Micro Stuttering from running a balanced power plan! (TEMP FIX HERE)

[LiveOrDie]

There seem to be a problem with x99 and using a balanced power plan it produces Micro Stutters in some games i can't say how many games get this problem but Bioshock Infinite is one of them, After comparing both balanced and High Performance you can clearly see the problem, And seeing my 3770K runs a balanced power plan fine with no stuttering i can only put it down to the chipset?

Games Affected/Tested so far

Bioshock Infinite
Borderlands 2
Borderlands The Pre-Sequel


EDIT 03/02/15 TEMP FIX

This problem seems to be related to the unreal engine and X99 chipset there is no hard fix for this problem but you can download this handy tray program called Full Throttle Override
and add all unreal engine games to its games list this will set a High Performance power plan when starting the game.

[Kosmosagamemnon]

jonstatt wrote:
That is not the micro-stuttering that the OP was referring to though which is really quite subtle and has minimal effects on benchmarks. A 1/2 second freeze is a full-on stutter. I doubt it's anything to do with the MB or power plan. It is more likely to do with GPU drivers or the SoundBlaster. In your situation I would pull the SoundBlaster and see if it has any effect. I would also switch off SLI temporarily in the NVidia control panel and check for behavioural changes.

NVidia have had problems with recent drivers, particularly with the 970, but not confined soley to that card as I see reports of similar issues with Titans and 980s. This is theory right now but part of the issue seems to stem from the fact that the latest driver iterations try and harmonise different cards more effectively. So say for example you have a 970 from MSI that is not overclocked at all, and another 970 from Palit that is...in the past this was not recommended at all. Now the drivers attempt to sync the two cards clocks. As a result the voltage may drop on one of the cards (even if they are identical due to the fact one card may be slightly more efficient than the other - this can be found by checking ASIC value in GPU-Z), and this appears to be causing some weird effects such as one of the cards down-clocking temporarily as it thinks its going into power save when it shouldn't be.

Fascinating. You have given me much to investigate and I do appreciate that. Interestingly the effect is reduced when I remove the ZxR but it is not completely addressed. The issue even results in game crashes on occasion, when a pause/freeze goes on for a little too long. Is it the board? these cards perform admirably in a Rampage IV. But that was some time ago and does not account for changes in driver development over time. I will look into this further, thanks!

[jonstatt]

Kosmosagamemnon wrote:
Fascinating. You have given me much to investigate and I do appreciate that. Interestingly the effect is reduced when I remove the ZxR but it is not completely addressed. The issue even results in game crashes on occasion, when a pause/freeze goes on for a little too long. Is it the board? these cards perform admirably in a Rampage IV. But that was some time ago and does not account for changes in driver development over time. I will look into this further, thanks!

When the game crashes, do you get a pop-up in the bottom right corner of the screen telling you the NVidia drivers had a problem and restarted? That would be a clue. Although you are not running your CPU OC'd, it sounds like you are with the RAM. Although the RAM is sold as 3GHz, it is normally really a lower speed like 2133 RAM that has been "tested" for OC'ing. I have noticed if I push my RAM's timings that when it's only a little over instead of BSODs, I can get temporary slowing (memory read/write retries?) that could cause stutter. You may want to do a full defaults in the BIOS and see what effect that has as well.

But definitely try disabling SLI in the NVidia control panel as that's a very quick thing to try without pulling the card.

[Kosmosagamemnon]

jonstatt wrote:
When the game crashes, do you get a pop-up in the bottom right corner of the screen telling you the NVidia drivers had a problem and restarted? That would be a clue. Although you are not running your CPU OC'd, it sounds like you are with the RAM. Although the RAM is sold as 3GHz, it is normally really a lower speed like 2133 RAM that has been "tested" for OC'ing. I have noticed if I push my RAM's timings that when it's only a little over instead of BSODs, I can get temporary slowing (memory read/write retries?) that could cause stutter. You may want to do a full defaults in the BIOS and see what effect that has as well.

But definitely try disabling SLI in the NVidia control panel as that's a very quick thing to try without pulling the card.

No, other than the usual faulting application pop-up that Windows generates. It's not a driver crash, but the game application I'm running. While my RAM is F4-3000, I am not running an XMP profile due to stability issues discussed in other threads as such the RAM is running at 2133Mhz.

As such my BIOS setup is very straightforward, the settings are Optimized Defaults with the following adjustments....

HD Audio - Disabled
Above 4G Decoding - Enabled
INT19 Trap - Postponed
Quickboot - Disabled

Within the video driver (347.09)

I have forced the power profile to Maximum performance from Adaptive. It did not appear to make a significant difference.

It's unusual because this system does not have a particularly heavy custom configuration applied, anyway I apologize to the OP I did not mean to de-rail his thread! Feel free to PM me with some suggestions instead, or perhaps I should start another thread.

[nick_the_greek]

Valley benchmark is the only one that I have noticed that balanced mode decreases performance and stutter
high performance I get higher scores .......

[LiveOrDie]

After some googling i found what i was looking for and can't thank this guy enough for making this tool, Its a work around which you will never know is running download page is here, I have tested it and it work a treat.Full Throttle Override link also added to 1st post.

[jonstatt]

LiveOrDie wrote:
After some googling i found what i was looking for and can't thank this guy enough for making this tool, Its a work around which you will never know is running download page is here, I have tested it and it work a treat.Full Throttle Override link also added to 1st post.

Thanks for posting this. How exactly are you using it? Are you adding every game in your collection to the auto list? Or are you just using the tool as a quick way of moving between performance plans without going into the control panel?

[LiveOrDie]

jonstatt wrote:
Thanks for posting this. How exactly are you using it? Are you adding every game in your collection to the auto list? Or are you just using the tool as a quick way of moving between performance plans without going into the control panel?

I've added all my Unreal games and a few others which i want to run without downclocking BF4,Dying Light and so on.

[jonstatt]

LiveOrDie wrote:
I've added all my Unreal games and a few others which i want to run without downclocking BF4,Dying Light and so on.

Thanks. Dying light is a good candidate for this because apparently it is not that well coded, and even maxes out cores running at 4GHz which a game like this really shouldn't.

[LiveOrDie]

jonstatt wrote:
Thanks. Dying light is a good candidate for this because apparently it is not that well coded, and even maxes out cores running at 4GHz which a game like this really shouldn't.

Yer its a bad port it doesn't seem to utilize all cores correctly which mite be fixed with a update or two. But I'm using this tool mainly for Unreal games like Bioshock, borderlands and so on.