BF1: Are i5's really that bad?

[ThatAngryGnome]

Hey y'all,

 

I know this has been posted before, but I wanted to post it again in light of new patches. BF1 has ran pretty underwhelmingly for me: 

Here's my rig: 

4670k OC'd to 4.24ghz @ 1.22V, CPU cores unparked. Cooled with NZXT X61, never even hits 70 degrees

GTX 1080 (Asus STRIX), not OC'd

16GB Corsair RAM @ 1600Mhz 

Corsair 850W PSU, MSI Gaming 7 mobo, HyperX Savage 500GB SSD.

 

First order of business, the reason why my CPU is rather old while I'm running a GTX1080 is because I upgraded a 3 year old computer, and decided the CPU didn't have to be replaced.

 

For BF1, I usually get 75+ FPS (I've capped the FPS to 75 to help my issues). However, in intense scenes or after an hour of gaming, I get FPS drops to the low 30's at times. It's very bothersome. 

 

My CPU is almost always maxed at 100%. I don't know if Shadowplay effects my CPU usage that much.

 

I was wondering if anyone else has had the same problems as me, and how they fixed it. I don't think I want to upgrade (I'd have to buy a new mobo since buying a Haswell i7 doesn't sound like a smart idea at the moment). The cost would be upwards of 500 bucks for an 7th gen i7 and a mobo, which would theoretically fix my problems.

 

 

[xDylanio]

Well i mean you have an i5 and a great gpu... But apart from that shadow play never does that to me, so I guess it's probably your cpu

[TheOnlinePotato]

try finding a second hand i7 other than upgrading to 7th gen they're still great chips.

[zMeul]

6 minutes ago, ThatAngryGnome said:

However, in intense scenes or after an hour of gaming, I get FPS drops to the low 30's at times. It's very bothersome. 

you need to investigate further because that's not a CPU problem and sounds a lot more like a memory leak, somewhere

[Scruffy90]

Thats an over 50% drop. Def a larger issue than either the cpu or gpu by itself.

[ThatAngryGnome]

8 minutes ago, zMeul said:

you need to investigate further because that's not a CPU problem and sounds a lot more like a memory leak, somewhere

Hmmm did some research, turns out Killer Ethernet (comes standard with many MSI boards) is known for memory leaks. I'll give this a shot and report back in my OP, thanks!

[zMeul]

Just now, ThatAngryGnome said:

Hmmm did some research, turns out Killer Ethernet (comes standard with many MSI boards) is known for memory leaks. I'll give this a shot and report back in my OP, thanks!

if you have a Killer NIC, remove everything but the drivers - Killer software is known to cause issues

[typographie]

I'm using a 6600K at 4.5 GHz. All four cores are usually pegged around 95%+ in BF1, but I don't usually have any noticeable framerate issues. I'm at 60 FPS most of the time, and if there are any drops they're probably no worse than 55 FPS or so. If I try to do much in the background while BF1 is running (like, more demanding than a Youtube video), I do start to get some noticeable framerate hiccups.

 

I have Shadowplay's Instant Replay function turned off because I've seen it cause performance issues in some games before. It's not entirely disabled, but it has to be turned on to record manually. If you've got yours recording all the time, I suppose its possible that's a factor.

[ThatAngryGnome]

1 hour ago, zMeul said:

if you have a Killer NIC, remove everything but the drivers - Killer software is known to cause issues

Just did that. I didn't notice anything different, but in my two hours of testing, there didn't seem to be any performance degradation. If there was performance degradation, it seems to have gone. Still, there were frame drops and my CPU was max'd at 100, with my FPS fluctuating  

[zMeul]

3 minutes ago, ThatAngryGnome said:

Still, there were frame drops and my CPU was max'd at 100, with my FPS fluctuating  

that should be normal as BF1 is heavily CPU dependent

does it do that from the start or it keeps going up over time?

