting that the audio is played back.

 

This was as well with the DCS that when I did fly high like 10km, there was none of stuttering. Below 3km it started or every time when long distance audio was to be played back like vehicle explosion (you shot target smoking, exploding only a 10 seconds later) or when flying low where world sounds got filtered to cockpit. In DCS the audio didn't break down as the audio is processed in own process/thread but graphics got it. In other few games (ARMA included) the audio suffered same manner as graphics (and as graphics in DCS).

 

The booster technology just was the cause for the few game audio system code. I could even run the benchmark (Futuremark) average 5-10% higher than the similar systems with same clock speeds etc and caused confusion as it didn't reveal the CPU/GPU to have problems nor instability in the heating etc.

Same problem was with the power consumption that 98% rated power capability of the PSU didn't never even come close to maximum required power, meaning new PSU wouldn't have helped at all.

 

So the problem just was that DCS World doesn't demand enough from hardware, nor consume less to keep throttling away but jumps exactly around the level where it gets activated and disabled.

[33-DFTC]

[…]

 

Thank you for the exhaustive answer and the time you put into it.

 

I sure hope the MB manufacturers will provide some way to disable the booster mode in the BIOS down the line. The platform is being well received by the enthusiasts and more and more publishers/developpers are adopting the Ryzen technology. Fingers crossed.

[Sandman1330]

My Crosshair VI Hero does allow me to disable it - I'm on vacation right now, but will try this when I get home!!