Frame Time Issues

[Lil-Dabbie]

Hello, ever since upgrading from my 1060 to my 6700xt I have had issues with frame timing. (Essentially I get micro stuttering or full on freezing constantly). This did not happen the first month or so of owning the card but has popped up recently and been happening for a couple months now. I have removed all overclocks on my CPU, and put the GPU back to stock settings from its auto overclock but it didn't help. Shown below is the graph of framtime in CS:GO, which is more cpu bound I know but my cpu didn't have any stuttering issues beforehand and it should be able to play the game just fine (i7 9700k). The only thing I could think of is that my system is now fast enough to where my RAM (which is mismatched and running at the default of 2133MHz) is causing issues. Anyone have any ideas on what may be causing this? It happens in most games I play (from minecraft to valorant and seemingly everything imbetween) but only CS:GO is where it becomes VERY apparent. Maybe it's a CS:GO problem?

 

[YoungBlade]

Having RAM running that slow with a 9700K could certainly cause these kinds of problems. What motherboard do you have? It might be possible to do some tweaking to fix that.

 

Another thing to try, if you haven't done so already, is using DDU to clear out your display drivers and reinstall them totally fresh.

[bezza...]

probbs a cpu or ram bottlneck

[emosun]

Did you bother to ddu the previous drivers

[Lil-Dabbie]

10 minutes ago, YoungBlade said:

Having RAM running that slow with a 9700K could certainly cause these kinds of problems. What motherboard do you have? It might be possible to do some tweaking to fix that.

 

Another thing to try, if you haven't done so already, is using DDU to clear out your display drivers and reinstall them totally fresh.

I have a z board from asus I believe. I don't remember exactly which board though... Would it tell me in the BIOS? Also I have used DDU a couple times as well, just forgot to mention.

[Lil-Dabbie]

10 minutes ago, Tomberry said:

probbs a cpu or ram bottlneck

This is what I would assume, however, this issue is not anywhere as bad in other games such as valorant which is also CPU bottlenecked. Also at a few hundred frames why would a bottleneck cause crazy frametime issues and stuttering? Maybe I'm misunderstanding something?

[Lil-Dabbie]

1 minute ago, emosun said:

Did you bother to ddu the previous drivers

Yes, I did remove all Nvidia drivers and then removed all drivers later on in an attempt to have nothing but the newest AMD drivers.

[YoungBlade]

2 minutes ago, Lil-Dabbie said:

I have a z board from asus I believe. I don't remember exactly which board though... Would it tell me in the BIOS? Also I have used DDU a couple times as well, just forgot to mention.

The BIOS would probably tell you, but regardless, a Z board will have RAM overclocking capabilities, which is what we want.

 

Are you comfortable with overclocking?

[Lil-Dabbie]

2 minutes ago, YoungBlade said:

The BIOS would probably tell you, but regardless, a Z board will have RAM overclocking capabilities, which is what we want.

 

Are you comfortable with overclocking?

As long as someone is able to tell me how, I don't see why not. I tried turning on XMP just to see if it would bring it up the the speed of the two slower sticks but it did not work and caused blue screen.

[YoungBlade]

1 minute ago, Lil-Dabbie said:

As long as someone is able to tell me how, I don't see why not. I tried turning on XMP just to see if it would bring it up the the speed of the two slower sticks but it did not work and caused blue screen.

If the sticks are mis-matched, then XMP may not work. All XMP does is take a profile that's been stored on the RAM and load those voltages and timings. It's a dumb system (as in, unsophisticated) that isn't able to take into account differences between the mis-matched modules.

 

Do you know what RAM you have? If not, install CPU-Z and go to the "SPD" tab, to show the timings tables for the two sticks:

 

 

If you can share that here, we can see what we're working with.

[Lil-Dabbie]

7 minutes ago, YoungBlade said:

If the sticks are mis-matched, then XMP may not work. All XMP does is take a profile that's been stored on the RAM and load those voltages and timings. It's a dumb system (as in, unsophisticated) that isn't able to take into account differences between the mis-matched modules.

 

Do you know what RAM you have? If not, install CPU-Z and go to the "SPD" tab, to show the timings tables for the two sticks:

 

 

If you can share that here, we can see what we're working with.

 

Also this is the motherboard in case you still wanted to see it.

[YoungBlade]

Okay, so with that, we should be able to get the memory at least working at DDR4-2666 without much issue. Since the XMP profiles don't require adding extra voltage, it should also be totally safe.

 

In your BIOS, there should be a section for memory in the Ai Tweaker tab. The first thing I would try is turning on XMP to load the timings, then going down to where it shows your DRAM Frequency and manually setting that to DDR4-2666 and see if that can boot. If so, you'll already be getting a 25% boost in memory speeds.

