1070 low utilization but low framerates.

Grimham

[H]ard|Gawd
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Jul 20, 2004
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I decided I would replace my 1060 3GB with a 1070 to get better frame rates gaming. So I was just playing Fallout 4 and have the built-in FPS in steam enabled. Most places I get 60 fps (the refresh rate of my monitor) but in certain places downtown with a lot of stuff it will dip into the 40s and even high 30s. I thought perhaps my CPU was holding me back so I put CPUID HWMonitor up on my 2nd screen and my cpu utilization was maxing at between 65-70 percent during the low frame rates. My GPU was at 50ish. All temps are normal. So I'm not sure what the issue is?

I will tell you, to change cards all I did was turn off the PC, pull my 1060 out put the 1070 in, booted and then updated to the latest Nvidia drivers.

Fallout 4 was played with ultra settings @1080p.

Asrock P67 Extreme 4 Gen3
3570k @ 4ghz
16 GB ram
Crucial MX500 1TB SSD
Seasonic 650 watt PS.
blah,
blah,
blah..

Ideas?
 
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I decided I would replace my 1060 3GB with a 1070 to get better frame rates gaming. So I was just playing Fallout 4 and have the built-in FPS in steam enabled. Most places I get 60 fps (the refresh rate of my monitor) but in certain places downtown with a lot of stuff it will dip into the 40s and even high 30s. I thought perhaps my CPU was holding me back so I put CPUID HWMonitor up on my 2nd screen and my cpu utilization was maxing at between 65-70 percent during the low frame rates. My GPU was at 50ish. So I'm not sure what the issue is?

I will tell you, to change cards all I did was turn off the PC, pull my 1060 out put the 1070 in, booted and then updated to the latest Nvidia drivers.

Fallout 4 was played with ultra settings @1080p.

Asrock P67 Extreme 4 Gen3
3570k @ 4ghz
16 GB ram
Crucial MX500 1TB SSD
Seasonic 650 watt PS.
blah,
blah,
blah..

Ideas?

I can tell you this much, downtown Boston is notorious for low frames, especially around Goodneighbor. Plus being at 1080p with a low clocked Ivy w/4T isn't doing you any favors in FO4. Try OC'ng that 3570 to around 4.4GHz and see if you gain any frames in downtown.
 
Overclocking should always help, but my point is that I'm only at 65%-70% utilization on my CPU now. If it was pegging 100% or anywhere close to it then the low frame rates would make more sense to me.
 
Did you check to see if one or two of the cpu core are maxing out near 90-100%?
Some games hit core 0/1 harder than the other cores and you can verify that no single core is approaching 90+ percent in game.
 
If that was your GPU usage @ Ultra settings, than that's also your proof that your CPU bottlenecked. You should be seeing 100% usage. Try running DSR if your not willing to OC.

I bumped it up from 4 to 4.5ghz and ran back and forth through the same area. It might have been slightly better by 1 or 2 fps (this is very unscientific, I know) but CPU and GPU utilization were still low. Anyway, maybe I'm chasing ghosts with using this particular example in this particular game. I'll do some more testing later.
 
I bumped it up from 4 to 4.5ghz and ran back and forth through the same area. It might have been slightly better by 1 or 2 fps (this is very unscientific, I know) but CPU and GPU utilization were still low. Anyway, maybe I'm chasing ghosts with using this particular example in this particular game. I'll do some more testing later.

Are you by chance using ultra God rays? That setting will put a hurting on you as well. I've experienced the same issues in that area of Boston as well as a lot of other peeps, especially after having over 200 mods. Your OC should help get you better minimums in that area at least, try it with DSR next, I would be interested in your results.

Nexus has a FPS mod fix for downtown if your interested.

https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/26286/
 
Enable dsr for sure. It will offset the load to the gpu and you will get better frames. I have a 1070 with a w3690 bumped to 4 ghz. Frames were initially worse in some cases than my 1060 6gb. DSR bumped it up so i get almost a solid 60 frames in most games.
 
RAM bandwidrh limited.. fallout 4 its VERY sensitive to ram speed.. (one of the most extreme scenarios)

RAM.png


When I had my 3770K I had to overclock to 4.8ghz and buy 2400mhz ram.. the later upgraded to 6700K in order to keep framerates high enough..
 
Are you by chance using ultra God rays? That setting will put a hurting on you as well. I've experienced the same issues in that area of Boston as well as a lot of other peeps, especially after having over 200 mods. Your OC should help get you better minimums in that area at least, try it with DSR next, I would be interested in your results.

Nexus has a FPS mod fix for downtown if your interested.

https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/26286/

Enable dsr for sure. It will offset the load to the gpu and you will get better frames. I have a 1070 with a w3690 bumped to 4 ghz. Frames were initially worse in some cases than my 1060 6gb. DSR bumped it up so i get almost a solid 60 frames in most games.

RAM bandwidrh limited.. fallout 4 its VERY sensitive to ram speed.. (one of the most extreme scenarios)

When I had my 3770K I had to overclock to 4.8ghz and buy 2400mhz ram.. the later upgraded to 6700K in order to keep framerates high enough..

Thanks all. I won't have time to fool with things today, but I will try DSR and report back. Very interesting about the ram speed, I believe mine is at 1600.
 
Thanks all. I won't have time to fool with things today, but I will try DSR and report back. Very interesting about the ram speed, I believe mine is at 1600.

you may also try two very good mods to help with FPS..

Insignificant object remover

Boston FPS Fix

In my opinion those are the best mods for improving Fallout 4 performance without degrade image quality..and I always recommend to anyone to install it even if the performance is good. it just help with game smoothing and FPS stabilization.

