3900x - Minimum frame rates lower than 5 year old Intel CPU?

humbug · 7 Nov 2019 at 16:51

VincentHanna said:
I've had my 3900x since August, and I've not had many issues with it really, but after reading a few game CPU benchmarks recently it does appear that my minimum frame rates are lower than they should be.

I ran a few benchmarks when I first got it, mainly to check the CPU cooling was OK. I play at 4K, so i'm always going to be GPU limited, therefore it wasn't worth benchmarking a ton of stuff. At the time I noticed that in some games my minimum frame rate was a lot lower than an Intel 5930k that I used for many years, but I guess I didn't think too much about it as it wasn't apparent when playing games.

But Red Dead Redemption II just came out, and in benchmarking that I'm noticing the same trend again.

An example below

Hitman 2 Miami Benchmark - Min 18.38 fps

Hitman 2 Miami Benchmark - Min 3.52 fps

In the Red Dead Redemption II in-game benchmark I've done two runs, both with fresh install of Windows 10 and latest F10a BIOS with AMD AGESA 1.0.0.4 B and my minumum frame rates for 4k/ultra settings were 7fps and 6fps, respectively.

The average was about 43fps both times, which is more in-line with what others are getting with the same 2080Ti GPU

According to Gamers Nexus though, their 1% low and 0.1% lows didn't drop below 28.5 fps at similar settings:

I don't notice big spikes or drops in games, so perhaps I shouldn't even worry about it but it does seem like something isn't quite right.

What should I be looking at?

Spec in sig

18 FPS vs 3 FPS?

Is that sustained? i mean are you actually getting sustained periods of 3 FPS on the 3900X and 18 FPS on the 5930X?

Or is it like a lot of benchmarks do and just pick up the odd 200ms hitch on one or two frames and register that as the Min FPS?

This is why reviewers use 1% and 0.1% lows, some of them don't even use 0.1% lows in which case its an average of the lowest frame rates of 1% of the run, it does away with singular "Frame Hitching" becoming the registered lows.

humbug · 7 Nov 2019 at 17:13

Just watched that video....

The poor performance here of the 7600K and 9600K was put down to a lack of threads, not the only game where the 9600K has horrible performance with its miserable 6 threads.

The 9700K Steve says is because of a bug in the engine, if you cap the performance to a lower level its smoother, i actually find that explanation really odd because the 9900K does not suffer from the same issue, is it just coincidence that the 9900K has 16 threads and is smooth, while the same CPU without SMT having 8 threads is a stutter mess like the 9600K.... hhmmm? surly if it was "a problem with a bug in the engine on Intel CPU's that RockStar have not fixed since GTA-V" then the same would be true on the 9900K, or is it just that like the 9600K it lacks SMT and therefore enough threads, Steve? If you cap the FPS on the 9700K its just doing less work, so is under less stress with its 8 threads.

SonicSW20 · 7 Nov 2019 at 17:24

@humbug - if it was simply a threadcount issue, why does the 7700k not suffer from the problem (4C/8T) but the 9700k (8C/8T) does?

humbug · 7 Nov 2019 at 17:30

SonicSW20 said:
@humbug - if it was simply a threadcount issue, why does the 7700k not suffer from the problem (4C/8T) but the 9700k (8C/8T) does?

That is a good point, i would be interested to see what happens when you turn SMT off on the 3900X to make it a 12 thread CPU, perhaps something to do with the lack of SMT.

At 4.9Ghz its not as quick as a stock 3600 tho

*pats mine on the cooler*

humbug · 7 Nov 2019 at 18:00

VincentHanna said:
It's not my fastest drive, but it's on a Samsung 850 SSD

It's the only thing installed on that drive.

Its not a bad drive either.

Unless you are actually seeing sustained low frame rates i would not worry about it, in game benchmarks are pretty dumb, they just look for the longest pause period on any frame and then chalk it down to Min FPS, that frame could be one 200ms fame out a million 12ms frames.

Rroff · 7 Nov 2019 at 18:07

I'm not overly familiar with the 3900X but it is possible you are encountering some kind of cross-core latency related minimums assuming that it isn't just a one off frame delay at the start of the benchmark, etc. that is causing it.

sideways14a · 7 Nov 2019 at 18:09

Could just be a crap game with a crap benchmark pulling low numbers out of its ass that dont actually reflect gameplay.
I mean, i know the 9700k aint the greatest cpu in the world but even it shouldnt be doing those 1% lows in the graph above so its bound to be an error maybe affecting your pc as well even with a different chip.

humbug · 7 Nov 2019 at 18:17

sideways14a said:
Could just be a crap game with a crap benchmark pulling low numbers out of its ass that dont actually reflect gameplay.
I mean, i know the 9700k aint the greatest cpu in the world but even it shouldnt be doing those 1% lows in the graph above so its bound to be an error maybe affecting your pc as well even with a different chip.