 

 

ps: what are you using to monitor this? I found on my own that MSI Afterburner / RivaTuner has some sort of memory leak

[ThatAngryGnome]

31 minutes ago, zMeul said:

that should be normal as BF1 is heavily CPU dependent

does it do that from the start or it keeps going up over time?

 

 

ps: what are you using to monitor this? I found on my own that MSI Afterburner / RivaTuner has some sort of memory leak

Using NVidia's FPS overlay to monitor FPS

 

It does it from the start. I mentioned in my OP that over time (ie playing Operations), the performance seemed to get worse. I've made a fix if it was a memory leak, and I'll spend the next few days seeing if that helped. But from the get go, I'll start off getting around 60 FPS, going up to 75, going down to 50, 60, 45, 75, 30 (just one rough example of my most recent game).

 

I realize that my CPU will be working hard, but I didn't expect it to make lag drops that I can notice, and that really can get bothersome in game.

[zMeul]

I suggest you inspect further, terminate all the non essential processes, nVidia's overlay for example

it's possible that BF1 itself it's the culprit - not unheard of

 

update the drivers, all of them: chipset, NIC, video card, sound card .. etc

[Columbo]

I am getting 80FPS drops never below 60fps. My system is in my signature. I have a solution to the OP's problem. Shut your computer down and unseat your graphics card from the motherboard. Reseat it and then reinstall your Nvidia drivers. I would have the graphics card out for 30 seconds to a minute. 

[ThatAngryGnome]

3 hours ago, Columbo said:

I am getting 80FPS drops never below 60fps. My system is in my signature. I have a solution to the OP's problem. Shut your computer down and unseat your graphics card from the motherboard. Reseat it and then reinstall your Nvidia drivers. I would have the graphics card out for 30 seconds to a minute. 

Thank you for that solution. I'll try it out and report back to you. If an i5 ivybridge with a 970 doesn't get the spikes I get, then there's definitely a problem. Keep in mind though, everything for me is set to high or ultra (I have tuned down the really demanding settings like AA of course).  

[Not_Sean]

This is a great post, and keeps me happy with my i5. 

Love how even in the latest video linus was calling out people for been idiots and buying i7's. guess these days everyone is a content creator that needs a i7. cause editing 2k Gopro projects in Adobe Premiere and After effects has never felt slow on my system. 

To OP, check the nVidia experience I recently noticed it was running funny, Fully shut it down on reboot (msconfig) and the FPs flux was gone in games. although not playing BF1 

[Columbo]

My 3570K @ 4.5ghz can still handle any game. My BF1 settings are 1920x1080 ultra everything and AI set to medium. I run BF1 in DX11. 

 

ThatAngryGnome, please post back your results. Removing the graphics card wipes out all hardware connection memory. 

 

[ThatAngryGnome]

On 3/15/2017 at 8:31 PM, Columbo said:

My 3570K @ 4.5ghz can still handle any game. My BF1 settings are 1920x1080 ultra everything and AI set to medium. I run BF1 in DX11. 

 

ThatAngryGnome, please post back your results. Removing the graphics card wipes out all hardware connection memory. 

 

 

Okay it's been a week (or more, sorry school had me caught up)  

 

I took out my graphics card and also gave my system a good dust down. 

 

It didn't make much of a difference  If anything, there was a lagspike where my FPS dropped to SINGLE digits for a solid 10 seconds. Although I have no "scientific" results, the experience was fairly the same (FPS varies from 60-75, but drops to 35-45 a bunch, and even lower at times).  

 

The next plan of action is to do a clean install of Windows. I'm not too optimistic, as I've done a clean install of the system twice before (reinstalling BF1 of course) and the issue persists. I plan to swap out my RAM for another kit*, and if that doesn't work, I have a Haswell CPU (4400, so it's worse than my 4670k) that I can swap out as well an test to see if it's a CPU problem. Finally, I have another Z97 mobo so I can check my mobo too.  

 

I didn't mention this in my OP, but I've played Witcher 3 on near max settings on this rig and it's worked flawlessly. I've never had problems with that game, so I think this may just be an issue with BF1. It's crazy though, I expect the game to run much smoother on a rig like mine.

