Gadgetory

we recently had an issue in gta5 testing as we posted in the 2500 carry visit that higher frequency CPUs were performing worse and that was a really strange curiosity that we investigated more heavily Patrick Layton is joining me to talk about it he did most of testing and at some times of writing for things lately before getting to that this coverage is brought to you by a thermaltake and their core p3 enclosure which is wall mountable and acts as an ad hoc test bench you can learn more at the link in the description below so the issue we were talking about was with AI v cpus i7 is no problem with i-5 the 6600 K at 7600 K the 0.1% low values or the frame x we're really getting hammered with GTA v it doesn't make a whole lot of sense because those are high-performing parts and in the other games that we tested they really didn't have issues so Patrick helped out a lot with that and I we kind of I think have an idea of where it's pinpointed at this point yeah so the issues are appearing generally when we get above 160 fps appearing in the games it seems like the i5 specifically on our standard benchmark course when the frame rates are going up to 170 180 range we get really hard stuttering and GTA itself doesn't recognize that stuttering but perhaps or logging software does record some very low 0.1% whoo yeah so the GTA FPS monitor on the screen never dips when there is actually a stutter but with our looking through the frame times measured in testing what we're seeing with the i5 CPUs is occasional frame times that jump up to something like 180 milliseconds so now you're waiting one tenth of a second to get that next frame that's really noticeable so we end up with an average that's kind of okay if it's in a vacuum but when we compare the average to even lower end I threes and by fives that don't stutter the i5 6600 Kane 7600 K look like they perform worse on paper than CPUs with a lower frequency and that's because they're lower than 160 FPS or whatever the number is so the next step that we took was to try and crank some of those other eye size that we have up to above 170 FPS in that range and we did that with the i5 2500 K at 35 70 K yeah and we noticed the same stuttering issues once we were able to achieve the higher framerate yeah yeah so the 35 70 K specifically basically that here's the weird the the part where I got really curious let me over talked with 35 70 K the performance got worse and so obviously that shouldn't happen unless you're really unstable but the overclock was fine for everything else and so I played around with XMP we well the very first thing that was done was new GTA 5 install that didn't help then a new Windows install which absolutely should blow away any problems in the software didn't help then we lower the XMP stuff so disabled XMP down clocked memory and my thinking here was that with the lower memory frequency maybe it was an issue where the memory controller on the CPU wasn't able to keep up with the frequency in this particular title and that was really promising at first but did not turn out to be the case yeah so we also we try to keep a standard benchmark rig together for these tests for the i-5 2500 K revisit we have been using a gtx 1089 govt of FTW for all the tests and just for a sanity check we did change that out for an RX 480 and we were noticing exactly the same as three issues yeah and that was done because of the thinking there well one obviously changes change it goes easy to change but it's possible or at least originally I thought it was possible that there could be some kind of Nvidia memory residency or something like that some kind of memory contingency going on that was causing the fish but swapping the video cards didn't improve anything so clearly wasn't an issue with NVIDIA or Andy specifically and and we even found out through testing that as we're learning this one 60 FPS limit found out the easiest way to replicate it is with the i5 CPU to drop all the settings down to nothing hello that's at 1080p and so you expect your performance be great but it actually worsens and if we ran the way we validated it was run everything at 4k which is now all the loads on the GPU have 4k resolution as two times the pixels or something like that and and performance was perfectly fine the average was half what it was but there were there was no stuttering oh yeah we tried a few other things too yeah a full list of hardware that we tried out we tried the msi n7z 170 and the slide tomahawk v2 70 and if I gaming Pro carbons be 270 and the AC 68 deluxe board and we also just now have been running tests with an O an AMD FX a injury's MA and we weren't able to quite achieve the frame rates that would be causing this issue typically but we did notice some slight stuttering it seemed like when we disabled four of the cores so we were working with 4 cores overclocked and then lowered the settings as far as possible including resolution we were only getting around 160 FPS at that point but we think we noticed an issue at one point so can't really confirm that yeah I can't confirm it