How to increase performance in single core game?

[Krzych]

Hi,

I play Lord of the Rings Online quite often and this game, being very, almost 9 year old, is not optimized for multi core utilization. It uses single core, disabling remaining three cores through setting affinity in task manager doesn't make big difference, maybe 10%. Overclocking CPU is helping a lot, while overclocking GPU gives no results, it is not utilized in even half and mostly sits on 1.005 voltage and 1139 clock. I have i5-4690K, currently 4,5 GHz 1.27V, GTX 980 Ti and 8 GB 2400MHz RAM. Problem is that for about 4 years devs are releasing content that is too demanding for single core and you get very bad performance on whatever system you have, because game will use only one core anyway. There is some discussion going on on game forums about performance problems so I made some benchmarks, you can see them here. As you can see, overclocking CPU is helping significantly by reducing FPS drops and increasing average FPS, but it is still far from comfortable. I tried to push CPU further to 4,7 GHz at 1,35V, but even though it was stable on 12 hour stress test, it is actually scoring noticeably lower in game than 4,5 GHz 1,27V. Lowering graphics settings doesn't help, and even if it does a little, such small performance gain is very not proportional to visual quality loss.

My question is what else can I do to increase performance in this single core game? I don't know, binding one core to game and forbid anything else from using this core, whatever that can help increase performance, because its just bad. And there is almost certainly no hope for game optimization or update.

Thanks in advance for any help,

[Castdeath97]

Not much, Skylake has a form of reverse hyperthreading I heard to help with this.

[TheRandomness]

2 minutes ago, Castdeath97 said:

Not much, Skylake has a form of reverse hyperthreading I heard to help with this.

That was a myth proven to be debunked afaik.

[Bouzoo]

7 minutes ago, Krzych said:

I don't know, binding one core to game and forbid anything else from using this core, whatever that can help increase performance, because its just bad.

Afaik that won't help. I see you've been asking on OC.net w/o success. Have you tried some older drivers?

[Krzych]

2 minutes ago, Bouzoo said:

Afaik that won't help. I see you've been asking on OC.net w/o success. Have you tried some older drivers?

So far I didn't ask anywhere else than here. Maybe its another angry LOTRO player:) And I never tried older drivers, I don't think it will help, and even if it does, LOTRO is one of my favorite games but not only one and I cannot use old drivers just because of this game or even worse - install other drivers every time I want to play.

Ehhh, this game is hopeless. 

[Bouzoo]

1 minute ago, Krzych said:

So far I didn't ask anywhere else than here. Maybe its another angry LOTRO player:) And I never tried older drivers, I don't think it will help, and even if it does, LOTRO is one of my favorite games but not only one and I cannot use old drivers just because of this game or even worse - install other drivers every time I want to play.

Ehhh, this game is hopeless. 

Figured that someone with username Krzych04650 might be you. 

http://www.overclock.net/t/1558645/official-nvidia-gtx-980-ti-owners-club/5340

[Monarch]

There's nothing you can do. Even if you had the CPU with the best single core performance, there's only so much a single core can do. I'm not familiar with LOTRO, but sometimes it's not even possible to multi-thread games due to API limitations. Guess it's not the case here, since you said they added some content later on that made the game more demanding, so they probably figured it's not worth it to multi-thread it.

[Castdeath97]

34 minutes ago, TheRandomness said:

That was a myth proven to be debunked afaik.

Really? Any link to it?

[Krzych]

12 minutes ago, Monarch said:

There's nothing you can do. Even if you had the CPU with the best single core performance, there's only so much a single core can do. I'm not familiar with LOTRO, but sometimes it's not even possible to multi-thread games due to API limitations. Guess it's not the case here, since you said they added some content later on that made the game more demanding, so they probably figured it's not worth it to multi-thread it.

They added some DX10/11 features like dynamic foliage shadows, AO, interactive water and such things, but this is not a problem, older areas are running very well even on maxed out settings. Problem is that they, in their incompetence, crossed single core limitations while developing new regions and revamping older ones and its now running very bad in many places. And they are still developing unoptimized content like they are unaware of those performance issues. Or maybe their human eye cannot see more than 30 FPS, I don't know. And of course there is no hope for optimization or multi core support, because one - they are most likely unable to this, and two - they don't have enough resources. They don't even have enough resources for proper forum moderating, developers of MMO based on one of the most popular stories in the world, mind you.