 

I'll probably have to wait and do this much later on, but if I remember, I'll post back results on this thread for your curiosity. Thanks for all the help!  

 

*My RAM is 16GB, 4x4 kits. The two 4x2 kits, while the exact same model number and all, were bought separately, so they may have been from a different batch.

[SkilledRebuilds]

1 hour ago, ThatAngryGnome said:

 

Okay it's been a week (or more, sorry school had me caught up)  

 

Have you look at at the various Reddit BF1 performance threads regarding Pre-Rendered Frames, either with a config file or using the Nvidia/AMD Control Panels.

I may have seen it drop to 55-60fps at times... the i5 4690 and my GTX970 has never dropped below 50fps, and usually maintains 65-90FPS in High and Low demand... All I did was change pre-rendered frames instead of using Frostbite's default.

My GPU usage stopped dropping as far as it was (at times down to 60%, now 90% are low gpu usage numbers), my frames became way more consistent, and the game is far more enjoyable than when I first started.

[Columbo]

You want your GPU running @ 95%+ at all times playing BF1. My 970 is OC'd and I see numbers like 104-108% on GPU speed. My frames really never dip below 70 much of the time. Have rarely seen anything in the 60's. I am sure in a horrific firefight explosion event on a 64 person serve they could drop in the 50's for a second. I watch them on my G15 LCD keyboard when I game. On games like CS:GO I get 280-290fps and that game runs the GPU in the 40% power region to maybe 50% to achieve those FPS. 

 

To the OP, try running your system with just 8GB of ram instead of 16GB. Ideally you want only 2 Dimm's for OCing your ram for stability. Even at stock clocks your your 4670K should be able to easily achieve 80FPS. My last suggestion is to uninstall your nvidia drivers and reinstall them with the newest drivers. 

[ThatAngryGnome]

Thank you all for the responses.

 

 

17 hours ago, SkilledRebuilds said:

Have you look at at the various Reddit BF1 performance threads regarding Pre-Rendered Frames, either with a config file or using the Nvidia/AMD Control Panels.

I may have seen it drop to 55-60fps at times... the i5 4690 and my GTX970 has never dropped below 50fps, and usually maintains 65-90FPS in High and Low demand... All I did was change pre-rendered frames instead of using Frostbite's default.

 

So I've dug through a bunch of reddit (and LTT) posts, and have done that. Set the prerendered frames to 1 from the nvidia control panel and my max gamtime.maxfps to 76 (monitor runs at 75). It actually did help a ton, but as I'll address later, there are some serious lag spikes that are odd for my system. Maybe someone else visiting this thread from the future can read this and fix their rig like this. The fact that you have a 4690 + 970 and don't report FPS drops below 50 solidifies my concern that something fufu is happening.

 

16 hours ago, Columbo said:

To the OP, try running your system with just 8GB of ram instead of 16GB. Ideally you want only 2 Dimm's for OCing your ram for stability. Even at stock clocks your your 4670K should be able to easily achieve 80FPS. My last suggestion is to uninstall your nvidia drivers and reinstall them with the newest drivers. 

That's a very great idea, I should try that out. I can try only 8 gigs from exactly one kit that I bought, and test that out and see if it fixes my issues. As for nvidia drivers, I can reinstall them right now (and might as well), though that hasn't worked in the past. Thanks for the suggestions. 

 

15 hours ago, Strike105X said:

Unfortunately bf1 is a very cpu intensive game, but at least its optimized to take full advantage of multicore CPU's, its one of the few games to properly utilize the fx cpu for constant 60fps it could take up to 67% of my cpu at 4.7 ghz... 

 

Anyway as far as other games go the i5 does a good job, but  bf1's 64 player modes are made to take advantage of more cores, although at 4.6 ghz it should be smooth sailing (at least that's what a friend uses with this game and the same i5 cpu).

