I recently built my first PC and tested it while gaming. I'm seeing around 600 FPS, but my 1% lows are dipping to 100 and fluctuating between 100 to 300, which causes noticeable lag. I understand that going from 360 FPS (which is what my monitor supports) to around 100 FPS isn't a massive shift, but I'm striving for the smoothest experience possible.
Here's my setup: I have a 360 Hz monitor, a Ryzen 9 9950X3D CPU, an RTX 5080 Astral GPU, and 64 GB of RAM running at 6000 CL 30. My temperatures are within safe limits for both the GPU and CPU, and I've updated my BIOS with G-Sync and V-Sync enabled.
So, besides asking how to improve my 1% lows, I've got a few other specific questions: 1) Should I cap the FPS to match my monitor? 2) I used BIOS presets for my X3D chip; could this be impacting performance? 3) Do I need to configure my CPU with any software for the 3D cache? 4) Is my performance actually acceptable?
4 Answers
You should definitely consider disabling those BIOS presets for the X3D. If you’re comfortable with it, tuning your memory timings could help too — try setting tRFC to 600 and tREFI to 40000 as they might give a noticeable bump to your 1% lows!
For your CPU, just a heads up: the 7900X3D and 7950X3D had some issues with 3D vCache parking. You’ll want to check if the same applies to your 9000 series. Make sure it’s enabled in the BIOS!
It’s pretty weird for your frames to drop to 100 when you're getting 600! Honestly, G-Sync might be causing some problems here. Have you tried disabling it to see if your lows improve? Also, don’t just stick to one game; check out some other free-to-play titles like Dota or CS2, just to see how they perform too.
Yeah, I wonder if it's just a specific game issue. I'll give that a shot!
It really depends on the game you’re playing, but you might want to try capping your FPS if it’s CPU-bound. I've noticed that the 50 series GPUs sometimes struggle with 1% lows. Also, turning off power monitoring in MSI Afterburner helped me get better lows. Just make sure the games are running on the 3D vCache cores; that could make a big difference!
Interesting! What if I’m not using Afterburner, can I still get those gains?
Are those settings universal, or do they depend on the exact processor model?