Valorant Low FPS on my laptop and frequent stutters.

[Shiven]

I have an Asus F570zd laptop, with a Ryzen 5 2500u cpu and GTX 1050 4GB gpu, and 8 GB single channel RAM.

My cpu, gpu, bios and windows is up-to-date.

 

Whenever I play valorant, I get sub-par FPS for my setup as I get 70-100 fluctuating fps on lowest settings, 720p. It's the same for 1080p as well. I've observed that my cpu core clocks/threads keep fluctuating dramatically between 1.5 GHz and 3 GHz.

 

I even get frequent stutters, and I've noticed (using msi afterburner + rtss) that whenever my game hangs my gpu usage goes to 0%. The stutters are also more frequent during the beginning of each match.

 

My iGPU and dGPU both reach 70 degrees tops while gaming, and CPU reaches 78-81 degrees tops.

When I play It Takes Two, the cpu has no problem at least keeping and maintaining clock speeds around and above 2.2 GHz at all times while even reaching 86-87 degrees.

 

I've also reinstalled valorant twice but no effect. Changing power plans between Ultimate performance, bitsum highest performance and ryzen balanced didn't make much of a difference.

Any help? Thanks.

[TheBean]

screenshot task manager performance tab while you are in a deathmatch game

[KrystianTheFox]

25 minutes ago, Shiven said:

I have an Asus F570zd laptop, with a Ryzen 5 2500u cpu and GTX 1050 4GB gpu, and 8 GB single channel RAM.

My cpu, gpu, bios and windows is up-to-date.

 

Whenever I play valorant, I get sub-par FPS for my setup as I get 70-100 fluctuating fps on lowest settings, 720p. It's the same for 1080p as well. I've observed that my cpu core clocks/threads keep fluctuating dramatically between 1.5 GHz and 3 GHz.

 

I even get frequent stutters, and I've noticed (using msi afterburner + rtss) that whenever my game hangs my gpu usage goes to 0%. The stutters are also more frequent during the beginning of each match.

 

My iGPU and dGPU both reach 70 degrees tops while gaming, and CPU reaches 78-81 degrees tops.

When I play It Takes Two, the cpu has no problem at least keeping and maintaining clock speeds around and above 2.2 GHz at all times while even reaching 86-87 degrees.

 

I've also reinstalled valorant twice but no effect. Changing power plans between Ultimate performance, bitsum highest performance and ryzen balanced didn't make much of a difference.

Any help? Thanks.

do you have a hwm monitor if you have turn on the game and see in the hwm monitor

[Shiven]

52 minutes ago, KrystianTheFox said:

do you have a hwm monitor if you have turn on the game and see in the hwm monitor

Forgot to mention, msi afterburner wasn't showing cpu temp so I used hwinfo64 for that. All other values in msi afterburner match with the values in hwinfo 64.

[Shiven]

1 hour ago, TheBean said:

screenshot task manager performance tab while you are in a deathmatch game

[KrystianTheFox]

1 hour ago, Shiven said:

when did you change the thermal paste on the cpu ?

[TheBean]

the problem is the ram. you dont seem to have enough. if your laptop lets you add more ram, please do. ryzen is heavily memory starved so giving it lots of *fast* ram is very important for performance. 

[Shiven]

7 hours ago, KrystianTheFox said:

when did you change the thermal paste on the cpu ?

Damn! I'm surprised you found out I changed the thermal paste haha. I changed the thermal paste about 2 months back. With stock thermal paste, my gpu temps were around 83-87 while gaming and cpu reached 90-95 degrees.

 

After repasting using Gelid GC Extreme thermal paste, my temps have definitely improved (as you can see in the above posts), however, the performance remains fairly similar.

[Shiven]

4 hours ago, TheBean said:

the problem is the ram. you dont seem to have enough. if your laptop lets you add more ram, please do. ryzen is heavily memory starved so giving it lots of *fast* ram is very important for performance. 

I have 1 more slot for additional ram on my laptop, so should I get another 8 GB 2400 mhz ram to unlock dual channel ram or should I get faster ram (which will just be downclocked I guess).

 

Btw, I also use memreduct everytime before I start playing to free some more ram, you can see while I play about 80% of my ram is used.

 

How much performance increase do you think adding more ram will give me? Will it fix the fluctuating cpu clocks?

[TheBean]

1 hour ago, Shiven said:

Btw, I also use memreduct everytime before I start playing to free some more ram, you can see while I play about 80% of my ram is used.

thats not nessesary. just close chrome before you play or anything else in the background. 

just buy the same ram stick you already have but another one. 

[Shiven]

12 minutes ago, TheBean said:

thats not nessesary. just close chrome before you play or anything else in the background. 

just buy the same ram stick you already have but another one. 

Yeah, I play with nothing running in the background. Do you have an idea how much increase in performance or fps I'll get by utilizing dual channel memory?

