Doom Mystery Performance - Trouble shooting advice wanted!

Discussion in 'Videocards - AMD Radeon' started by flopzie, Feb 10, 2017.

  1. flopzie

    flopzie Guest

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    (PS if this is in the wrong board, please place it in the right one for me!)

    I'm beffudled by the performance of Doom on my PC. It's not brand-spanking new, but it's got the beans to run Doom fine. In fact I'm very impressed with the performance 50-60 FPS is perfectly playable, and the game looks great.

    However, at apparently random intervals (let's say somewhere between 30 seconds and 2 minute gaps) the otherwise stable FPS goes down to 25-30 for a few seconds. At the same time I see a spike in my CPU load (or a dip in the GPU performance).

    Now, clearly, 'something' is making the CPU work intensively and that's impacting upon the games performance... however I'm dumbfounded about where to look. Nothing is evident in my task manager, I've tried disabling everything running in the background, twiddling with powersaving features, etc, etc. Also, if I lower all the games settings then I see the performance increase I would expect (i.e. 100FPS+) however this stuttering issue exists in exactly the same way. It happens even if staring at the sky, or standing in a corner (i.e. is not related to the amount of stuff on the screen).

    How wouldst one go about trouble shooting this particular issue? It's, obviously, driving me rather mad!!
     
    Last edited: Feb 10, 2017
  2. AMD4Life

    AMD4Life Guest

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    Are you using VSync? If so, your frame rate is halving because your system can't maintain a solid 60 FPS. Otherwise, make sure your drivers are up to date.
     
  3. flopzie

    flopzie Guest

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    Nope! No vsync, and the drivers are up to date.

    On the on-screen-display I can see the CPU load spike (as I said, regardless of what I am doing... no monsters, looking into a corner, not moving for example) and at that point the FPS dips to sub-30.
     
  4. PrMinisterGR

    PrMinisterGR Ancient Guru

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    That sounds like VRAM flushing to me. Try to lower texture/shadow quality.
     

  5. flopzie

    flopzie Guest

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    Tried that! No effect.

    In fact putting all of the graphics settings to the lowest possible has no positive effect (apart from slightly increasing the FPS at times when this issue isn't occurring).

    I'm totally dumbfounded by it. Almost tempted to install a fresh copy of windows to see whether that negates the problem (!)
     
  6. user1

    user1 Ancient Guru

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    try dropping the vt_maxppf setting to 4 and see what happens
     
  7. flopzie

    flopzie Guest

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    Thanks for the input, but no joy I'm afraid, precisely the same issue.
     
  8. vase

    vase Guest

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    I also suspect VRAM limit being the issue.
    And although you tested it already.
    If you haven't done it, chose the low shadow and texture settings and QUIT and restart the game.
    Doom has a strange way of sometimes not applying settings right away (maybe has to do with the streaming textures functionality).
    So just in case you didn't try that and just switched quickly in game with no effect...

    Otherwise... you run it on Vulkan right? What happens if you run it in OGL? Knowing that FPS in general will go lower there, but does it still have FPS drops to 0-20 ?
     
  9. flopzie

    flopzie Guest

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    okay okay....

    I have new information, which makes things make sense. I just ran the game with a CPU monitor open, and the FPS drops directly correlate with the CPU clocking the cores down to 1397mhz (rather than the 4391 they usually run at). So, that is what's making this so unbearable.

    I've no idea why _that_ is happening however, so now the hunt begins. Temperature is clearly an obvious culprit, however I have an open case, a massive air cooler, and the reported temperature when running doom was <55 which I don't think should make it throttle itself.

    Hmm. Anyway, massive thanks for all the inputs. Once I've somehow figured out how to stop this throttling from happening I'll find out what the real performance should be like.

    Ta
     
  10. PrMinisterGR

    PrMinisterGR Ancient Guru

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    Try to play while using the Maximum Performance Windows power plan.
     

  11. A M D BugBear

    A M D BugBear Ancient Guru

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    Does this do with other games you have?

    Ever tried cleaning your drivers out with DDU and or + driver sweeper 3.2.0??


    Also, what resolution are you running this darn game at? And also, your in-game settings?
     
  12. Xul Aethyr

    Xul Aethyr Active Member

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    if performance mode doesnt work, your motherboard might be a bit weak for that cpu, check its VRM temps, i think that one throttles around 80c. If thats fine, maybe bios power saving features.
    with my 280x fps would tank when it hit vram limit, keeping textures and shadows at high fixed it(with clean game boot)
     

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