# OC gave huge boost in CPU intensive game



## nobody00 (Jan 6, 2012)

gtx 970
i5 4690k
8gb ram
120ssd
19" LCD 1280x1024 monitor

The game is Company of Heroes + Blitzkrieg mod. BK mod adds more units, explosions effects and many other cpu intensive tasks which makes it very cpu demanding. It is very interesting that when it starts to lag the framerate is 57fps+ meaning it's no video card type lag. It's cpu stutter type lag.

As you can see from this first video, at the begging of the game when no few units on the field its smooth as butter. (Youtube decreased the video quality of the video, probably because i compressed the video but you can see the difference)





But when more units show up meaning more cpu tasks, the stutter starts to show up. You can see that the fps is very good 50+, without fraps is 57+ so it's not the video card based lag, you can see how little the video card is used ~20%, the cpu is ~50% but thats because of fraps, without it its a lot less and only one core is used more than the rest.





Why did i posted in the Overclocking section, well because on the lag video the cpu is at 3.5 GHz no turbo boost activated, but when i OC the CPU to 4.7Ghz/1.3V i get maybe 40-50% smoother gameplay when many units on the field. 

BUT it's still not enough, i still dont get buttery smooth gameplay as in the beginning of the game, so my question is, is there any other way besides OC to speed up the CPU speed or other methods so i can get smooth gameplay the entire game? Or do i need a 6ghz CPU for this particular mod?

Thanks


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## gcavan (Aug 13, 2009)

System memory? "More CPU tasks" generally always means higher RAM usage. 8GB is the minimum I currently recommend for a gaming PC. Granted, only 4GB showing in use and it may not improve the situation, but another 8GB of RAM is an inexpensive upgrade.


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## nobody00 (Jan 6, 2012)

i have 8gb the specs are written first. If it uses 4 it means i have ~3-4 left. How would more ram would fix the lag since cpu clock speed oc made a huge difference, it must be the cpu in my opinion.


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## LMiller7 (Jun 21, 2010)

When the memory gauge shows 50% usage it does not mean there is 50% memory unused. Typically most of the remainder will be on the standby list which contributes significantly to performance. Windows will try very hard to maintain a reasonable value here for standby memory, the higher the better. I doubt that more memory would significantly improve performance but it cannot be ruled out. 

By definition any increase in CPU speed above the maximum rated by the manufacturer is overclocking.


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## nobody00 (Jan 6, 2012)

But i just dont understand why when i OC the CPU i get better performance if not enough RAM is the issue, ~4gb is the maximum the pc can use in games from 8gb? Meaning in my case the RAM is a bottleneck? Also when i monitor Pagefile usage it's ~4gb as well. This means it uses the slow HDD(SSD in my case)?


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## Aus_Karlos (Mar 10, 2007)

If the game is Large Address Aware its possible to use +3gb of RAM for the game but only if the games engine supports it. 
However the game engine also has internal limits. Depending on how its built the game needs to give every entity in the game a phyical address with some sort of index. If its a 32-bit inter index theres a limit.
The game may have only be able to assign 1024 objects to the index that can be dynamic in the world (IE, debris, objects with collision and physics ect.)
If these limits are reached a couple of things could happen.
The game can outright crash to desktop or come to a crawl.

Theres also a DirectX limit, a major performance hitter is Draw Calls. This command tells the CPU to pass information to the GPU about what to draw on the screen, the more objects you need to render per frame the more draw calls you need. DX9 has a limit of 6,000 draw calls, an average game thats well optimized may be creating 2,000-3,500 draw calls. As this mod add more unit, effects, ect. The draw calls increase due to the complexity of the scene.
Theres also the issue of DX overheads, DX9 main thread can only be run on Process 0,0 (Core 0, Thread 0) and unlike DX10 to 12 can not multitask these to other threads and cores, its a great bottleneck.


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## nobody00 (Jan 6, 2012)

Aus_Karlos said:


> If the game is Large Address Aware its possible to use +3gb of RAM for the game but only if the games engine supports it.
> However the game engine also has internal limits. Depending on how its built the game needs to give every entity in the game a phyical address with some sort of index. If its a 32-bit inter index theres a limit.
> The game may have only be able to assign 1024 objects to the index that can be dynamic in the world (IE, debris, objects with collision and physics ect.)
> If these limits are reached a couple of things could happen.
> ...


so you're saying not enough ram would likely be the cause right?


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## nobody00 (Jan 6, 2012)

I cant edit, the youtube videos no longer worked from bad compression so i deleted them. These are the new links


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## Aus_Karlos (Mar 10, 2007)

What are those videos suppose to be illustrating?


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## nobody00 (Jan 6, 2012)

Aus_Karlos said:


> What are those videos suppose to be illustrating?


That in beginning game is smooth and when more units show up it starts to lag


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## Aus_Karlos (Mar 10, 2007)

In total your fps dropped an average of 3fps, Your CPU utilization is 50% (Or ~80% on Core 0 which is probably the main game thread) and your GPU utilization is 25%.
Hardware is not the bottleneck.

If the Units themselves are moving slower compared to in the beginning (which by scrolling all around made it impossible to determine), then its a Game Engine limitation and there is nothing you can do about that, you could have the most powerful PC in the world and it wouldn't make any improvement.


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## nobody00 (Jan 6, 2012)

Aus_Karlos said:


> In total your fps dropped an average of 3fps, Your CPU utilization is 50% (Or ~80% on Core 0 which is probably the main game thread) and your GPU utilization is 25%.
> Hardware is not the bottleneck.
> 
> If the Units themselves are moving slower compared to in the beginning (which by scrolling all around made it impossible to determine), then its a Game Engine limitation and there is nothing you can do about that, you could have the most powerful PC in the world and it wouldn't make any improvement.


The CPU utilization is even lower without recording.

When i talk about lag, im not referring to the units moving slower, they move choppy but that's a smaller problem, the big problem is the scrolling/moving on the map, that's why i only scroll in the video, the scrolling is very choppy/not smooth and it affects my gameplay performance. 

It could be game engine limitation yes but i've seen gameplay videos by other players that do not lag like i do.

Anyway i ordered 8gb more ram since it's so cheap now, i'm hoping it will help. Thanks for the help


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## Aus_Karlos (Mar 10, 2007)

Are you using ShadowPlay?
ShadowPlay is for the newer gen cards like the 900 series. These cards have a built-in h.246 chip on the card for recording. Unlike other programs like FRAPS, ShadowPlay uses very little CPU as all the encoding is done by the H.246 chip on the GPU.


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## nobody00 (Jan 6, 2012)

Aus_Karlos said:


> Are you using ShadowPlay?
> ShadowPlay is for the newer gen cards like the 900 series. These cards have a built-in h.246 chip on the card for recording. Unlike other programs like FRAPS, ShadowPlay uses very little CPU as all the encoding is done by the H.246 chip on the GPU.


fraps, shadowplay was adding more stutter


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