 

That might be all you need to do to get it to work at the lower speed.

 

If that still fails, you'll probably need to also manually set the timings. That section is going to look a lot more complicated, but all you need to do is match up the higher numbers from the XMP columns of those tables - higher is worse for timings, but we want to make sure it works. So CL/CAS would be set to 17, both RAS values to 17, tRAS to 39, and tRC to 55.

 

That should just work once all those values are set manually. If they don't, we can try giving the sticks a bit more voltage, but that shouldn't be necessary.

 

If you're having trouble figuring out which setting is which, feel free to take a picture with your phone and post it here.

[Lil-Dabbie]

6 minutes ago, YoungBlade said:

Okay, so with that, we should be able to get the memory at least working at DDR4-2666 without much issue. Since the XMP profiles don't require adding extra voltage, it should also be totally safe.

 

In your BIOS, there should be a section for memory in the Ai Tweaker tab. The first thing I would try is turning on XMP to load the timings, then going down to where it shows your DRAM Frequency and manually setting that to DDR4-2666 and see if that can boot. If so, you'll already be getting a 25% boost in memory speeds.

 

That might be all you need to do to get it to work at the lower speed.

 

If that still fails, you'll probably need to also manually set the timings. That section is going to look a lot more complicated, but all you need to do is match up the higher numbers from the XMP columns of those tables - higher is worse for timings, but we want to make sure it works. So CL/CAS would be set to 17, both RAS values to 17, tRAS to 39, and tRC to 55.

 

That should just work once all those values are set manually. If they don't, we can try giving the sticks a bit more voltage, but that shouldn't be necessary.

 

If you're having trouble figuring out which setting is which, feel free to take a picture with your phone and post it here.

So I went to Ai tweaker and set XMP but it only allows for XMP to be set for the 2800MHz sticks. So even if I change the frequency to 2666MHz won’t that have everything else wrong?

[YoungBlade]

6 minutes ago, Lil-Dabbie said:

So I went to Ai tweaker and set XMP but it only allows for XMP to be set for the 2800MHz sticks. So even if I change the frequency to 2666MHz won’t that have everything else wrong?

That should lower the frequency to 2666 still - manually setting that overrides the XMP value.

 

The timings will be slightly lower than expected for tRAS and tRC, so there's a chance that there could be instability from that. It also may work just fine - you'd be slightly "overclocking" that stick by giving it tighter timings.

 

You can go change those timings values manually if you'd like - I was just offering that first method for the sake of simplicity so you didn't need to figure out where the timings settings are.

[Lil-Dabbie]

2 minutes ago, YoungBlade said:

That should lower the frequency to 2666 still - manually setting that overrides the XMP value.

 

The timings will be slightly lower than expected for tRAS and tRC, so there's a chance that there could be instability from that. It also may work just fine - you'd be slightly "overclocking" that stick by giving it tighter timings.

 

You can go change those timings values manually if you'd like - I was just offering that first method for the sake of simplicity so you didn't need to figure out where the timings settings are.

I have restarted after that and no blue screen so far. Is there any quick way to test stability of memory?

[YoungBlade]

7 minutes ago, Lil-Dabbie said:

I have restarted after that and no blue screen so far. Is there any quick way to test stability of memory?

Quick? Depends on how you define that. That's one of the downsides of overclocking is that it takes time to validate.

 

For overclocking my RAM, I use OCCT's memory test running for the hour that's allowed with the free version as a first step. Then I run Prime95 using "Large FFTs" overnight. So far, that has been sufficient for me. I overclocked my RAM from DDR4-3000 to DDR4-3333 without needing to raise voltages.

 

Here's a link to OCCT: https://www.ocbase.com/

 

Here's a link to Prime95: https://www.mersenne.org/download/

[Lil-Dabbie]

8 minutes ago, YoungBlade said:

Quick? Depends on how you define that. That's one of the downsides of overclocking is that it takes time to validate.

 

For overclocking my RAM, I use OCCT's memory test running for the hour that's allowed with the free version as a first step. Then I run Prime95 using "Large FFTs" overnight. So far, that has been sufficient for me. I overclocked my RAM from DDR4-3000 to DDR4-3333 without needing to raise voltages.

 

Here's a link to OCCT: https://www.ocbase.com/

 

Here's a link to Prime95: https://www.mersenne.org/download/

Okay, I will have to give those a try. I just went into a deathmatch in CS:GO to see how it looks now and it felt somewhat better. The graph also shows an improvement I would say.

Still some hitching but it definitely became better overall.

[Lil-Dabbie]

Thanks to everyone who responded and gave solutions, and a big thank you to @YoungBlade for helping me overclock my RAM! While it may not be a complete fix (upgrading RAM to be the same frequency and faster than 2666MHz) it definitely seemed to help overall and I learned something new.