The only commonality between all these CPU's with horrible 1% and 0.1% lows is they all lack SMT, all the Ryzen CPU's have SMT and as @SonicSW20 pointed out the 4 core 8 thread 7700K's 1% and 0.1% lows are fine, the 9700K with 8 real cores is much faster than the 7700K.

Perhaps this game does something with SMT that it can't without and you get a stutter-fest.

Its an interesting one...

arc@css · 7 Nov 2019 at 18:55

Apologies for jumping in but where is the Ryzen power plan located? Is it in Ryzen Master?

I'm not sure what settings I should pay attention to.

Woodsta888 · 7 Nov 2019 at 19:01

Two games I've noticed recently are well over 100GB. CoD MW (128GB) and RDR2. In CoD when you first load a map, even from an SSD it takes about a minute to load all the shader textures. Why have new games recently jumped up in size so much?

sideways14a · 7 Nov 2019 at 19:05

Woodsta888 said:
Why have new games recently jumped up in size so much?

Lazy programmers.

Brazo · 7 Nov 2019 at 20:36

@VincentHanna

How does the game actually play?

If it plays fine I really wouldn’t read too much into it mate. The game appears to be a poor port. Wait for a few patches to sort it out.

TrM · 8 Nov 2019 at 07:57

Woodsta888 said:
Two games I've noticed recently are well over 100GB. CoD MW (128GB) and RDR2. In CoD when you first load a map, even from an SSD it takes about a minute to load all the shader textures. Why have new games recently jumped up in size so much?

games haven’t jumped by that much though. Between render screens high Rez textures and audio games have been getting bigger all along some other big games over the years final fantasy 15 just to name one of them. But cod being so big has made more people notice. But games will only keep getting bigger when new consoles comes out I expect most games to be the wrong side of 100gb

I’m Just hoping ssd drives come down in price to keep all the games on

arc@css said:
Apologies for jumping in but where is the Ryzen power plan located? Is it in Ryzen Master?

I'm not sure what settings I should pay attention to.

It’s acctully under the power options on windows

opethdisciple · 8 Nov 2019 at 09:01

Could just be inaccuracies in the benchmarks themselves.

VincentHanna · 8 Nov 2019 at 12:39

Perhaps, but why would it show the old intel 5930K as having higher minimums if the benchmark was the issue?

This isn't just Red Dead Redemption II, this it Hitman 2 in DX12 and possibly Forza 4 as well (I seem to have lost the screen-grabs I took of that)

Unfortunately there's no easy way for me to setup the 5930k again as it's safely stored away ready to sell on.

IT Troll · 8 Nov 2019 at 12:44

humbug said:
The only commonality between all these CPU's with horrible 1% and 0.1% lows is they all lack SMT, all the Ryzen CPU's have SMT and as @SonicSW20 pointed out the 4 core 8 thread 7700K's 1% and 0.1% lows are fine, the 9700K with 8 real cores is much faster than the 7700K.

It has to be an engine bug which causing this on the non-SMT CPUs. The results do not really make sense otherwise from a relative performance point of view. I think Steve mentioned that they couldn't even get the game to run on a couple of their Ryzen boards. So clearly urgent bug fixes are required from RockStar.

humbug · 8 Nov 2019 at 12:50

IT Troll said:
It has to be an engine bug which causing this on the non-SMT CPUs. The results do not really make sense otherwise from a relative performance point of view. I think Steve mentioned that they couldn't even get the game to run on a couple of their Ryzen boards. So clearly urgent bug fixes are required from RockStar.

Yeah

djay · 8 Nov 2019 at 13:15

arc@css said:
Apologies for jumping in but where is the Ryzen power plan located? Is it in Ryzen Master?

I'm not sure what settings I should pay attention to.

Power options in Control Panel. You should have Ryzen Balanced and Ryzen High Performance i think it is.

sadbuttrue · 8 Nov 2019 at 13:26

There are many things that can cause a stutter during the first few frames of a benchmark.

Unfortunately very few are smart enough to run for a few seconds before collecting data.

This can lead to random and often unhelpful 1%/minimum frame rates on some setups.

Freddie1980 · 8 Nov 2019 at 13:34

VincentHanna said:
Honestly, this is pretty much bare-bones Window install.

Windows 10 + updates,
GPU driver
AMD chipset driver
Red Dead Redemption II

I disable onedrive, I've not got around to installing Steam/Epic Launcher etc.

Checked my memory with CPU-Z and it's definitely operating dual channel, 3600mhz (CPUz reports 1799mhz)

Make sure your running RDRII in directx 12 rather then Vulkan which isn't in a good state at the moment.