Are occasionnal frametime spikes normal?

[DemethVLK]

Hi,

For some weeks now I've been going crazy with my games smoothness.

I experience frametime spikes in almost each one of my games.

This morning I took God of War as a sample and did several tries and monitored them with Afterburner:
Afterburner graphs

My monitor is a XB271HU, 165hz, with G-Sync on.
I've tried everything from uninstalling drivers using DDU, to reinstalling windows, tweaking the bios, heck even unplugging every peripherals and SSDs.

I downgraded my monitor to 150hz. I thought at first my issue was fixed but the sample I took was too short as other graphs show periods of stability as long, before spiking.

I don't know what to do anymore.

What's weird is that at 165hz, when launching the game I have frametime spikes every minute or so, but 30 minutes after doing several tests, in the same conditions, the game is butter smooth.


I've tried with both my recently bought RTX 4060 and my GTX 1080 with no luck.

RTX4060
I7 6700K
MB ASUS Z170-A
16GB of ram

Any ideas? I'm desperate at this point.

 

[Ferrum Master]

How about stop using Afterburner?

Try older drivers and older OS for debugging purpose. Latest WU patches and nvidia drivers ain't best.

 

[DemethVLK]

What do you recommend, 2/3 patches ago or like a year ago?

Edit: Someone mentioned 546.17 in terms of stability and performances, tried this one, same results

 

[Onasi]

Some engines will have frametime spikes regardless of your hardware and settings, yes. I have no idea if GoW is one of them, but an example of a truly heinous engine performance that I always default to is Payday 2. On certain heists, no matter what you are running, the game just completely sh*ts the bed, especially when you go loud and a ton of stuff is on the screen. And even if you run a smaller one, it never feels like 60 is 60 or 120 is 120. The frametimes are all over the place.
This isn’t to say that’s your issue, I just wanted to point out that SOMETIMES the issue isn’t on users end.

 

[Beginner Macro Device]

Did it work properly before?

 

[DemethVLK]

Some engines will have frametime spikes regardless of your hardware and settings, yes. I have no idea if GoW is one of them, but an example of a truly heinous engine performance that I always default to is Payday 2. On certain heists, no matter what you are running, the game just completely sh*ts the bed, especially when you go loud and a ton of stuff is on the screen. And even if you run a smaller one, it never feels like 60 is 60 or 120 is 120. The frametimes are all over the place.
This isn’t to say that’s your issue, I just wanted to point out that SOMETIMES the issue isn’t on users end.

That's what I ended up thinking but I feel like I didn't notice this before. It might have become an obsession and now I see it everywhere

Did it work properly before?

No, as far as I remember It didn't. In a game like Smite, when FPS are super high and your latency is really important, I would have noticed

 

[AusWolf]

The old 6700K is probably holding you back. The 4060 can provide the average FPS, but in the rare instance when the CPU fires up, it (the CPU) seems to be not enough.

I might be wrong, though.

 

[Ferrum Master]

Have you tried these tweaks?

Windows 11 Tweaks for GPU Benchmark

Updated for 22H2 - Install without Internet - When it prompts you to go online, press Shift+F10 and type "OOBE\BYPASSNRO" (that's an o not a zero at the end). After the automatic reboot you can install without network - Install on systems without TPM, UEFI or other requirements...

www.techpowerup.com

Have you disabled all windows CPU exploit mitigation crap? Core isolation, secure boot, TPM crap?

 

[Beginner Macro Device]

TPM crap?

This made two of my games be horribly lag-happy so I really recommend avoiding enabling this "feature."

 

[DemethVLK]

Tried this: https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/...etime-spikes-normal-temps.293355/post-4889702

Same results, with the oldest driver I could find using NVCleaninstall

Trying TPM right now, windows says I don't meet the requirements. Looking into it.

Thanks everyone for helping

Edit: It seems I need to boot into UEFI mode. What's that about? If my PC "doesn't meet requirements", i suppose TPM is not on anyways?

 

[Onasi]

Looked at your graphs and, TBH, I don't see anything criminal there? Occasional small spike is fairly normal, probably just asset streaming. It's not like it's all over the place, just a line with a rare spike.
Does it actually occur often enough to bother you is the qustion? Just looking at a few samples is not enough to get the whole picture.
Seeing as how the issue IS more prominent at higher FPS I would echo the idea that the CPU might just not be keeping up.

 

[DemethVLK]

Looked at your graphs and, TBH, I don't see anything criminal there? Occasional small spike is fairly normal, probably just asset streaming. It's not like it's all over the place, just a line with a rare spike.
Does it actually occur often enough to bother you is the qustion? Just looking at a few samples is not enough to get the whole picture.
Seeing as how the issue IS more prominent at higher FPS I would echo the idea that the CPU might just not be keeping up.

When the game is fluid and then suddenly stutters, yeah I notice it, sadly.

As for the CPU, on Smite where spikes are every 30 seconds, my CPU never exceeds 50%.
On God of War, a more demanding game, it never exceeds 90%.
Could it really be a bottleneck?

