2023 Esports Optimization Guide

Everything about latency. Tips, testing methods, mouse lag, display lag, game engine lag, network lag, whole input lag chain, VSYNC OFF vs VSYNC ON, and more! Input Lag Articles on Blur Busters.
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Re: 2023 Esports Optimization Guide

Post by Chief Blur Buster » 16 Mar 2023, 19:58

Niko wrote:
16 Mar 2023, 11:27
Although nothing new there are good suggestions in the thread but that part kinda confused me. These power-saving options in Device Manager just disable the device (NIC, USB/mouse or keyboard for ex.) only after you left the computer untouched for a certain amount of time. "Allow this Device to Wake the Computer" & "Allow the Computer to turn off this device to save power" just awake the PC if you receive a message in sleep mode or to activate it when moving the mouse or pressing a button. When playing game with 250-500fps these dont do anything. There are other power-saving features that save power while working but specifically these are wasting of time.
I'm not talking about graphics.

I'm talking about mudane things such as mouse P-states and keyboard P-states, to things like CPU thread affinity and core parking, and the other things that this guide attempts to (only partially) address. Even this guide does not fully disable your GPU power management (horrendously difficult to disable!).

You have random things like (stationary/unused keyboard/mice to suddenly active) (network idling to sudden activity) (idle cores suddenly being unparked) etc.

Nowadays, there seems to be over one hundred things that sleeps/unsleeps, and sometimes Microsoft overdoes it on our esports systems.

It's horrendously more complex now than 20 years ago, with gigantic number of power states in hundreds of chips, that sometimes have driver bugs or over-conservativeness (millisecond assumptions by non-esports developers).

Now, it's also a kinda a lag problem at low frame rates too. Even the GPU goes into a sleep mode between frames when frame rates start idling (e.g. rendertimes of 40% GPU time when your frame rate is capped). Whether it's a 60fps cap in a fighting game or emulator, forcing GPU load down to 10-20%, your GPU sleeps between frames, which can delay rendertimes to spread inputtime:photontime (aka extra lag from power management between frames). So maybe your 20ms 60Hz lag becomes 21-22ms because of those power management behaviors occuring between frames and taking time for GPU to "wake up"... I've seen weird GPU power management occasionally occur at triple digits (capped 200fps+) especially with simpler things like looking at the floor, where 200fps suddenly drops to less than 50% GPU utilization and then the GPU kind of decides to power-manage between frames, creating some minor power management effects.

<Advanced Programmer-Tech Speak>

Skip this if you're not technically literate; but it's part of the Milliseconds Matters series.

Even in my Tearline Jedi beam racing experiments, even at triple-digit frame rates, there were sometimes power management issues creating tearline jitter (wide enough amplitude to be roughly ~0.5ms worth, going by horizontal scanrate amplitude, and the number of scanlines that the tearline jittered). As not all pixels on a display refresh at the same time (high speed videos www.blurbusters.com/scanout ...) as the video output is a serialization of 2D data through a 1D medium (broadcast, wire) as we've been doing for the better part of a century displaying on a 1920s TV or a 2020s DisplayPort monitor. So tearlines are raster splices to that, and anytime tearing is delayed (moved downwards) is a latency, even if tiny. It was fun to watch raster jitter become 10x or 100x worse, depending on power management settings, and the way you could visually see sub-1/100,000sec timing errors, was quite fun to watch. If a display signal was 100 KHz scan rate (number of pixels row per second spewed out of the GPU output), a tearline moved down by 1 pixel was a 1/100,000sec lag, and a tearline moved down by 100 pixels was a 1ms lag. Power management was really wreaking havoc to raster-interrupt-style beam racing feats. Even different APIs used to measure time, timer events, QueryPerformanceCounter, RTDSC, other high precision events vs busylooping, etc, had a major impact on calming down the tearlines.

Here's me controlling VSYNC OFF tearing with a computer mouse:

phpBB [video]


At 1080p/60Hz, this requires a precision of 1/67000sec (67KHz horizontal scanrate), and even a 2-pixel raster jitter is a 2/67000sec error margin.

Now if I turned on power management, this jittered like crazy, often by a 100 pixel amplitude (100/67000sec latency jitter).

Nontheless, precision beam raced tearline-positioning engineering it opened my eyes to how 0.5ms-to-2ms league power management interferences were all over the system, even affecting mudane games.

