Another look at HPET High Precision Event Timer

bcdedit /deletevalue useplatformclock

Also bcdedit /set useplatformtick yes made some games stutter or behave oddly in my case, same for youtube, youtube stutters for me with the "even" timer command, RivaTuner framerate limiter tends to behave worse with this on as well; both in Windows 10 1607 and 1809, so be careful around using this and believing it will make everything better as some sort of magic, there is a reason why MS made it this way and changing to an "even" number mean nothing, it's a debug command and changing means modifying the O.S because "you know more" and every single person that does this command does not know the reason behind it other than "an even number is better" without any proofs.

It used to be an even number on Windows 7, but MS changed this in 10 (and 10 is better for gaming than 7, only some people with an obscure mindset will get mad over this) and people have been gaming on 10 for years before this was discovered and no one reported unplayable games before this. The only command I use is bcdedit /set disabledynamictick yes because is a power saving feature and I don't want that, but I don't touch the timers anymore, this started with Windows "tweakers" from Youtube and then it started to become more popular, but people do it without even knowing the side effects, besides you should think about this: How many programs and games are coded with the "uneven" timer?

All of them, any developer that makes a game for Windows 10 does not ever uses these "magic" commands, so this is another thing to keep in mind, leave this alone, there is other stuff you can tweak that can help (MSI modes, debloat O.S, memory management commands, etc) but timers themselves are something that no one except MS engineers could understand and we need to leave them alone. Also if you check MS website on these commands, they said that they only should be used for debugging; meaning used to test very specific stuff or if you literally know what you are doing, not to make PC games "better".

 

So basically referring to your post above, you set this on your system?

bcdedit /deletevalue useplatformclock
bcdedit /set disabledynamictick yes

And left the rest?

 

First one is Windows stock mode, so no need to change it unless you forced HPET, the second one, yes, that's the only change I've made and seems to work well.

 

Not to the point of being unplayable bad but after jumping to w10 3 years ago I noticed it's much more prone to stutter/micro stutters in games then w7 was.Varying in severity to kinda frequent to barely any in alot of games I play even after changing to a whole new much more capable rig.

I've also done the whole updating bios,DDuclean drivers,disabling gamebar,overlays,checking temps and core clocks close to half dozen times already with barely any change.(Also I dont mess with the registry/hpet anymore after not seeing any improvement) The only change I do w10 itself is disable everything under the gaming section,most stuff under privacy except mic and enable the high performance power plan.

Now I'm either playing games that all happen to have some issue or there's something up with the OS. (Could also be a driver issue.I'm on a 3080 atm and all driver for it seem kinda "meh" atleast compared to driver 442.59)

Usually when someone says their game is smooth and there's a forum to said game saying otherwise I always ask them to put a frametimegraph up while they play and most of the time they either start noticing the frametime spikes or they never comment again.

 

Games that kept stuttering to me did it with or without bcdedit changes and in general, properly optimized games run fine regardless of this setting. I just don't think changing this will solve the stutter some suffer at PC gaming, from whenever its coming from; tweaking the O.S a bit is also important, Windows 10 has too much bloat. Also keep in mind that devs on PC are starting to care much less these days and most big AAA games are more console-focused, to the point some PC ports are made by very rubbish 3rd party studios, I am done with PC games on several regards, and I will get either a PS5 or a Series X, I rarely game on PC now, I've lived major frustrations and endless nights of tests, wasting time troubleshooting rather than playing to see why X game stutters when my PC surpasses the requirements, for example and such games stutter on my rig no matter what or games than once ran flawlessly just to present obnoxious hitching out of the blue, whereas other more demanding games run quite well, PC game is and will be trash in several regards.

Also don't bother on generic gaming forums using terms such as "frametime", "latency", "rivatuner fps lock" and such, most of those users are extremely illiterate on any sort of advanced terms (most of these people are kids or very, very casual gamers that know very little about anything PC related, they just get a PC because it has become a huge trend lately and you even see "solutions" on those forums that make you facepalm, even Steam is on that level tbh), they just care for what they see on their screen and the vast majority of people don't notice bad framepacing, stutter, etc or they just don't care, they get used to a subpar experience.

Microstutter and stutter in general can have a lot of causes, making the problem hard to diagnose, but I can say that some games on newer Windows builds seem to run worse than on older builds; even if some games aren't compatible with older Windows 10 versions, the ones that start correctly on them run much better, for example, games on 1607 don't stutter or stutter much less than on 1809, for example. I have yet to test 1709, which a lot of people praise, but in general, newer builds are worse than older ones and if you have an RTX card, you are doomed to newer builds only.

 

It's how it turned into a chasing ghosts game (atleast for me)Trying to figure out how to fix a game to work properly to get a smooth experience when the issue is the game itself/OS and nothing can be done on the user's end and it's become an insanely common occurance too to the point I can safely say pretty much every game I've played in the last 3 years has had some frametime/random frametime spike issue from barely any to frequent.

