Debunking Gaming Latency Myths on Ryzen 7800X3D/9800X3D, Windows 11,RTX4090/5090

[Maelstrom]

The fact remains that the absolute lowest level life form, the professional gamer, is able to perform without any secret tweaks, and they do not notice such issues.

*** Forum Rule Reminder PSA ***

It's fine to knock and criticize...

But unlike esports voice chat in a game, there's a red line involved especially since voice tones are not visible in text in the same way as audio (voice tone that sounds "derogatory war-league hate" vs voice tone that sounds "funny sarcastic humor singsongy" like harmless esports banter)...

Therefore, I need to remind forum members about the Blur Busters Forums rule of "no name calling" and "respect newbies" forum rules. Err on the side of caution since we have tons of countries reading these forums, and not everyone interprets words the same way.

Specifically these two listed rules:

- No fighting, no flaming, no name calling, no hate speech.

I apologise, that was intended to be self deprecating, I didn't think about it much past that

[Maelstrom]

You are conflating two things - the level of expertise of an average user, versus how perceptive they are around these issues. It is completely reasonable to me that people who aren't knowledgeable about computers are able to determine when there is an issue with their latency.

The fact remains that the absolute lowest level life form, the professional gamer, is able to perform without any secret tweaks, and they do not notice such issues.
That alone is enough to suggest that there is no widespread/universal problem at a software/hardware level. I caveat this to also say that that doesn't mean I think the people on this forum are making up their issues, just that it can't be the case that the out of the box experience with the OS is that games are unplayable.

Your post just seemed exactly the kind of folklore this thread is trying to dispel - where is the data for those tweaks? Have there been actual experiments using those tweaks on modern hardware? Or is it being carried over from testing done years and years ago with a completely different OS and harware landscape? Probably.

It's plausable to me that users will set up a modern ryzen based system, encounter network issues or issues with a single bad component, and then go down the rabbit hole of tweaks that make things worse based on the kind of trust me bro advice that is often parroted here.

Honestly, 90 percent of the time any two people are talking about 'input lag' on this forum, you can be certain that they are talking about emtirely different phenemona, e.g. network lag, microstutter, poor performance, etc, and that neither have done the required basic diagnosing of the issue.

Personally I test on the most controlled environments I can, kovaaks and dedicated quake servers where my ping is constant and I'm playing against the same individuals, with visibility on my ping and jitter, so I'm able to tell if something is affecting real change.

You still assume people even care to notice. Try to have some perspective and context. You keep thinking everyone is "you", like everything you do is what everyone else does. I think you fall into the category of people who are not capable of noticing that difference. If you don't notice it of course you're not going to believe it and think everyone else is crazy.

This is very vague and is also making assumptions about me that make zero sense. In what way do I keep thinking everyone is 'me'? I fall into the category of people who is not capable of noticing the difference - which difference is that? Latency? The difference in latency achieved through performing tweaks?

What exactly are you even arguing about at the moment?

[Maelstrom]

The scope of this thread specifically is around tweaks for the Ryzen x3D systems. Nowhere have I concluded that tweaks as a whole do not matter. My stance is more that such tweaks have small effects, or as the OP suggests are detrimental as they are not applicable to modern systems - but remain being passed around as folklore without providing any proof, or even a concrete understanding of what the tweak aims to achieve. Despite this, it is recommended without caveat, to be applied universally.

There is also a wider context for my outlook - which is where people have "the issue" and go down a rabbit hole of trying software tweaks (and beyond) to try to fix that. I'm not convinced you can tweak yourself out of 'the issue' which makes online play (imo) almost impossible.

I don't think you have much knowledge on competitive scenes if you're saying things like this and trying to degrade people. Lots of the pros have to submit their configs and autoexecs for things like CSGO tournaments. The tournament organizers have special people to setup every machine up to players preferred settings and review submitted settings to make sure they follow tournament guidelines. Every tournament is different and I've even seen custom tools used in some tournaments. One app creator has this in their FAQ:

Is there a silent CLI mode for tournament setups?
Absolutely. Use TimerResolution.exe -max -hide to force the minimum tick without showing a window—perfect for LAN cafés or stage PCs.

My comment about professional gamers was hyperbole. I am not trying to degrade anyone, I am just very frustrated with this forum at times since everyone talks past each other and parrots a software tweak without being able to explain why.

I don't pretend to be a professional gamer so yes, I'm not aware of the specifics behind tournament setup. However this doesn't disprove nor contradict anything I've said - there exist many people able to perform without tweaking (so the implication that not tweaking is leaving lots of potential on the table is unfounded), but further, the fact that some professionals will use tweaks isn't indicative of anything either unless they have some kind of proof and goal that they're trying to achieve.