I would have to spend more time trying to overclock it and get the frequency I put it under liquid tune the voltage may be get the frequency to 5 gigahertz maybe an issue would pop out for now we only hit 160 a few times so it wasn't quite in the threshold to trigger but with i7c Jesus hasn't been an issue at all and those easily achieve over 160 so we're basically looking at a matter of hyper threading or even just having extra threads in general eight threads this doesn't pop up but with four threads with a higher frequency and therefore a higher performance is an issue I don't know why the performance is perfectly fine and every other game we passed and so at this point looked into things like DPC testing so could it be deferred procedure calls where the OS is down prioritizing things that need that are critical for game performance and that wasn't the problem I ran a latency mom to validate that no problem at all that was inspired by tech reports recent findings where they had to redo some tests for the same reason memory residency was tested that wasn't a problem you did some Nvidia settings tweaking I think yeah so online if you just do a quick Google search for GTA 5 stuttering GTX 10 ATM it seems like some other people are having similar issues but the fix that normally comes up is turning on vsync which isn't acceptable for us so obviously because we're benchmarking so some settings that we did alter are the maximum pre-rendered frames we said that's one mess with the shader cache and threading optimization settings didn't didn't help didn't have any effects on the stuttering that we were seeing right yeah the only reason any of that would impact it anyway would be if it's so far if it drags your performance below the number that's triggering the stutter so if you increase the pre-rendered frames to two or three or something then you're doing a lot more processing per frame so your frame rate will be lower that would fix the issue fix to get a cut it would work around the issue or prevent we'd never hit the the point where it becomes a problem so at this point to recap we've done a new GTA install a new Windows install we've tested basically every i7 back to Sandy Bridge every i-5 back to Sandy Bridge the FX 83-70 that couldn't do anything with that different video cards four or five now six different motherboards now and a couple of other things DPC late and see all that stuff can't figure it out so we're kind of I think I'm at a point where for the i-5 for gta5 when doing the benchmarks I'll probably still include them in the results but just keep doing that disclaimer we did in the 2500 K refresh which is basically like something's really weird here we don't think it's us we've done due diligence it still could be some kind of hardware level thing but I don't know what it is so I'd be really curious if anyone out there has an i5 CPU that's probably Ivy Bridge or later and even if you have to overclock it but the easiest thing you could do is go into GTA drop your settings to normal maybe you can do 1080p a much your GP bottleneck and drop that to and see what happens if you are going over 160 fps you don't even need grabs it helps but you don't need it if you just look at the screen and see if it's not or I'd always have and then into scenes it happens in the pier yeah specifically on the pier in the trailer park at the beginning is that benchmark screen and the benchmark that we personally use to publish is the jet flying around when the jet turns for the first time I think it is yeah the framerate spikes and then we get sputtering right so I'd be curious penny one else has this problem we I sent out a tweet Jay from jst science replied and said he's seen some of these issues of the 76 under K a couple of you have replied and said you've seen issues so I I don't know I'm inclined to say that it's not windows and it's not the test image there's a brand-new I'm also inclined to say that it's not a motherboard problem because we've tried enough of them so I'm leaning towards Rockstar GTA issue but I can't really confirm that very confidently but we've tested it every we've tested in a an absurd amount of hardware yes I think about the only hardware that's remained constant is the cooler right went on for the whole series of toasts yeah everything else has been changed out and reconfigured yeah and even the cooler with the MD one was changed but yeah other than that yeah so I think that's really all there is to say I don't know anything also interesting Lee ran into with this um I don't think so but yeah again if anybody else has run into this issue we'd love to hear about it because we couldn't really find a lot of user complaints about this we don't know whether that's because we're the only people really hitting a serious CPU bottleneck here right or what but if anybody has this issue photos allowed in our tweet at gamers Nexus thank you for watching as always patreon link in the post roll video if you want to help us perform dozens of hours of tests that have zero return subscribe for more I'll see you all next time you