 

[P4-630]

The old 6700K is probably holding you back.

Yes it was even @ 4,5Ghz bottlenecking my 2070 Super @1440p....
An i7 12700K solved my CPU bottleneck and gave my 2070 Super a new boost in various games.

 

[Onasi]

It's not about usage, if you are looking at overall usage percentage. No game really will go to a 100% since that means loading all cores equally fully, which games don't do. It's about the ability of cores to feed the GPU effectively at a constant rate. That is a functuion of how fast the cores are, not in terms of frequency necessarily, but architecturally. When the cores fail to keep up with the demands of the GPU, that's when the frametime spike occurs. The GPU expects the frame to be ready for it to render every... let's go with 120 FPS capped... every 8.3 ms. If the CPU cannot do that consistently at all times you get a situation in which the GPU has to fall back on the buffered frames. If the buffer isn't enough, you get a stutter. This is not an issue when GPU bound since the CPU always has time to get a new frame ready.
The usage is irrelevant, GoW might not peg a single core to it's max (although it probably does) while SMITE might seem to be lower usage, but actually just uses a single or at max two cores and just hammers them incessantly.

 

[AusWolf]

When the game is fluid and then suddenly stutters, yeah I notice it, sadly.

As for the CPU, on Smite where spikes are every 30 seconds, my CPU never exceeds 50%.
On God of War, a more demanding game, it never exceeds 90%.
Could it really be a bottleneck?

The CPU usage you see is measured across all cores and threads. The game might not use all 8 threads available, but if it uses 2 or 3 fully, it could still run across a bottleneck if those threads are too slow.

 

[Ferrum Master]

For the lulz you can disable hyperthreading also.

 

[DemethVLK]

Baldur's Gate 3, same blueprint as God of War, main screen, with graphics behind

Not a single spike. Just one when I lost 5 fps. This has to be game-engine related right?

I thought I did share already but here is Smite:

http://imgur.com/a/5WdsTqm

This is criminal at this point. Compared to my other graphs, this must be related to its engine right? It's running on UE3 (hence the recent announcement of Smite 2)

 

[Onasi]

...main screen isn't really the best way to test frametime performance. For what it's worth, the Divinity Engine IS extremely well built and is basically wonder-tech in comparison to most of AAA garbage console ports out there. Last time we had something like that was Doom 2016 and Eternal which are both stupidly well optimized.

 

[DemethVLK]

This is Smite CPU usage, the game with the worst spikes I suffer from

The CPU usage you see is measured across all cores and threads. The game might not use all 8 threads available, but if it uses 2 or 3 fully, it could still run across a bottleneck if those threads are too slow.

http://imgur.com/a/VBpwQlZ

 

[Onasi]

Is this uncapped or...? Because if it is, then it's fairly representative of an ancient basically single-threaded game trying to run as fast as it can and running out of CPU juice.

 

[DemethVLK]

...main screen isn't really the best way to test frametime performance. For what it's worth, the Divinity Engine IS extremely well built and is basically wonder-tech in comparison to most of AAA garbage console ports out there. Last time we had something like that was Doom 2016 and Eternal which are both stupidly well optimized.

I chose main screen to make sure the image was still and the spikes weren't because of an explosion in the distance or something
Both games use in game graphics as their main screen background. For instance graphical settings change its appearance and performance

Is this uncapped or...? Because if it is, then it's fairly representative of an ancient basically single-threaded game trying to run as fast as it can and running out of CPU juice.

If you're talking about smite, it's uncapped since the game is capped at 150fps and can't go higher.

I've tried several fps caps as well, all with spikes

 

[Onasi]

Baldur's Gate 3, same blueprint as God of War, main screen, with graphics behind

What you posted yourself? I assume that you meant main menu by that?

If you're talking about smite, it's uncapped since the game is capped at 150fps and can't go higher.

I've tried several fps caps as well, all with spikes

Seems like an engine then. From memory, the game has both an old DX9 and a newer DX11 renderer. Any differences there? Also I think the game is 32-bit by default with 64 being an option?

 

[DemethVLK]

What you posted yourself? I assume that you meant main menu by that?


Seems like an engine then. From memory, the game has both an old DX9 and a newer DX11 renderer. Any differences there? Also I think the game is 32-bit by default with 64 being an option?

Both dx9 and dx11 gave the same results. Turning down all graphical options as well.

I still need to check if I'm correctly running the 64bits version

 

[KedsDead]

Have you tried changing up the graph? So it only shows CPU Utilization, GPU Utilization and Frame Times. That will help isolate if its the CPU holding the card back. If the spikes align you have your culprit.

 

[DemethVLK]

For the lulz you can disable hyperthreading also.

No changes in the frametime spikes

However, SMITE takes from 35s to 6s to load. THANK YOU!

Also, I have absolutely zero frametime spikes in Red Dead Redemption 2.
I've concluded that nothing is wrong with my computer, I will move on. Thanks everyone for your help!