Absurd stuttering/freezing and inconsistent frametimes on GeForce cards
Posted: 21 Feb 2021, 14:28
Hey.
I tried nearly everything I could think of and I can't find the cause other than GeForce bad Radeon good.
I don't know where to start so I will list my specs first.
Ryzen 2700x
16 - 36 GB of RAM (changed over time)
Gigabyte Gaming K7 motherboard
Corsair RM750x PSU
Two Samsung S34J552WQUXEN 3440x1440 ultrawide monitors (up to 60 Hz, 75 Hz with FreeSync, overclockable and used at 95 Hz)
latest Windows 10 20h2 (used 1703 version before too)
As for GPUs - I used RX 470, RX 570, GTX 1060, RTX 3080 (random order) and my current GPU is RTX 3070.
Everything was fine with RX 570 that I used the most. Had two DisplayPorts instead of one (GTX 1060) which I used to connect my two Samsung S34J552WQUXEN monitors. Up until one Windows or Radeon drivers caused the display to be very dim and dark when coming back from idle and moving mouse. Power cycling fixed that so not really annoying issue.
Now when I tried GTX 1060 in 2nd PCIE slot, it had very inconsistent frametimes. The Unigine Heaven benchmark had butter smooth fps and smooth changes to frametime when camera was moving. GTX 1060 was all over the place and inconsistent. Tested native on Windows 10 and also on Linux with gpu-passthrough to fresh installation of Windows 10. Caused me a day of headaches but didn't really pay attention to this, scrapped it all and went back to my native Win 10 and RX 570.
Few months ago I managed to get Asus RTX 3080 TUF and the only games I really played was Ghostrunner and League of Legends. Ghostrunner was cool and amazing, played most of it with locked fps to 100 (to be close to my monitor refresh rate) and it was 100 fps no matter what. League of Legends is just a bad game to test consistency of GPU. It seems like it was working on or I just didn't stress it enough to notice stuttering/freezing.
RTX sold, back to RX 570, all good, now sniped RTX 3070 - put it in AND BAM, stuttering, crazy frametimes etc. It's crazy. I tried everything and I don't know what might be causing this. The only correlation I found is that it might be related to loading data. Ghostrunner runs super inconsistently and frametimes straight up jump up and down. The issue is best reproducible in Genshin Impact - all I have to do is open the map, wait few seconds and move the map rapidly (left click hold and mouse rapidly). It causes massive frametime spike. I might be really going bonkers on this and be wrong, just looking for unoptimized things in games but I'm 99% sure it shouldn't work like this. Confirmed with another person playing the game and on GTX 1060 that it's not happening on his end.
Now as for what it looks like. I took some screenshots and even recorded video of frametime graph from my phone (to not put additional load on the PC). It seems I can't post links to imgur/streamable/google drive and attach only 3 files to one message, so yea... I will post them in the next message I guess.
And now I did almost everything I could think of. I ran hardware at my current settings (CPU and RAM tuned) and at stock too. I tried forcing PCI-E gen 2 instead of 3, I nuked drivers multiple times with DDU, tried fresh Windows 10 installation, disabled v-sync and g-sync (I have to keep g-sync anyway or my ultrawides will frameskip above 60 Hz, common issue with ultrawides on GeForce cards), tried HDMI cable, tried different monitor, tried undervolted GPU at full power limit to prevent clock jumping and potential issues with power delivery, tried stock GPU settings.
The things I think about:
It seems you guys are very knowledgeable and eager to help so I hope we can find a solution that hunts me - either this or I will be forced to go RX 6800 I guess.
I tried nearly everything I could think of and I can't find the cause other than GeForce bad Radeon good.
I don't know where to start so I will list my specs first.
Ryzen 2700x
16 - 36 GB of RAM (changed over time)
Gigabyte Gaming K7 motherboard
Corsair RM750x PSU
Two Samsung S34J552WQUXEN 3440x1440 ultrawide monitors (up to 60 Hz, 75 Hz with FreeSync, overclockable and used at 95 Hz)
latest Windows 10 20h2 (used 1703 version before too)
As for GPUs - I used RX 470, RX 570, GTX 1060, RTX 3080 (random order) and my current GPU is RTX 3070.
Everything was fine with RX 570 that I used the most. Had two DisplayPorts instead of one (GTX 1060) which I used to connect my two Samsung S34J552WQUXEN monitors. Up until one Windows or Radeon drivers caused the display to be very dim and dark when coming back from idle and moving mouse. Power cycling fixed that so not really annoying issue.
Now when I tried GTX 1060 in 2nd PCIE slot, it had very inconsistent frametimes. The Unigine Heaven benchmark had butter smooth fps and smooth changes to frametime when camera was moving. GTX 1060 was all over the place and inconsistent. Tested native on Windows 10 and also on Linux with gpu-passthrough to fresh installation of Windows 10. Caused me a day of headaches but didn't really pay attention to this, scrapped it all and went back to my native Win 10 and RX 570.
Few months ago I managed to get Asus RTX 3080 TUF and the only games I really played was Ghostrunner and League of Legends. Ghostrunner was cool and amazing, played most of it with locked fps to 100 (to be close to my monitor refresh rate) and it was 100 fps no matter what. League of Legends is just a bad game to test consistency of GPU. It seems like it was working on or I just didn't stress it enough to notice stuttering/freezing.
RTX sold, back to RX 570, all good, now sniped RTX 3070 - put it in AND BAM, stuttering, crazy frametimes etc. It's crazy. I tried everything and I don't know what might be causing this. The only correlation I found is that it might be related to loading data. Ghostrunner runs super inconsistently and frametimes straight up jump up and down. The issue is best reproducible in Genshin Impact - all I have to do is open the map, wait few seconds and move the map rapidly (left click hold and mouse rapidly). It causes massive frametime spike. I might be really going bonkers on this and be wrong, just looking for unoptimized things in games but I'm 99% sure it shouldn't work like this. Confirmed with another person playing the game and on GTX 1060 that it's not happening on his end.
Now as for what it looks like. I took some screenshots and even recorded video of frametime graph from my phone (to not put additional load on the PC). It seems I can't post links to imgur/streamable/google drive and attach only 3 files to one message, so yea... I will post them in the next message I guess.
And now I did almost everything I could think of. I ran hardware at my current settings (CPU and RAM tuned) and at stock too. I tried forcing PCI-E gen 2 instead of 3, I nuked drivers multiple times with DDU, tried fresh Windows 10 installation, disabled v-sync and g-sync (I have to keep g-sync anyway or my ultrawides will frameskip above 60 Hz, common issue with ultrawides on GeForce cards), tried HDMI cable, tried different monitor, tried undervolted GPU at full power limit to prevent clock jumping and potential issues with power delivery, tried stock GPU settings.
The things I think about:
- high latencymon interrupts
- both GTX 1060 and RTX 3070 are from Gigabyte while RTX 3080 was from ASUS - might be compatibility issues or borked Gigabyte firmware/software trying to access sensors/stuff from Gigabyte products (?)
- the stuttering happens on its own but is even more noticeable when doing actions or when things load.
It seems you guys are very knowledgeable and eager to help so I hope we can find a solution that hunts me - either this or I will be forced to go RX 6800 I guess.