solved but not done I got better performance in a game after I accidentally lowered my clockspeed from 4.1GHz to 0.8GHz, can anyone try to explain how this is possible?

[QazCetelic]

This is a weird post for the troubleshooting category because it's already fixed, I just want to know how.

So I was playing Rise of the Tomb Raider but was having horrible lag (8-12fps), I tried lowering the settings, but got 12 on high and 8 on lowest which was pretty weird because I would expect there should be a bigger difference. So, I thought the bottleneck could be somewhere else, so I lowered the resolution from 1920x1080 to 1280x720 which increased the FPS to the 60 (because V-sync was on), but it went down to 12 again after ~30 seconds. I then tried reducing it to the minimum of 800x600, but the performance improvement was also only visible shortly after exiting the menu. I thought it might be caused by closing the menu or something, but that didn't seem to be the reason. Then I started looking at the clock speed, it was at a steady 4.1GHz and the temps where at 85c°. The game ran fine for a short while but then started to struggle again, I checked again and the clock speeds were down to 2.2GHz and the temps to 95-99c°. I tried to figure out what was happening, so I looked at the graph of the thermals and clock speed, and it seemed to be boosting and throttling back constantly. I think that that was the issue. Likewise, I figured it would be better to cap it at 3GHz to prevent it from going up and down too much. So entered 3000 thinking it would be in MHz, but I misread it, and it was in kHz and I therefore entered what ends up being 3MHz instead, however it didn't go below 800MHz. I didn't notice at first, there was a bit more lag when navigating Spotify and using Firefox but nothing too much to raise suspicion. I opened the system monitor and saw that the clock speed was at 800Mhz and realized a mistake. So I opened the game out of curiosity and to my surprise it actually works, but then I noticed that the game was running butter smooth and was nothing like the slideshow it was before which puzzled me the most. How could the decrease from 2.2-4.1GHz to 0.8GHz improve performance? "It surely is just being weird and will go back to lagging any second now", I thought, but it didn't. Then I thought that the displayed clock speed was false, however it showed up everywhere as 800MHz on all cores.  I still have no clue how this is possible. Did the lowering fix some weird bug or something?

Do any of you know what's causing this weird situation?

Some further info:

•     I use an optimization program called Game Mode created by the game's developers.
•     I have tried cpupower-gui to change the max frequency
•     I have tried cpufreq-manager to change the max frequency
•     CPU: i7 8750H (6c)
•     GPU: GTX 1060
•     RAM: 16 GB DDR4
•     I use an SSD
•     I'm running PopOS 20.10 (Linux)
•     I'm running the game using Steam (natively, so no Proton)
•     The Steam FPS counter is showing 1 FPS even though it's not.

[WereCatf]

3 minutes ago, QazCetelic said:

Did the lowering fix some weird bug or something?

No, you just simply reduced temperatures and therefore throttling.

[QazCetelic]

1 minute ago, WereCatf said:

No, you just simply reduced temperatures and therefore throttling.

Yeah, but it was throttling to 2.2GHz before shouldn't that have performed better than the 0.8GHz it's currently at?

[WereCatf]

2 minutes ago, QazCetelic said:

Yeah, but it was throttling to 2.2GHz before shouldn't that have performed better than the 0.8GHz it's currently at?

Evidently not.

[shaz2sxy]

4 minutes ago, QazCetelic said:

Yeah, but it was throttling to 2.2GHz before shouldn't that have performed better than the 0.8GHz it's currently at?

it was throttling at 2.2ghz but iot was still running hot so probably the heat was causing it to be unstable even at that speed

[Cyberspirit]

Are you using a desktop or a laptop? If it's a desktop, you might wanna check your CPU cooler and see if it's mounted properly because it shouldn't just overheat like this, especially not just from games.

[QazCetelic]

5 minutes ago, Cyberspirit said:

Are you using a desktop or a laptop? If it's a desktop, you might wanna check your CPU cooler and see if it's mounted properly because it shouldn't just overheat like this, especially not just from games.

It's a laptop

[Cyberspirit]

13 minutes ago, QazCetelic said:

It's a laptop

Then it could just be bad design so the best you can do, assuming it isn't a super dusty older machine, is maybe undervolting it and see how low you can get the power. Not sure how overclocking is on Linux in terms of software though.

[whm1974]

10 minutes ago, Cyberspirit said:

Then it could just be bad design so the best you can do, assuming it isn't a super dusty older machine, is maybe undervolting it and see how low you can get the power. Not sure how overclocking is on Linux in terms of software though.

To my Knowledge there isn't much in the way of Overclocking SW for Linux. So Normally Users will have to go in the BIOS/UEFI and adjust the voltage from there.

 

Laptops? Not much there for the vast majority of them...