Once people realized "VSYNC OFF tearlines are just rasters" -- some programmers took notice. An emulator, WinUAE added lagless VSYNC (sync of emuraster to real raster). And a technology, called RTSS Scanline Sync (and Special K Latent Sync) was created because they were impressed by Tearline Jedi, and is now in use by tweakers who love glassfloor frametimes being perfectly delivered to refresh cycles without the need for VRR or laggy VSYNC ON sync technologies. Though, there are compromises to using an external frame rate capper (instead of an internal one that could be less laggy) it is one of the lower-lag external custom third party sync technologies available that doesn't require game awareness to utilize (e.g. NVIDIA Reflex, custom in-game cap, etc)

This type of precision is ignored by game programmers at this time; though we may need to revisit this when we're doing the 4K 1000fps 1000Hz reprojected-UE5-raytraced future (via reprojection technology -- a frame generation technology that can reduce latency), which is now feasible on 4090-class GPUs. (LinusTechTips has a great video of VR reprojection being brought to PC)

phpBB [video]


Technologies like these will portend esports of the 2030s when we need UE5-quality at 1000fps esports-class latencies). It can even rewind frametime latencies (10ms 100fps) because the Frame Generation using reprojection instead of interpolation, reduces latency by knowing input reads (6dof translation coordinates) to modify the last UE5-raytraced-rendered frame instantly (within 1ms) to create a reprojected frame; and you can do that at 10:1 ratios. Obviously reprojection artifacts, but they mostly disappear if you reproject from a base framerate of 100fps to a higher frame rate (e.g. 360fps or 1000fps).

Some of these precisions are not yet critical today, but... there are imprecisions from power management that are going to kind of semi-bottleneck 1000fps 1000Hz raytraced UE5 future, unless they are temporarily turned off in a kind of Ultra Performance Mode.

Now that being said, not all systems create major problem from power management. I've seen many systems perform glass floor even during Balanced Power Management, and other systems just go.... fritzy. Attempting to run Tearline Jedi, my RTX3080 system has more power management latency than my old GTX 1080 Ti system, which is really a ****. Sigh.

</Advanced Programmer-Tech Speak>
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Niko
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Re: 2023 Esports Optimization Guide

Post by Niko » 17 Mar 2023, 13:50

Yeah, I can say Im technically literate. My 1st computer didnt have a hard disk or GPU :D Also ive read your articles. One of the best sites btw. People start talking about Latency the last 2-3 years. Im emphasizing its importance for 10 years now. The mainstream youtubers only recently start explaining whats 1% loads LMAO. Now every noob has its own guide & its rare to see someone explain everything correctly because they dont talk from experience but from something they read in Google (not talking about this guide).

Most the things you speak of are for stock system on untouched Windows. Since Im overclocking & tweaking my system I dont have these problems. Also all C-states, SpeedShif & other power saving features are all disabled. in addition to C-& P-states there are also System power states, Device power states ect. Most of the previously mentioned options concern D3-in & out of sleep after a period of unuse (D3 & D0 are the main, others are optional. D0 is active).
Ofc. there is "shadow" throttling & other powersaving features (mostly hardware) that you cant disable. Windows is easier but not always have to disable a feature just because you can. Also many times ppl disable something thats disabled from BIOS anyway. Manufacturer drivers are usually much better than Windows generic ones btw so its good practice to update them. PowerPlan options also can adjust USB but they don't apply when fully operational. Also I dont see how Selective Suspend can improve your mouse responsiveness unless you want to wake from sleep faster (from non-active period) unless there is a bug. Like my Razer 8k for ex. It didnt power On when start PC. Disabling D5 in BIOS fixed that. Im talking about that because i see so many useless tweaks. People often cant make a difference b/w Desktop use & Gaming. The Async reprojection is promising. Also we are finally close to old CRT monitor speeds. Took us only 20 years :D

Niko
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Re: 2023 Esports Optimization Guide

Post by Niko » 17 Mar 2023, 14:06

imprecise wrote:
16 Mar 2023, 18:47
Niko wrote:
16 Mar 2023, 11:27
Although nothing new there are good suggestions in the thread but that part kinda confused me. These power-saving options in Device Manager just disable the device (NIC, USB/mouse or keyboard for ex.) only after you left the computer untouched for a certain amount of time. "Allow this Device to Wake the Computer" & "Allow the Computer to turn off this device to save power" just awake the PC if you receive a message in sleep mode or to activate it when moving the mouse or pressing a button. When playing game with 250-500fps these dont do anything. There are other power-saving features that save power while working but specifically these are wasting of time.
I have found these settings being on cause heavy movement feeling on both m+kb and controller. I often double-check these specific settings after plugging in a controller or moving USB devices, because the setting turns back on and the heavy movement feeling returns.
People say the same thing about unplugging & plug back the mouse without touching these power saving options.

