Micro stutters in old games vs. overkill PC

[FTW900]

Hello everybody!
I am trying to get rid of micro stuttering in old games and cannot find the reason why I experience them in almost every game (even in old ones)
I used to have 4790k (OC) for old games and it was perfectly fine for the most part, but I was unable to achieve perfect 'locked' RTSS frame time like never (but I accepted it due to my PC being 'outdated')
Now that I own 10900k OC to 5Ghz and 3090 Ti & 128 Gb of DDR4 3600 memory I still experience them even in such games like GTA:VC or Half-Life 2 for example
I thought it might be my Sony FW900 that has incredible response times but no-I tried it on OLED and IPS and I still feel them from time to time even tho my PC is clearly an overkill for such old game nothing helps, even 'ultimate performance' plan when my CPU is constantly at 5Ghz like...what the hell? Not to mention I see them on the frametime graph
I also do not have any slideshow, just a static wallpaper
My system is relatively clean, I disabled and removed tons of bloatware, the only thing that starts with the windows is KAV/TinyFirewall and that's about it
I can understand the stuttering during shader compilation/emulation for example but for the love of God I cannot understand why do I keep having them in such old titles!

Please, send help! Life and death situation!

[jorimt]

Frametime spikes still exist in older games, and can be caused by things like asset-streaming and auto saves, which aren't always performance-related, but engine-limited, hence no matter how overkill your PC is, those will typically remain.

That said, one thing you can do with an Nvidia GPU is ensure you have it set to “Prefer maximum performance” for older games so they don't unnecessarily downclock it, which can cause lower overall performance and, in some cases, more stutter.

[r0ach]

Have you tried various BIOS options like turning off hyperthreading, turning off above 4g decoding, etc? If it's not a configuration problem, I noticed a lot of games seemed to be more fluid on Win 7 than 8.1, and 10 was even worse in some cases. Might depend on engine as well. I don't like Win 10 myself as a whole but with certain drivers like 456.71 for instance, games like Borderlands 3 probably have better motion fluidity in Win 10 than 8.1.

But overall I would say if you compared a broad spectrum of DX9-DX11 games on 7 vs 8.1 vs 10, most people would probably notice 7 feels more fluid and real-time in frame delivery, 8.1 probably second place, and win 10 last. As for other things about your system, your memory controller probably can't handle 128 GB of DDR4 at 3600mhz.... I assume there's four sticks. Put in only two sticks and change it to 2133mhz 15-15-15-36 1T and see what happens. Most people would probably consider your memory setup a bad idea to use. If it actually works well I'd be surprised.

[FTW900]

Frametime spikes still exist in older games, and can be caused by things like asset-streaming and auto saves, which aren't always performance-related, but engine-limited, hence no matter how overkill your PC is, those will typically remain.

That said, one thing you can do with an Nvidia GPU is ensure you have it set to “Prefer maximum performance” for older games so they don't unnecessarily downclock it, which can cause lower overall performance and, in some cases, more stutter.

Thanks for the reply. I will make sure that 'max perf' settings is manually forced for every game and test it out once again!

I tend to think that there's something fishy going on really.
GTA:VC should not stutter randomly while traveling in the game at all - you can literally run it on almost every CPU that exist today, including low-tier smartphones. No matter how much stuff game engine does in the background or how terrible code is, any modern CPU definitely is capable of calculating that within 16 ms and even way, way less. Hell, even to emulate PS2 option without issues!
More than that I see that my CPU is barely touching 3% of usage in that case and we should also keep in mind that this is 'ultimate' performance plan when it is constantly running at 5+Ghz (manually 99% lowest CPU state)...I think problem lies somewhere else but where? Game is running of SSD. RAM can be an issue for the latest games but for the games from 2000's I think 3600 is plenty, not to mention the amount of RAM available...

Also, I can understand GTA 4 lagging in some areas (or even 5 as most recent example) due to terrible engine/optimization and game using only 1 or 2 cores at best (I do not blame my PC for this), but GTA:VC? In theory it is possible to fit whole game inside 3d chip cache by this point lol it shouldn't lag at all.
I do not remember any stutters with my amd fx cpu when it was released on far worse hardware, then 2500k nor 4790k back in the days had any problems...well maybe 4790k had some issues (not sure) because I was @4k and 7 yo 'bloated' Win7 and honestly had tons of crap installed/uninstalled during all these years not to mention godawfully slow ram.

Can somebody with a 7800x3d make a quickie?
A good testing area that I found is in HL2U (prob. that applies to vanilla HL2 too) in chapter 4 (water hazard) that one can start from the 'new game' menu.
If player proceeds to the red barn down the river he will most likely to encounter stuttering while making 2nd jump before leaving canals. I guess this is the place where all loading/buffering is happening so most likely there will be stutters. Wonder if that large 96/128-something-mb cache might help...

P.S. making a cold-run is necessary, 2nd time I ran it on my system w/o restarting the game gives me no stutters (another point towards caching/compilation issue really)

P.S.S. also, during loading/saving there is a noticeable stutter happening. I wasn't talking about these, these are not issue and I understand where they come from

[FTW900]

Have you tried various BIOS options like turning off hyperthreading, turning off above 4g decoding, etc? If it's not a configuration problem, I noticed a lot of games seemed to be more fluid on Win 7 than 8.1, and 10 was even worse in some cases. Might depend on engine as well. I don't like Win 10 myself as a whole but with certain drivers like 456.71 for instance, games like Borderlands 3 probably have better motion fluidity in Win 10 than 8.1.

