GPU and some CPU downclocking and causing massive stutters and freezes

[Zulu]

I guess this is not directed at FA admins or such but, havent been able to find suitable answers on the web. I've just upgraded GPU to a not bad AMD one. Now if I set affinity for ETLegacy to single core, the GPU downclocks to 0Mhz because of the minimal workload. Causes a several second freeze every time it happens, several times per map. Even running on all CPU cores --where i dont get the freezes--I see the GPU running low speed and frames are dropped. Several years ago I had an AMD GPU and needed to hack the VBIOS to get around it. I dont want to do that now, with this more expensive GPU.  It also happens with some CPUs and default motherboard configurations that downclock CPU speed, resulting in stutters and ugly artefacts. Damn green crap tech. Other people have these experiences and thoughts on mitigations?

 

I forgot to mention. AMD driver control panel (Adrenalin) is just about useless, and GPU does it's own thing, ignoring preference for "performance" or whatever

Edited Sunday at 08:23 AM by Zulu

[Aardappel]

Did you delete old driver correctly?

[Zulu]

yes, used DDU as well.  this has been particularly a problem with AMD GPUs for a long time, even when old control panel (Wattman) let you supposedly set a minimum speed. Adrenalin doesnt even let you do that for my card (9070xt).  someone on the web who had this problem with another AMD GPU card wrote a bit of software called a keepaliverenderloop.  i will give that a try.

it's truly pathetic of AMD to have this problem for so long and never fix it. GPU runs perfectly on games that utilize more heavy graphics.

[Aardappel]

I have no problem with my 7900 GRE.

 

is the game running in windowed mode for some reason? Changing to fullscreen sometimes fixes the fps drop, for weird reasons the game sometimes sets to windowed mode.

 

What is your CPU? Does it have E-cores?

windows version?

[Zulu]

14 hours ago, Aardappel said:

I have no problem with my 7900 GRE.

 

is the game running in windowed mode for some reason? Changing to fullscreen sometimes fixes the fps drop, for weird reasons the game sometimes sets to windowed mode.

 

What is your CPU? Does it have E-cores?

windows version?

ETLegacy running in fullscreen (r_fullscreen 1) and windows 11 compatibility mode set for game to not do fullscreen optimizations (faking fullscreen with windowed stuff)

5900x with SVM turned off, so running 12 cores. i didnt enable performance cores thing in bios, which became available recently, and i run all cores equal speed without downclocking, as that also sux.

As i said, this is only a problem (and has been a long time a problem for AMD GPUs) for games not utilizing GPU much. For this card the Adrenalin has no options for minimal clocks etc., only some silly offsets to adjust. I enabled virtual super resolution to try to put some load on the card and it plays a bit better, with gpu clock about 200Mhz. Still freezes up every now and then if i set etlegacy to run on one core.

 

The utility i mentioned keepaliverenderloop, doesnt seem to run. Looks like back to running that vbios override thing. disabling ULPS in registry did nothing.

 

Card runs demanding games great. 300fps in hitman WOA on ultra settings.