 

[TheBean]

13 hours ago, Shiven said:

Do you have an idea how much increase in performance or fps I'll get by utilizing dual channel memory?

its hard to say without trying but it will help for sure. you are also running low on memory so windows will move things to the page file which is extremely slow (it uses your ssd for the ram. and ssd's are like 1/100 the speed of ram)

 

so adding more ram will stop windows from going to the page file which will speed things up, and then dual channel which will get you at least +10%

[Shiven]

8 hours ago, TheBean said:

its hard to say without trying but it will help for sure. you are also running low on memory so windows will move things to the page file which is extremely slow (it uses your ssd for the ram. and ssd's are like 1/100 the speed of ram)

 

so adding more ram will stop windows from going to the page file which will speed things up, and then dual channel which will get you at least +10%

Ohhh that makes sense. Funnily enough, I actually have a 1 TB 5400 RPM HDD, so it would be even slower right? I wonder if thats the reason my game takes ages to load sometimes from menu to in-game and vice-versa.

 

Do you think it may be the reason my laptop sometimes runs very choppy and not-so-smooth?

 

Thanks for the advice bro . I'll defo get back to y'all once I add more ram in the coming week(s).

[TheBean]

1 hour ago, Shiven said:

Do you think it may be the reason my laptop sometimes runs very choppy and not-so-smooth?

oh definitely. hdd is like 1/20 speed of even a super cheap ssd. upgrading that to an ssd will feel like you just got a new computer. that should be the first thing you do and that is #1 priority. you can get 500gb ssd for $40 and it will make a gigantic difference in day to day usage. 

[Shiven]

On 7/21/2021 at 8:51 AM, TheBean said:

oh definitely. hdd is like 1/20 speed of even a super cheap ssd. upgrading that to an ssd will feel like you just got a new computer. that should be the first thing you do and that is #1 priority. you can get 500gb ssd for $40 and it will make a gigantic difference in day to day usage. 

Hey, so I got another 8gb ram for my laptop, so now my laptop runs with 16gb ram dual channel memory (confirmed with cpuz).

 

Good news is I'm not facing any in-game stutters anymore!

 

And bad news is I'm still getting 55 - 90 fps on 720p low settings. Also, my cpu clocks are still fluctuating, which doesn't happen in other games (it takes two).

 

Any help?

[TheBean]

your game is weirdly not using 100% of the gpu which is odd considering the low end gpu i assume you have. 

honestly, try *increasing* the game settings. sounds odd, but right now from the task manager screenshot it looks like you are being CPU limited. incerasing the game quality will shift the load a bit more to the GPU which could potentially help. first thing would be to try changing to 1080p

[Shiven]

15 hours ago, TheBean said:

your game is weirdly not using 100% of the gpu which is odd considering the low end gpu i assume you have. 

honestly, try *increasing* the game settings. sounds odd, but right now from the task manager screenshot it looks like you are being CPU limited. incerasing the game quality will shift the load a bit more to the GPU which could potentially help. first thing would be to try changing to 1080p

Yeah, I've tried everything from 720p low to high and 1080p low to high, and it doesn't help. Fps gets lower with 1080p and higher settings.

[Mark Kaine]

On 7/19/2021 at 7:54 PM, Shiven said:

umm, do you not see this? 1 core almost (it realistically is) maxed out…

Thats also why changing settings doesnt do much…

 

This will depend on the game, but that one you're trying to play is obviously heavily cpu bound on your  system, there isnt really much you can do, buying more RAM likely isnt going to help either (only slightly, because  dual RAM *is* better than single RAM, it just wont make the cpu faster, which would be needed to "fix" this issue)

PS: also i would recommend using hwinfo (or afterburner ) + rtss overlay ingame so you can see whats actually happening, something is really odd about those taskmanager screens, not sure the game was even running or suspended at that point (plus taskmanager is often inaccurate)

 

Something like this (yeap, cores/threads are important you need to see all of them)

 

Also I think, if the fluctuating framerates bother you Vsync (or Gsync if you have that) will be your best bet.

 

18 hours ago, TheBean said:

your game is weirdly not using 100% of the gpu which is odd considering

Edit: misunderstood, but its not odd, because  core 1 is literally  through the roof, that makes the gpu waiting for new frames, hence low utilization.

[Shiven]

1 hour ago, Mark Kaine said:

umm, do you not see this? 1 core almost (it realistically is) maxed out…

Thats also why changing settings doesnt do much…

 

This will depend on the game, but that one you're trying to play is obviously heavily cpu bound on your  system, there isnt really much you can do, buying more RAM likely isnt going to help either (only slightly, because  dual RAM *is* better than single RAM, it just wont make the cpu faster, which would be needed to "fix" this issue)

PS: also i would recommend using hwinfo (or afterburner ) + rtss overlay ingame so you can see whats actually happening, something is really odd about those taskmanager screens, not sure the game was even running or suspended at that point (plus taskmanager is often inaccurate)

 

Something like this (yeap, cores/threads are important you need to see all of them)

 

Also I think, if the fluctuating framerates bother you Vsync (or Gsync if you have that) will be your best bet.