But overall I would say if you compared a broad spectrum of DX9-DX11 games on 7 vs 8.1 vs 10, most people would probably notice 7 feels more fluid and real-time in frame delivery, 8.1 probably second place, and win 10 last. As for other things about your system, your memory controller probably can't handle 128 GB of DDR4 at 3600mhz.... I assume there's four sticks. Put in only two sticks and change it to 2133mhz 15-15-15-36 1T and see what happens. Most people would probably consider your memory setup a bad idea to use. If it actually works well I'd be surprised.

I tried HT ON/OFF, didn't help unfortunately

Yeah I love 7 but when I made an upgrade it was time to leave it behind (unfortunately once again). Plus I heard that steam will no longer work on it soon. And even tho I don't play much (especially modern crap titles) I need to run old games somehow. Plus no new drivers, Chrome support ended so on and so forth
I'm not sure if W11 is any better but knowing m$ I can assume it is 10% worse and 5% more resource hungry (at least)

About RAM: It runs perfectly fine in other cases really.
Plus it is not OC, just a JEDEC XMP. Compiling, video encoding, tons of Chrome tabs, no pagefile.sys (hmm now I wonder if that could be an issue) everything is rock-stable, even when all memory is used

[RealNC]

Set both GPU and CPU to highest perf. For the CPU, you do that by changing the Windows power plan. Default is balanced, try high performance instead.

If this fixes the issue then that means the games are so light on CPU that they result in power saving mode being enabled and disabled all the time, which can cause hiccups.

[FTW900]

Set both GPU and CPU to highest perf. For the CPU, you do that by changing the Windows power plan. Default is balanced, try high performance instead.

If this fixes the issue then that means the games are so light on CPU that they result in power saving mode being enabled and disabled all the time, which can cause hiccups.

I had 'ultimate performance' plan unlocked, also manually set minimal CPU state to 50/90/99% but that didn't help much.
I also tried high performance now - same results, maybe even slightly worse or just a coincidence.

HL2.jpg (48.76 KiB) Viewed 13711 times

Playing with 'real time' priority now and cores, wonder if HT off+real time priority can fix that...will report a bit later on.

Update:
Yes, unfortunately that did not fix any of the issues with the HL2.
But after re-installing VC from Steam, disabling auto-GPU-selection, selecting maximum performance mode and plan I managed to fix the issues for the most part with VC (at least I hope so). I no longer see constant spikes during new game intro, only few ones in the beginning (which is still weird).
Can somebody with amd 3d chips (or some 13-14th gen Intel users) confirm issues or lack of thereof? HL2U 4th chapter or GTA:VC new game intro

[andrelip]

Some possible reasons:

1) Game trying to use a busy CPU thread. RGB software, scheduled tasks, buggy drivers, and other things could be causing load spikes in your core. Most are so fast that you hardly notice them in Afterburner but feel them. You can check it using Perfmon and the per-process CPU usage graph. The best thing is to isolate the core and check. There is a program called ReservedCpuSets that forces the entire system to avoid some threads, even drivers and interrupts respects that. It will works as a preference but these threads are still going to be available if there is no other thread to use. Processes running in those threads will have near zero race conditions, it will be as good as it can get. So select some cores to be reserved and then force the game to only use these cores and uncheck the others.

2) Unstable OC. Try Prime95 small FFTs and check if there is any throttle reason in HWiNFO.

3) Clock Stretching. Disable idle and check the effective clock in HWiNFO. It should be a perfect 5GHz. Then apply a stress test with Prime95 and check if it remains a perfect 5GHz. If not, then you could be losing cycles due to LLC undershooting and Vdroop.

4) Single core bottleneck. You have 3% utilization when counting all cores, but you need to check it per core.

5) Unstable memory. Use MemTest and confirm if your memory is stable.

6) IO bottleneck. Hard to test, but the game could be waiting for disk or network (some games use local LAN packets even for single-player to simplify coding for both modules). This happens in specific frames only, like the one that has a tick update. GPUView and WPA thread stack can help identify the cause. You can even know the file the game was reading in WPA.

7) GPU and CPU idling. Too little usage may induce deeper C-states, reduced frequency, and other power savings issues. Disable it and fix the frequency. Double-check with HWiNFO.

If none of this solves, learn how to use WPA (Youtube have tons of lessons) and try to co-relate a slow frame with an event and explore the stack of this process.

[jorimt]

No matter how much stuff game engine does in the background or how terrible code is, any modern CPU definitely is capable of calculating that within 16 ms and even way, way less.

Many older open-world games had a 30 FPS framerate target at the time (including GTA:VC, I believe), so the streaming systems were "tuned" for 33.3ms frametimes, hence the higher the average framerate, the more obvious any spikes are now going to be.

Game is running of SSD.

SSD doesn't help with stutter (just load times) in legacy games since the Windows storage API is limited to HDD transfer rates, unfortunately.

A good testing area that I found is in HL2U (prob. that applies to vanilla HL2 too) in chapter 4 (water hazard) that one can start from the 'new game' menu.
If player proceeds to the red barn down the river he will most likely to encounter stuttering while making 2nd jump before leaving canals. I guess this is the place where all loading/buffering is happening so most likely there will be stutters. Wonder if that large 96/128-something-mb cache might help...

I have a 13900k, but for what it's worth, I ran this test in HL2 (vanilla and update, both with G-SYNC off + V-SYNC off, just to rule anything out) and I got zero stutter on the first two jumps after the red barn both the first and second time running it, if those are the jumps you were talking about.

[andrelip]

For instance I tested SpecialK a few years ago in black mesa (~hl.2) using 9700k and it was a flat line.