A bit of a strange oddity with RTSS and frame capping. Unsure the root cause for the behavior

Everything about displays and monitors. 120Hz, 144Hz, 240Hz, 4K, 1440p, input lag, display shopping, monitor purchase decisions, compare, versus, debate, and more. Questions? Just ask!
Post Reply
User avatar
witega
Posts: 49
Joined: 08 Jun 2019, 11:40

A bit of a strange oddity with RTSS and frame capping. Unsure the root cause for the behavior

Post by witega » 24 May 2022, 17:23

Greetings everyone, hope yall are doing awesome, long time no chat.

I have a strange phenomenon happening in games that I am not sure if the issue is driver, software or hardware related.

Whenever I play games that run at 60FPS but have no in game frame limiter I use RTSS to give me a flat consistent frametime. For example as below in Dead or Alive 6, this is OFFLINE play:

Image

It stays rock solid at 16.6ms, never any variation. However when I go and play the game ONLINE I get this behavior:

Image

It fluctuates between 16.6, 16.7 and 16.8ms in frametime (but the framerate stays 60FPS with a rare occasion of a stutter spike).

What gives here? This was never a problem when I first got this machine, but it seems something between now and a year ago I've been noticing this oddity. Not sure if its related to a new Nvidia driver or a new hardware problem.

I'll list my PC specs below. Note while the game was playing, I did have HWINFO64 on to see if there were any performance limitation reasons. Usually that can cause a spike if the CPU needs to downclock due to thermal reasons or power limits, etc. None for the CPU or GPU. Temps are fine and there is no throttling that I can see.

My CPU is actually not overclocked manually. I have all the overclock settings turned off in the BIOS and the only thing that is on is Intel's SpeedShift technology which will automatically boost clocks. I have hyperthreading turned off so all 10 cores are running, and my CPU clock is locked at 4.9GHz.

What's also interesting is having hyperthreading ON actually alleviates this problem entirely. In fact, it also eliminates any instance of stutter that might arise. I don't understand since I thought having more physical cores available would be more of a benefit and reduce latency, as well as helping boost performance in unoptimized games.

So is my motherboard/CPU just not capable of being stable having hyperthreading turned off? Should I keep hyperthreading ON? I'm really baffled as to what could be causing this.

In my NVCP I do have "Ultra" selected for Low Latency Mode. I know that can be a cause of stutter sometimes, but I've always had it enabled ever since I got the machine, can't see how that could be causing a problem. Power management is "Maximum Performance", everything else is on auto, Vsync OFF, etc.

Oh and changing my Power Plan in Windows from "Balanced" to "Ultimate Performance" doesn't do anything to change the behavior.

PC Specs:
RTX 3090
i9-10900KF
BenQ XL2546K (DisplayPort connection)

Not sure if my other specs matter. I am using a wired Ethernet connection 1GB fiber optic. I've tweaked the Ethernet driver to disable any power saving/energy efficient settings and maximizing where I can or disabling unnecessary features that might hinder performance.

Any ideas on how I can troubleshoot this further?

Appreciate the help.

Thanks!

xPrzybyLx
Posts: 13
Joined: 03 Dec 2021, 12:53

Re: A bit of a strange oddity with RTSS and frame capping. Unsure the root cause for the behavior

Post by xPrzybyLx » 25 May 2022, 20:34

What if You disable Nvidia Reflex, I don't think You actually need it enabled for running a game in 60fps...

User avatar
witega
Posts: 49
Joined: 08 Jun 2019, 11:40

Re: A bit of a strange oddity with RTSS and frame capping. Unsure the root cause for the behavior

Post by witega » 19 Jul 2022, 13:14

I don't have Nvida Reflex. The goal here is to get a flat frametime, without RTSS I don't get that.

This issue is still occuring, here's an example just in the menu screen of Retroarch:

Image

What is causing these tiny blips?

Before it would be two completely flat lines

Post Reply