[YoungBlade]

I'm glad I could help!

 

If your system passes those stability tests, we could give some actual memory OC a try. That would come with a degree of risk, because you'd need to increase voltages based on the fact that the slower stick can't do DDR4-2800 at 1.2V as it stands. I would only expect to be able to get up around DDR4-2933 as a realistic target, and that's only a bit over a 10% improvement. You might be able to do DDR4-3333 if you're lucky - another 25% boost.

 

Given the price of RAM, and the fact that 9000 series Intel can usually handle fast RAM pretty well, it would be easier and more fruitful to just upgrade yourself with a 2x8GB or even 2x16GB kit of DDR4-3600 memory.

[Lil-Dabbie]

Just now, YoungBlade said:

I'm glad I could help!

 

If your system passes those stability tests, we could give some actual memory OC a try. That would come with a degree of risk, because you'd need to increase voltages based on the fact that the slower stick can't do DDR4-2800 at 1.2V as it stands. I would only expect to be able to get up around DDR4-2933 as a realistic target, and that's only a bit over a 10% improvement. You might be able to do DDR4-3333 if you're lucky - another 25% boost.

 

Given the price of RAM, and the fact that 9000 series Intel can usually handle fast RAM pretty well, it would be easier and more fruitful to just upgrade yourself with a 2x8GB or even 2x16GB kit of DDR4-3600 memory.

Is there a way to see what RAM a CPU is capable of running? For instance, I know it runs DDR4 and can't run DDR5 but can it run 3600MHz the same as 2133MHz? Like is there RAM that is too fast for a 9700k?

[YoungBlade]

16 minutes ago, Lil-Dabbie said:

Is there a way to see what RAM a CPU is capable of running? For instance, I know it runs DDR4 and can't run DDR5 but can it run 3600MHz the same as 2133MHz? Like is there RAM that is too fast for a 9700k?

With the 9700K, the rated speed is DDR4-2933, so anything beyond that is overclocking from Intel's perspective.

 

When it comes to knowing the max speed for a particular chip, the true answer is "it depends" because it's based on the silicon lottery. Your 9700K might be a "golden chip" when it comes to memory OC, and might be able to go to something crazy like DDR4-5000. Or it might be a dud and barely be able to make DDR4-3000 work. However, in general, the different generations of CPUs all have a limit for memory compatibility that's somewhat above their rated speed. And this knowledge is gained by the community over time as people try pushing their CPUs. Unfortunately, I don't know of a good resource on this, but you can look around on YouTube and see reviewers doing memory tests with various CPU generations and their results will, in general, be close to what you can expect.

 

For Intel 9000 series chips, most of them were able to handle DDR4-4000 speeds. Faster than that was not guaranteed, but was often possible. You can find people who used DDR4-4400 with i9 9900K CPUs and the like. Their competitors in the Ryzen 2000 series could often barely handle DDR4-3200, and anything that could reach DDR4-3600 was basically considered to be a golden chip.

 

The reason I would suggest DDR4-3600 is that, right now, it's the "sweet spot" in terms of value. Slower sticks are cheaper, but not much cheaper. While faster sticks are way more expensive. So it's the best value, in general. And your 9700K can almost certainly handle it.

[Lil-Dabbie]

1 minute ago, YoungBlade said:

With the 9700K, the rated speed is DDR4-2933, so anything beyond that is overclocking from Intel's perspective.

 

When it comes to knowing the max speed for a particular chip, the true answer is "it depends" because it's based on the silicon lottery. Your 9700K might be a "golden chip" when it comes to memory OC, and might be able to go to something crazy like DDR4-5000. Or it might be a dud and barely be able to make DDR4-3000 work. However, in general, the different generations of CPUs all have a limit for memory compatibility that's somewhat above their rated speed. And this knowledge is gained by the community over time as people try pushing their CPUs. Unfortunately, I don't know of a good resource on this, but you can look around on YouTube and see reviewers doing memory tests with various CPU generations and their results will, in general, be close to what you can expect.

 

For Intel 9000 series chips, most of them were able to handle DDR4-4000 speeds. Faster than that was not guaranteed, but was often possible. You can find people who used DDR4-4400 with i9 9900K CPUs and the like. Their competitors in the Ryzen 2000 series could often barely handle DDR4-3200, and anything that could reach above that that was basically considered to be a golden chip.

 

The reason I would suggest DDR4-3600 is that, right now, it's the "sweet spot" in terms of value. Slower sticks are cheaper, but not much cheaper. While faster sticks are way more expensive. So it's the best value, in general. And your 9700K can almost certainly handle it.

Awesome, thank you again for all of your help!