[Glenwing]

23 minutes ago, Castdeath97 said:

Really? Any link to it?

 

On 9/21/2015 at 10:45 AM, Glenwing said:

The "reverse hyperthreading" does not exist, it was a completely made-up rumor based on pure speculation, which has already been retracted by the original source of the rumor. They got one strange result on a single section of one benchmark, and started jumping to conclusions, which ultimately turned out to be completely wrong. They were corrected by Intel themselves at the IDF event where Skylake was officially covered.

Original source of the rumor: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Skylake-mit-inversem-Hyper-Threading-2779793.html
Later update from same source: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/IDF-2015-Intel-enthuellt-ein-wenig-die-Skylake-Architektur-2784862.html
Translated:
 

Inverse Hyper-Threading, as speculated here due to strange measurement results, is not supported by Skylake. Other improvements are responsible for the sometimes considerable acceleration of single-thread applications

 

[jjohnthedon1]

Disable you cores through the bios

then up vcore to 1.35 volts and try for 4.8 ghz should be relatively easy to hit once u have disabled the others cores in the bios 

also what I have found with mmos that use one core is even tho ur not gpu bound lowering the settings does help because the CPU still has to send instructions to the gpu 

[Krzych]

36 minutes ago, jjohnthedon1 said:

Disable you cores through the bios

then up vcore to 1.35 volts and try for 4.8 ghz should be relatively easy to hit once u have disabled the others cores in the bios 

also what I have found with mmos that use one core is even tho ur not gpu bound lowering the settings does help because the CPU still has to send instructions to the gpu 

Leaving only one core enabled decreases performance in game by about 15-20%, so all of this overclocking become pointless. System need something too, so I need two cores enabled.

Is it easier to achieve high overclock if I overclock only one core or two cores, while disabling other 2?

Can overclocking RAM help?

[jjohnthedon1]

4 hours ago, Krzych said:

Leaving only one core enabled decreases performance in game by about 15-20%, so all of this overclocking become pointless. System need something too, so I need two cores enabled.

Is it easier to achieve high overclock if I overclock only one core or two cores, while disabling other 2?

Can overclocking RAM help?

Overclocking ram can help with CPU bottle neck and try2 cores at 4.8 at 1.35 volts 

[Trik'Stari]

I have a 4690k (stock clocks), I had a GTX 660 back when I played LOTRO. I never had any troubles running it on full blast at 1080p.

This was a while ago though. At least two years now. Have things changed that much?

[runit3]

8 hours ago, Krzych said:

Leaving only one core enabled decreases performance in game by about 15-20%, so all of this overclocking become pointless. System need something too, so I need two cores enabled.

Is it easier to achieve high overclock if I overclock only one core or two cores, while disabling other 2?

Can overclocking RAM help?

Disabling cores should have no effect, if anything I would expect it to run worse (forcing all processes of your OS onto one core + the game). You could try setting the core affinity for the game to a relatively unused core.

Aside from that, since you're running a 980Ti try playing the game with DSR enabled. If you're on a 1080p monitor it'll play in 4k. Lower some of the details and see if transitioning a decent chunk of load to the GPU makes a difference.

[LokiFire]

Overclock balls to the wall, 5ghz or go home and stop caring.

[Krzych]

4 hours ago, Trik'Stari said:

I have a 4690k (stock clocks), I had a GTX 660 back when I played LOTRO. I never had any troubles running it on full blast at 1080p.

This was a while ago though. At least two years now. Have things changed that much?

I don't know how far you gone with content, but game is running fine before entering Rohan, except few places on the way. But Rohan and Gondor is complete disaster and it was like this from their release. GTX 660 is enough for this game, I wouldn't be surprised if it also gets bottlenecked by single core. R9 270X was bottlenecked when I was playing in this card, never reached 60% of usage while FPS was jumping all around the place from 20 to 60 in Rohan cities and villages. I also don't know when Bree was revamped, but it used to run at 100 FPS+, and now... just check my benchmark linked in first post, this is from bree. Dips to even 26 FPS on stock CPU. 

