Some mysterious effects on gameplay
Posted: 29 Jan 2021, 20:16
I've learnt a lot in this forum and improved my gameplay by magnitudes. However there are things that I didn't see discussions about and hard to explain. They also improve gameplays by a lot - I wouldn't say input lag here because I don't have measurements, but it should be a mix of things including input lag.
Single channel memory: back in 2010 in the z67/z77 times with ddr3, once a good player told me that he improved gameplay a lot by pulling off one memory stick. I thought - how could that be - and ignored. Later I tried and it was real. At the moment I believe more in science and didn't continue to play with that configuration which I regret now. Now with z170 with ddr4, the same thing happened, with both default timings and extreme timings. For single and dual channels, AIDA64 and MLC shows same latency, dual channels doubles the bandwidth, but result in much worse gameplay. I also found the sweet spot for memory frequency on 6700K is ddr4-2400. Even if ddr4-3200 has lower latency, the gameplay is worse, things feel heavy; while ddr4-2133 will make things dull.
Speedstep: while it's common to think it's best to turn off every CPU power feature, I found it's actually better to turn on speedstep. Is this due to some TDP limit?
Prefetch: turning off hardware prefetcher and adjacent line prefetch will make gameplay better. Maybe it's due to more efficient usage of the little 8MB L3 cache.
FCLK: the default 800MHz is the best. 400MHz is slow and 1GHz will make gameplay unstable. Maybe Z170 is too old here.
NVidia Powermizer: turning off is better, to make GPU run at fixed clock, although in my game the GPU usage is 0%. The graphics memory frequency has a similar sweet spot as the main memory, higher is not always better.
NVidia Power Options (in the control panel and NVInspector): Adaptive is slow, Maximum performance is dull - the hidden value "prefer consistent performance" is the best.
I'm also waiting for the 11th gen to hope to get more clues.
Single channel memory: back in 2010 in the z67/z77 times with ddr3, once a good player told me that he improved gameplay a lot by pulling off one memory stick. I thought - how could that be - and ignored. Later I tried and it was real. At the moment I believe more in science and didn't continue to play with that configuration which I regret now. Now with z170 with ddr4, the same thing happened, with both default timings and extreme timings. For single and dual channels, AIDA64 and MLC shows same latency, dual channels doubles the bandwidth, but result in much worse gameplay. I also found the sweet spot for memory frequency on 6700K is ddr4-2400. Even if ddr4-3200 has lower latency, the gameplay is worse, things feel heavy; while ddr4-2133 will make things dull.
Speedstep: while it's common to think it's best to turn off every CPU power feature, I found it's actually better to turn on speedstep. Is this due to some TDP limit?
Prefetch: turning off hardware prefetcher and adjacent line prefetch will make gameplay better. Maybe it's due to more efficient usage of the little 8MB L3 cache.
FCLK: the default 800MHz is the best. 400MHz is slow and 1GHz will make gameplay unstable. Maybe Z170 is too old here.
NVidia Powermizer: turning off is better, to make GPU run at fixed clock, although in my game the GPU usage is 0%. The graphics memory frequency has a similar sweet spot as the main memory, higher is not always better.
NVidia Power Options (in the control panel and NVInspector): Adaptive is slow, Maximum performance is dull - the hidden value "prefer consistent performance" is the best.
I'm also waiting for the 11th gen to hope to get more clues.