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imprecise
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Re: 2023 Esports Optimization Guide

Post by imprecise » 21 Mar 2023, 15:54

Guide updated to include MSI modes configuration. It looks like Windows prioritizes hard drives over all other devices by default, which isn't ideal when USB, GPU, RAM, audio, and network are needed in real-time for accurate responsiveness.

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witega
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Re: 2023 Esports Optimization Guide

Post by witega » 21 Mar 2023, 19:46

@imprecise, I'm curious...why did you edit Low Latency Mode in NVCP to "Off"? Why is "Off" better than Ultra?

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Re: 2023 Esports Optimization Guide

Post by imprecise » 21 Mar 2023, 22:11

witega wrote:
21 Mar 2023, 19:46
@imprecise, I'm curious...why did you edit Low Latency Mode in NVCP to "Off"? Why is "Off" better than Ultra?
I found when having a second screen connected and Low Latency Mode enabled, 2D performance could drop by 40% and sometimes even 80% or more. 2D performance is still needed in 3D games, as 2D sprites are often used for in-game effects. Most games weren't designed for LLM and I think nvidia has moved on to Reflex after finding a better method to decrease latency. If LLM works for you by all means go ahead and use it, but the advertised benefits of LLM aren't worth the 40-80% decrease in performance I have experienced.

viewtopic.php?f=10&t=11711

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witega
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Re: 2023 Esports Optimization Guide

Post by witega » 21 Mar 2023, 22:51

Thank you for your reply.

I am only on a single screen, so I theory I shouldn't be impacted? I'm running the Passmark test right now. Maybe I should try running two tests with LLM on Ultra and Off.

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imprecise
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Re: 2023 Esports Optimization Guide

Post by imprecise » 21 Mar 2023, 23:46

witega wrote:
21 Mar 2023, 22:51
Thank you for your reply.

I am only on a single screen, so I theory I shouldn't be impacted? I'm running the Passmark test right now. Maybe I should try running two tests with LLM on Ultra and Off.
In theory, LLM is meant to continue accepting and processing inputs when the GPU is under 100% load and can't keep up with any new processing. Nvidia claimed 23% latency improvement in 2019 when they introduced it and ran a 2060 at 4K in order to 100% load the GPU.

https://blurbusters.com/new-nvidia-grap ... s-latency/

60 fps = 16.67ms
120 fps = 8.33ms
240 fps = 4.17ms
480 fps = 2.08ms

At 120fps, even with LLM helping, 23% improvement is only going to be 1.92 ms. At 240fps, 0.96ms. Games running at over 120fps generally don't need a low latency mode intended for 100% GPU load scenarios, this technology is best when the GPU is running a low framerate high resolution single player game. Even then, it's better to cap at a more stable framerate than use the GPU at 100%.

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/fo ... when-gpu-/

To answer your question... you might see a slight improvement in responsiveness if it works correctly on your system.

Sebichek45
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Re: 2023 Esports Optimization Guide

Post by Sebichek45 » 22 Mar 2023, 22:21

How were you able to set the wininit to real-time? using process lasso didnt change anything. Also have you tried other default “high” services too?

Niko
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Re: 2023 Esports Optimization Guide

Post by Niko » 23 Mar 2023, 05:42

imprecise wrote:
21 Mar 2023, 15:54
Guide updated to include MSI modes configuration. It looks like Windows prioritizes hard drives over all other devices by default, which isn't ideal when USB, GPU, RAM, audio, and network are needed in real-time for accurate responsiveness.
Thats normal. Hard drives are the slowest link in the chain.

PS: BTW I accidentally pressed the report button instead Quote. Im sry for that. Is there a way to revert that?
Just waking up :D

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