1 hour ago, runit3 said:

Disabling cores should have no effect, if anything I would expect it to run worse (forcing all processes of your OS onto one core + the game). You could try setting the core affinity for the game to a relatively unused core.

Aside from that, since you're running a 980Ti try playing the game with DSR enabled. If you're on a 1080p monitor it'll play in 4k. Lower some of the details and see if transitioning a decent chunk of load to the GPU makes a difference.

I am on 1440p monitor, but this game is highly incompatible with DSR. Everything gets blurry and UI is practically gone, completely unreadable. Its very small even on native 4K. 

I will play around a bit more with some ideas. 

But one question is still unanswered, can I enable one or two core only for the game and forbid anything else of using them to make sure that this core is 100% available only for game?

[Krzych]

I tried few things but it looks like I cannot do much more than overcloking, setting affinity to third and fourth core(works noticeably better than setting affinity to first and second core) and setting high priority. I got some good and not that good results. There you can see some improvement, even significant one, but performance is still bad and hopeless. But for example here there is amazing improvement, from average 45 FPS and 90% of measurements being below 60FPS, to average 59 FPS and only 20% below 60. So there is some hope that majority of unoptimized places will now run on somehow acceptable framerate. All benchmarks were made while running or riding horse on high speed, so performance will get even better if I just walk in such bad performance places instead of running.

Thanks for any help, I didn't expect so many replies. I hope that you are in love will better optimized games, good luck 

[Krzych]

By the way, which CPU has the best single core performance? Is it possible to get something noticeably better than 4690K 4,5 GHz?

[Glenwing]

1 hour ago, Krzych said:

By the way, which CPU has the best single core performance? Is it possible to get something noticeably better than 4690K 4,5 GHz?

Right now the best is Skylake (i5-6600K/i7-6700K), but it's only slightly better than Haswell so I doubt it would make much difference.

[Krzych]

23 hours ago, Glenwing said:

Right now the best is Skylake (i5-6600K/i7-6700K), but it's only slightly better than Haswell so I doubt it would make much difference.

Thats what I thought. Maybe some new CPUs will change something on this matter, but I don't expect this to happen, they will rather to go into multi core even more without increasing single core performance.

 

Anyway, thanks for all replies, I got all answers I needed. 

[Nena Trinity]

Skylake + fast ram + OC both? (Haswell will probably do fine to)

[johnermon]

On 2/1/2016 at 5:34 PM, Krzych said:

Hi,

I play Lord of the Rings Online quite often and this game, being very, almost 9 year old, is not optimized for multi core utilization. It uses single core, disabling remaining three cores through setting affinity in task manager doesn't make big difference, maybe 10%. Overclocking CPU is helping a lot, while overclocking GPU gives no results, it is not utilized in even half and mostly sits on 1.005 voltage and 1139 clock. I have i5-4690K, currently 4,5 GHz 1.27V, GTX 980 Ti and 8 GB 2400MHz RAM. Problem is that for about 4 years devs are releasing content that is too demanding for single core and you get very bad performance on whatever system you have, because game will use only one core anyway. There is some discussion going on on game forums about performance problems so I made some benchmarks, you can see them here. As you can see, overclocking CPU is helping significantly by reducing FPS drops and increasing average FPS, but it is still far from comfortable. I tried to push CPU further to 4,7 GHz at 1,35V, but even though it was stable on 12 hour stress test, it is actually scoring noticeably lower in game than 4,5 GHz 1,27V. Lowering graphics settings doesn't help, and even if it does a little, such small performance gain is very not proportional to visual quality loss.

My question is what else can I do to increase performance in this single core game? I don't know, binding one core to game and forbid anything else from using this core, whatever that can help increase performance, because its just bad. And there is almost certainly no hope for game optimization or update.

Thanks in advance for any help,

XCpu upgrades or overlooking are your only options. Of course that is assuming your pc is being seriously bottleneck by your Cpu.