You name it.
* Rust with random minor frametime spikes simply running around
* Black desert online (anyone who plays this game knows already)
* Pillars of eternity 2 bit a of a micro stutter fest and is using UNITY.Get's obvious in cities.
* kenshi with random camera hitches.Granted the game has an old ass engine
* Apex with random 45ms frametimespike (wierdly always the same spike on a frametime graph) that happens once or twice a game (didn't have this issue on my old 1080ti on driver 442.59) I've seen my brother play this game with a frametime graph on my old 1080ti/9700k and he has it much worst micro stutter wise.Ironically this was the closest game to have a 100% smooth experience (when I used to play on my 1080ti that is,on driver 442.59)
* Wasteland 3 micro stuttered every time you pressed the shift key(to reveal interactables and characters) and hovered your mouse over your characters
* Cyberpunk is a wierd one.There's animations that cause minor frametime spikes and the occasional wierd awful frametime in cities.
* Warhammer 2 has minor frametimespikes whenever 2 big armies clash and you hover your mouse over the spells
* Phasmophobia micro stutters every time someone takes a photo xD
* Metro exodus has random micro stutter (to be fair its once in a while) even just walking around doing nothing.
* Monster hunter world has micro stutters related to input that where introduced 3 months after the game's release that has yet to be fixed by capcom themselves (A modder fixed this one like a couple of months ago)
* Call of duty (one of the recent ones with the battle arena) Random micro stutters and a bit of an erratic frametime.
* Wow has micro stutters in oribos and a lesser degree in orgrimmar.Also stutters/micro stutter every time you open UI element like the bag/map/achievements and etc.. (This has to be the game tbh)

It's just as you said. "they just care for what they see on their screen and the vast majority of people don't notice bad framepacing, stutter, etc or they just don't care, they get used to a subpar experience." Which is sad because dev's then don't have any incentive to make things better.

 

@kman

I assembled my previous (my first) rig back in 2012. Obviously it sported Win7, and then Win8.1 and Win10.
For all these years I had only one game with stuttering - Deus Ex: Human Revolution - which was solved (accidentally) with system timer tweak (from default 15.6 ms to 1 ms).
Without a tweak that game stuttered in all 3 Windows versions.

Combination of modern HW, FW and SW is way too vast for universal rules and general statements.

 

Well, this is a tough one. You can use DDU, wipe the newer driver and go back to 442.59, but newer games could present worse issues on this driver (RDR2 for example gives you a warning that the game performance will be slower and you need a more recent driver), but on the other hand, you do need newer drivers for newer games, there is no other way around it or strange issues could appear. However, 442.59 is objectively the best driver for Pascal GPU's, no contest, google about it, this driver came out right before the newer GPU's from nvidia came out, so I assume nvidia just optimized it a lot for Pascal. Maybe could install Windows 10 1607 or 1709+442.59 driver and give that a test? It's worth a shot, if your current Windows install is a pos, I'd do it, you have nothing to lose and a lot to win.

However, I'd just go ahead and downgrade the driver just for testing, if it works fine, then keep it, it may handle all games well, who knows. Tbh I may try it myself as well, right now I am on the 446.14 driver, which is also recommended btw, so you could try it as well.

Also, yeah, I do notice when someone elses game is running like crap; either seeing a video or just watching the gameplay, I can notice bad framepacing, of course I know a lot of stuff to tone this down, but most "gamers" don't learn about this and they don't care, some may even notice that things are running weirdly, but they get used to it and can't be bothered to try to find any solutions (PC games has gotten plagued by ignorance, the price of becoming popular), so all of what I said combines with most devs never caring about PC games they way they should, because "it runs fine" for most people when devs make a forum thread or something. Very few select devs care and know these terms, most of them just release the game and go like "play it! pepega"

Some games do get a number of reported issues, the devs mock the userbase saying "we are looking into it" and never fix anything, most likely because they are clueless about the issue. Depressing.

 

Sadly with a 3080 (current card) I can't go back that far driver wise and I fresh installed w10 on the 28th of last month.Kinda getting tedious.

Yea I know there's alot of HW, FW and SW combinations.That's why I tried ruling them out by checking hardware with stress test/memtest/crystaldisk/temps/clocks and software wise I keep my pc as light as possible.That's literally all I have installed.There's no usual suspect like ICU or some 3rd party obvious suspect so the only conclusion I can come up with is either ppl don't notice there's an issue like Smough pointed out because of their low standard of what's acceptable or there's something up with the game/w10/driver


Funnily enough on my old rig on w7 I had no stutters/micro stutters on Deus ex (or any game for that matter)

For anyone wondering my currenty rig is
3080 TUF OC ed,9900k,16gb 3200mhz ram,970 evo SSD,Rog maximus XI hero (latest bios) rmx 750 PSU,W10 version 20h2 19042.804

Bios settings are XMP enabled,Manual clock to 47,vccio/vccsa to 1.15 with speedstep/shift/c-states disabled.(Again,Temps average at like 60-65 when stress testing and cpu clock is locked to 4.7ghz)

 

Question about the wintimer clock.

With HPET enabled, I see 24MHz. Is that correct?

 

Yeah, it should be 24 MHz.

 

This has been tested, you dont want to have disabledynamictick on. Just leave bcdedits at default, these "tweaks" aren't going to help anything.

 

Why is that? I am willing to disable it if you can tell me what side effects it could have and who tested this. Because all this does related to power saving: "Dynamic Ticks are a feature that lets windows stop the system timer when nothing is happening in order to conserve power."

I don't need to conserve power when I am using a desktop PC with a good PSU, connected all of the time to an electric stream.

Also: "This [feature] is nice for portable and battery systems but can be a problem for desktops, especially since the tickless mode has been known to cause strange issues on some systems; especially when gaming or engaged in other media related tasks."

 

cpu ticks dont just have power consumption as a downside they do cause kernel cpu utilisation.

 

So if I wanted to reset all the timer values to default, instead of reinstalling windows 10, bcdedit /deletevalue 'value' will reset things to default?

 

Yeah, that should do the trick, no need to reinstall unless you do something that breaks some key o.s functions, such as boot or executing programs and such.

 

Thank you.

 

So i test 3settings
bcdedit /set disabledynamictick yes
bcdedit /set useplatformtick yes
bcdedit /set tscsyncpolicy enchanced

after months i put again on 20H2 windows 10 version same FPS on games and worse input mouse feeling so default bcdedit is the best choice

 

Have you tested only bcdedit /set disabledynamictick yes and the other commands as default?

 

Yes same little bit!!!but increase latencymon latency so i remove it