Why do you think autoexecs are so popular with tweaked interp rates in online play for games like csgo? If you want to stick to default configs and system, that's fine, but please stop with the "there's no difference" because you're absolutely wrong.

Why do you think LAN events even exist? They want to cut out the latency that gives advantages that comes from network based online play.

These aren't windows/system tweaks - these are much more straightforward and understandable reasons for a user to edit. And of course I know why LANs are used. Changing timer resolution or MTU size lives on a completely different world from gaming on LAN or using a custom config and attempting to conflate them both as equally valid is a massive stretch.

Tweaking game configs is just part of it if you want to optimize your setup. You can tweak your OS, your network adapter, and even your router. Yes, it's not going to give you a huge advantages, but there are advantages to gain and you can stack them from different areas to give a pretty moderate advantages vs a stock setup.

I won't go into depth on every tweak I find useful (do the research yourself), but just to prove you wrong on your "do you have any data", here is a research paper on restrictive nat types (practically every consumer router ship with this on by default) affects things like hit reg.

I suggest you do some more in-depth research before drawing such conclusions in the future.

Yes agreed - there CAN be differences, both positive and negative, and they should be established and understood, not blanket recommended.

Thank you for the whitepaper, I have requested access to the resource. Once again, this is irrelevant - since each tweak needs to be understood and examined on a case by case basis
I suggest you stop drawing blanket conclusions and attempt to understand responses before replying to them.

[Chief Blur Buster]

I apologise, that was intended to be self deprecating, I didn't think about it much past that

Totally appreciate the apology! Carry on.

I only recall you did it once and nobody had complained about it yet (complaint letters from known members) so I'm just reminding everyone to maintain at least some modicum of discussion decorum.

Forums, y'know. And not becoming social media.

[Chief Blur Buster]

Yes agreed - there CAN be differences, both positive and negative, and they should be established and understood, not blanket recommended.

I should add that identical optimizations can simultaneously be placebo AND not placebo.

- It may be placebo (no-operation) on a bunch of systems (10%? 90%? 99%) or make things worse.
- Yet actually surprising effective on the remainder of systems (giant improvements actually genuinely truly happened to, say, X% or XX% of systems).

Plus, sometimes optimizations are situational. Sometimes they only "activate" (give you lag saving benefits) when you've got a certain configuration (e.g. make the game less lag-penalized by running streaming software at the same time). Other help only for certain kind of gaming techniques that really pushes limits.

For example, high mouse DPI isn't as good in CS:GO 240Hz (Where low mouse DPI might absorb hand shake better) as say in Valorant/Quake Arena 1000fps 1000Hz. That's another situational.

Now, the other micro-optimizations will sometimes be like a lottery; where 10 optimizations mostly do nothing but 1 of them actually really helped. There's too much pressure to opetimize and sometimes you de-optimize as a result, because one of the optimizations made things worse. It's often hard to determine which improved / which worsened.

[kyube]

This subforum is simply a disinformation cesspit the past few years without any moderation... nothing you can do about it...
<1% of content in this subforum is worthwhile to read and it's mostly pre-2020...
Nowadays, it's the same old-wives-tales being pushed since 2012 era HW

Funnily enough, it's always new accounts respawning and using the same vocabulary for each thread name

[Chief Blur Buster]

This subforum is simply a disinformation cesspit the past few years without any moderation...

One word: Einstein.
"It's all relative" (moderation-wise)

- We are still more heavily moderated than adult social media (Facebook/X) on an average post:moderation ratio. Look at the number of posts they get, and how many posts are moderated. You haven't seen the posts that we delete before they become visible.
- We don't moderate too much of the information aspect as long as they're at least a modicum of plausibility. As long as it's not creating enough complaints (major nastiness, negativeness, things like that) where the forums are more destabilized. But we do moderate it when users are rude enough to the point where it degrades discourse.
- Yes, some AI spambots sometimes break through. If you know which members are AI, please PM me, and I will put a scanner on them again and see what is happening.
- Some things for confirmed spammers are deleted very fast so you don't see that preemptive moderating happen; it's thankless (and for users who thank me for the moderating: You're welcome).

Now back to topic:

As a premier mythbuster of "Humans Can't See 30 vs 60, Everything Beyond Is Microoptimization", I've been doing it for years.

We also have successfully created a scientific textbook situation where 10 microseconds error in a strobe backlight eventually cascaded to human visible flicker. Pulse widths were erratically varying by 1% (1.000ms versus 1.010ms). That was a 1% light difference. And that was visible as an annoying candlelight flicker in a strobe backlight.