Also remember that typically fallout 4 will load a single core more than the others, so if you are monitoring overall CPU usage you won't be able to see if you are single thread limited you have to see with an OSD all the threads behavior and see if one or more cores are above 90% utilization, that will point directly to lack of single core performance and overclocking further will greatly help, having experience with ivy bridge system I know 4.5ghz it's the minimum I would recommend for a good overall fallout 4 experience (specially with ton of mods.)
 
I haven't played FO4 in a long time but Boston is highly dependent on RAM speed as stated above. There's a mod called Shadow Boost that used to work along side just about everything, but is no longer supported unfortunately. But you might want to drop shadow distance down some even the slightest amount might help a lot.
 
Overclocking should always help, but my point is that I'm only at 65%-70% utilization on my CPU now. If it was pegging 100% or anywhere close to it then the low frame rates would make more sense to me.


core-speed cpu bottleneck.
Your CPU does not need to hit 100% to have a CPU bottleneck unless its single core


Did you check to see if one or two of the cpu core are maxing out near 90-100%?
Some games hit core 0/1 harder than the other cores and you can verify that no single core is approaching 90+ percent in game.


common misunderstanding on how multi-threading/multi-core works
This is now how it would show up
A single threaded game running at 100% CPU time would now show a single core at 100% because you measure over time and a thread is no destined to run at the same core constantly

you need to use process explorer and select the process and look at thread CPU utilization.
if one of those hits 100 divide by numbers of cores. You have have a core-speed bottleneck
In this case it would 25%


examples of a single threaded softwarer unings on a 8 core (physsical/logicle) system
Core-STuff.png


As you can see a core utilization is clearly showing 0-25% none is near 100%
but the thread it selgs is running at 100% of available CPU time. there is no more CPU time it can utlize so its a corespeed bottleneck.

You can do you own testing easily in a few min and see how things works


Also no game decided what cores it runs on unless it uses affinity ( no games I've seen does that) windows CPU scheduler does that.



If that was your GPU usage @ Ultra settings, than that's also your proof that your CPU bottlenecked. You should be seeing 100% usage. Try running DSR if your not willing to OC.

no it just proves it not GPU bottleneck, there can be other bottlenecks then CPU and GPU but most likely in normal scenarios after GPU it would be CPU
but things like sync would also show that behavior without it being a CPU bottleneck



OP are you running with vsync on?
That would explain why you are having both a CPU core-speed bottleneck but not able to fix it by overclocking
 
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OP are you running with vsync on?
That would explain why you are having both a CPU core-speed bottleneck but not able to fix it by overclocking

I've tried with vsync on and off - no change in the lows.
CPU at 4Ghz and 4.5Ghz - no change
DSR enabled at 2x - no change (though I'm not really familiar with using it and perhaps I didn't do it correctly)

Today I'm putting my 1060 back in to double check what I'm seeing.
 
I've tried with vsync on and off - no change in the lows.
CPU at 4Ghz and 4.5Ghz - no change
DSR enabled at 2x - no change (though I'm not really familiar with using it and perhaps I didn't do it correctly)

Today I'm putting my 1060 back in to double check what I'm seeing.

I haven played around with DSR so my opion here is soloy based on theory
DSR is SSAA its expensive and would probably be the f irst thing i would disable with FPS issues
However form the numbers you are showing i dont believe this is the cause, but i dont have ny good dies so maybe give it a try.

again try doing the process explore tip of seeignyou thread utilization and show it in here and i will happily give me 2 bits on it
 
I know you like Fallout OP but you really need to test some other games. Preferably ones with a good engine like the BF games or OW or witcher 3 even. If you can identify the problem with a few others it might make fixing your FO problem easier, or at least you can guarantee your CPU/GPU are working properly.
 
Try changing the power management setting in the NVCP to prefer maximum performance if you haven't already.
 
Monitor's refresh? F
Have you tried Fast Sync within the NVCPL? Use the nVidia control panel and look for the second to last bottom option Vertical Sync. Change to Fast and give it a try. If you are locked at 60Hz, it will be better but not much. If you use Fast Sync make sure all vync option in the games are "disabled." That is, if you can configure them via option in game. Just to note, Skyrim was never slow for me on my 1070FE/6700K maxed.

That engine (Elder Scrolls series, Fallout) has shitty rendering anyways and is a major complaint from the players
 
Tweak the game engine settings. change the task manager graphs to logical view. you should be able to squeeze out a couple hundred more mhz out of that cpu.
 
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I owned a 1070 and play Fallout 4 at 4k. I am always CPU limited.

It will report around 60-70% CPU usage, but CPU usage isn't exactly an accurate metric sometimes.

Fallout 4 loves high clocks + fast low latency RAM.

Upgrading to a 1080 ti offered me zero perormance gain in F4 (as expected).
 
I appreciate all the suggestions, I guess I'm just going to accept that that's the way it is in this game. I'm not about to buy faster memory or spend more time trying to squeeze every extra MHz out of my CPU. The game runs perfect 95% of the time and even in the slow areas it's not bad.
 
I've tried with vsync on and off - no change in the lows.
CPU at 4Ghz and 4.5Ghz - no change
DSR enabled at 2x - no change (though I'm not really familiar with using it and perhaps I didn't do it correctly)

Today I'm putting my 1060 back in to double check what I'm seeing.

To use DSR you have to enable it in the nVidia control panel then pick the higher resolution in game. It’ll render the game at the higher resolution then automatically downscale to your monitor’s native resolution. It’s a nice feature if you have extra GPU usage to burn.
 
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