The fact that your friend with the same CPU averages higher FPS makes me concerned that this is a hardware (probably not software) issue. I'd expect a 4670k to handle a 64 player map. It's constantly maxed at 100% though, so I'm very confused as to why.

 

I'll post back with results when I have a solid 5 hours of gaming after some tweaks.

[elementofprgress]

~ to open the console. iirc  PerfOverlay.DrawGraph 1 should be enough to get the performance graph up. While in the console it list all the available commands and tab auto fills so if that isn't exactly right I'm sure you'll find it.

 

Most likely it will confirm cpu spikes (yellow spikes iirc) occur during your frame drops. At least with this you can have a visual to help you identify if its something in game. If you see spikes during explosions and such with heavy particle effects turning down the effects settings might help ya.

 

Other cmds that you may find useful for figuring out the source of your issues.

Spoiler

PerfOverlay.Enable
PerfOverlay.DrawGraph
PerfOverlay.DrawGraphMethod
PerfOverlay.DrawCpuGraph
PerfOverlay.DrawGpuGraph
PerfOverlay.DrawFrameGraph
PerfOverlay.DrawVblankGraph
PerfOverlay.DrawFps
PerfOverlay.DrawFpsMethod
PerfOverlay.DrawFcat
PerfOverlay.FcatWidth
PerfOverlay.LegendDisplayFormat
PerfOverlay.FpsTimePeriod
PerfOverlay.FpsDisplayAlpha
PerfOverlay.FpsDisplayFormat
PerfOverlay.FpsDisplayScale
PerfOverlay.FpsDisplayOffsetX
PerfOverlay.FpsDisplayOffsetY
PerfOverlay.FrameFileLogEnable

Also, instead of entering cmds every time. you can create a file called user.cfg and put the cmds in that and put that file in the battlefield 1 dir and it will auto run them for you.

 

Best of luck, hope some of this is useful for you.

[schaden81]

I didn't see it mentioned, but are you running the game in DX11, or DX12? BF1 doesn't do DX12 any justice, and you tend to get really bad frame times, which would show up as a drop in FPS.

If you haven't already tried, run the game in DX11 mode.

[jjohnthedon1]

On 14/03/2017 at 3:00 AM, ThatAngryGnome said:

Hey y'all,

 

I know this has been posted before, but I wanted to post it again in light of new patches. BF1 has ran pretty underwhelmingly for me: 

Here's my rig: 

4670k OC'd to 4.24ghz @ 1.22V, CPU cores unparked. Cooled with NZXT X61, never even hits 70 degrees

GTX 1080 (Asus STRIX), not OC'd

16GB Corsair RAM @ 1600Mhz 

Corsair 850W PSU, MSI Gaming 7 mobo, HyperX Savage 500GB SSD.

 

First order of business, the reason why my CPU is rather old while I'm running a GTX1080 is because I upgraded a 3 year old computer, and decided the CPU didn't have to be replaced.

 

For BF1, I usually get 75+ FPS (I've capped the FPS to 75 to help my issues). However, in intense scenes or after an hour of gaming, I get FPS drops to the low 30's at times. It's very bothersome. 

 

My CPU is almost always maxed at 100%. I don't know if Shadowplay effects my CPU usage that much.

 

I was wondering if anyone else has had the same problems as me, and how they fixed it. I don't think I want to upgrade (I'd have to buy a new mobo since buying a Haswell i7 doesn't sound like a smart idea at the moment). The cost would be upwards of 500 bucks for an 7th gen i7 and a mobo, which would theoretically fix my problems.

 

 

Just having share enabled on the nvdia experience app dropped my fps by 30 percent and that wasn't even recording,

it stoped my cards running properly 

 

I'd start with disabling share all together to see if that helps 

[WereCat]

I have 4770k at 4.6GHz and GTX 1060 at 1440p ULTRA I get 60-75 FPS, at HIGH I get 90-110 FPS. I am sure that your CPU is a factor but I doubt that it would lose you so much FPS, there is definitely something else hindering your performance.