 

Edit: misunderstood, but its not odd, because  core 1 is literally  through the roof, that makes the gpu waiting for new frames, hence low utilization.

For the task manager screenshot, I basically was in the middle of a valorant match and I quickly alt tabbed and took the ss.

 

As for the hwinfo stuff, I use that for looking at my cpu temp (which also shows inaccurate temps for some reason in rtss overlay but not in the actual software. Eg. In-game it's showing around 70 usually but when I check max temps in the app it's around 80), and for the rest (including cpu clocks speeds and utilisation for cores/threads 1-8), I use msi afterburner + rtss.

 

Can you tell me how I should share that information with you? Just a normal ss or some graph which I have to find?

 

As for vsync, it locks my fps to 60 and increases latency by a ton, so that's a no-go.

 

Thanks for the help.

 

[Mark Kaine]

5 minutes ago, Shiven said:

For the task manager screenshot, I basically was in the middle of a valorant match and I quickly alt tabbed and took the ss.

Ya, but that can put the game immediately into a suspend mode, hence it could be the taskmanager info is not accurately presenting what happens while you play.

 

 

6 minutes ago, Shiven said:

As for vsync, it locks my fps to 60 and increases latency by a ton, so that's a no-go.

 

Well, you can also lock framerate with rtss for example, no vsync…

 

the thing is it sounds like you cant decide if you want stable framerates  or the highest possible… you cant have both doesnt work that way. Hence many people use rtss to limit the frames - if done right its definitely smoother than a constantly changing framerate … you just have to decide what you actually want?

[Shiven]

23 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

Well, you can also lock framerate with rtss for example, no vsync…

I tried the rtss frame rate limit, and it's basically like in-game fps cap, and if I use scanline sync then it's v-sync without the input latency lag, meaning I can get constant 60 fps.

 

23 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

the thing is it sounds like you cant decide if you want stable framerates  or the highest possible…

Well, what I want is the performance that my pc should(?) on paper be able to give me.

 

Look at this:

 

The man has 16 gb ram like me, just that he has 2666 mhz and I have 2400 mhz. He also has GTX 1050 2 GB variant, while I have the 4 GB variant. We have different processors, he has core i5 8400 while I have ryzen 5 2500u. (Read all this in the vid desc)

 

The funny part is he is easily getting 130 - 190 fps without any sweat. I'd be more than happy to get constant 130 fps instead of constant 60. Shouldn't that be possible for my build?

[Mark Kaine]

33 minutes ago, Shiven said:

Shouldn't that be possible for my build?

its always problematic to compare hw with a - random - youtube video, you dont have exactly the same hw, you dont even know if the video doesnt just pretend to be running this hardware.

 

 

I can only go by this, as i already said, this your 'main' issue, and the one i can tell u with certainty.

 

this is your limit, 1 thread constantly at near / over 100%, that is simply it, if you cannot lower this usage (which is unlikely) you wont get better frames (not significantly)

 

Im sorry, but thats what a cpu bottleneck is and looks like.

 

 

*** just for reference, the 8400 is much faster (~60%) than the 2500u, so its possible the guy in the video just never hits 100% on any core and thus could actually get those frames, afaik its not a really demanding game. 

 

Thats the problem with cpu bottlenecks, you cant really do much about it (except some intel cpus do overclock exceptionally well, unlike Ryzen) wheras a gpu bottleneck is much easier to deal with (just lower settings)

[Mark Kaine]

What you can do to see this effect is use MSI Afterburner overlay, that should make the correlation between CPU usage and framerates much more clearer. Also sometimes you can find a setting that actually lowers CPU usage, which would obviously help (however i still propose a framerate  limit for smoother experience)

Something like this, its important to see CPU usage on *all* cores / threads *and* GPU usage, and framerates (of course)

 

 

(this is literally a game that uses only one core, but it doesnt  really matter, just an example for an overlay layout that gives you all the information you generally would want)

 

 

[Shiven]

14 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

What you can do to see this effect is use MSI Afterburner overlay, that should make the correlation between CPU usage and framerates much more clearer. Also sometimes you can find a setting that actually lowers CPU usage, which would obviously help (however i still propose a framerate  limit for smoother experience)

Something like this, its important to see CPU usage on *all* cores / threads *and* GPU usage, and framerates (of course)

 

 

(this is literally a game that uses only one core, but it doesnt  really matter, just an example for an overlay layout that gives you all the information you generally would want)

 

 

Hey, so weirdly enough, I was in a game of valorant and quickly hovered over to task manager again to see the cpu clock utilisations, and this time it was thread 8 which represented bottleneck-type utilisation, and not thread 1.

 

Even more weird, whenever I'm in game and looking at my cpu clocks % through afterburner+rtss, I never manage to see any of them touching 100% or even going past 90%.