Therefore, we keep benefit of doubt on useless microoptimizations, in case one of them is a breakthrough.

Most are placebo, yep, but you must understand and appreciate why we don't moderate the "plausible information" aspect, at least until people start complaining fiercely about it (then we moderate).

Needless to say, there is often disinformation & misinformation but there are more times (than I can count on my hands) where one "assumed misinfo" turned out to be real valuable data that was actually more legit than expected once the entire circumstances was aggressively researched by multiple parties.

Many people also first thought that some of what Einstein published were crackpot misinformation shit at first.
If people bullied Einstein to not revealing how (nearer speed of light) that Issac Newton mechanics and math broke down, then we'd still have more misinformation. This is why I let discussions continue, until people start violating too many rules when discussing the said topic. It's tough to calibrate the level.

(Refresh rate myths: yoohoo)

[DudeBeFishing]

It is all relative. OP might be right about their own PC, but not for everyone.

1. Frame pacing being perfect at 10 fps is still going to feel worse than frame pacing being within 5ms at 250fps. I don't necessarily disagree. Game and hardware reviews should take frame pacing into consideration since it can pinpoint why a game feels like crap.

2. Boost behavior has been nothing but problems for myself. It never boosts when I want. Some games stutter because they don't put enough load on the hardware to increase the clockrate. I run static clocks if possible, since this is the only way around it on Windows. On Linux, you have to disable idle entirely, which might not be ideal for some people due to the extra power draw.

Myth 1 is not a myth on some hardware. Disabling HPET, in both Windows and BIOS, improves performance in some games on my AM2+, AM3+, and LGA1366 socket based PCs. With HPET enabled, moving the mouse would cause some games to drop to 10% their current framerate. With it disabled, no difference in framerate when moving the mouse.

[soul4kills]

This is very vague and is also making assumptions about me that make zero sense. In what way do I keep thinking everyone is 'me'? I fall into the category of people who is not capable of noticing the difference - which difference is that? Latency? The difference in latency achieved through performing tweaks?

What exactly are you even arguing about at the moment?

I don't think there was anything trivial about my response. You lack perspective because you make a generalized claim that tweaks have no real impact and it's pointless on "Modern Systems" and i'm going to assume you don't use tweaks because you don't believe in them. If you never tried them, how can you claim they don't work? And not everyone has a modern system. Ryzens have an input latency issue because of their infinity fabric and dual ccd design. And there are plenty of people in the forums claiming to experience input lag even on non dual ccd designs. So are all these people just crazy and stupid to you? That's a negative view to have on people you don't know. That's why I say you lack perspective because the only perspective you have is of your own experience and disregard anyone elses. And how do you even know the tweaks don't work? Did you test them out yourself? Even if you did, just because it had no impact for you doesn't mean it's not going to have an impact on someone else's entirely different setup. Again lack of perspective.

[Maelstrom]

This is very vague and is also making assumptions about me that make zero sense. In what way do I keep thinking everyone is 'me'? I fall into the category of people who is not capable of noticing the difference - which difference is that? Latency? The difference in latency achieved through performing tweaks?

What exactly are you even arguing about at the moment?

I don't think there was anything trivial about my response. You lack perspective because you make a generalized claim that tweaks have no real impact and it's pointless on "Modern Systems" and i'm going to assume you don't use tweaks because you don't believe in them. If you never tried them, how can you claim they don't work? And not everyone has a modern system. Ryzens have an input latency issue because of their infinity fabric and dual ccd design. And there are plenty of people in the forums claiming to experience input lag even on non dual ccd designs. So are all these people just crazy and stupid to you? That's a negative view to have on people you don't know. That's why I say you lack perspective because the only perspective you have is of your own experience and disregard anyone elses. And how do you even know the tweaks don't work? Did you test them out yourself? Even if you did, just because it had no impact for you doesn't mean it's not going to have an impact on someone else's entirely different setup. Again lack of perspective.

1) I didn't make that generalised claim. Further, the burden of proof is on you to provide evidence for the specific tweaks you are talking about.
2) This thread is explicitly about modern ryzen systems.
3) No those people aren't stupid to me, I believe their symptoms are real but because of the culture around tweaking, they aren't able to properly diagnose and test their systems and fixes. It's very possible to have 5 different people all complaining about input lag, but for each of them to be experiencing something completely different because they aren't showing a test or being descriptive enough about their symptoms

4) Your claim about ryzen cpus having an input lag issue should be easy enough to test or provide real evidence of right? "because of infinity fabric and dual ccd design" is not a full explanation.

5) I think I can conclude I don't lack perspective - you are not properly reading the messages you are replying to for whatever reason.

6) See point 1 again, and maybe the previous messages.