PC under performing multiple games (FF16/SH2R)

[Cornisgud]

Basically I've been troubleshooting my system not running games I think it's well above the recommended specs to play. After a day of troubleshooting and trying things I want to ask for advice on what I should try next, or if I'm missing something about my setup.

I recently had some trouble playing FF16 and the Silent Hill Remake on my PC and it looked like my bottleneck was the 8GB of VRAM (RTX 3070 TI). Both of these games ran, but stuttered in more open areas where a lot more was going on, even when lowering the settings. So I upgraded to the 4070 TI Super. The performance is even worse now.

I've reinstalled the graphics drivers, reinstalled the games, lowered the settings on both games, lower resolution of primary display and the game to 1080p, they're both installed on SSD's... And no matter what I do the games still perform poorly.

SH2R sits between 24-30 FPS and has massive stuttering spells and freezes that last 2-3 seconds. Outside the FPS sits around 15-20. About 9.5/16GB of VRAM is in use.

On FF16 FPS hovers between 12-18 at "mid" settings and goes into slow motion a ton. Uses about 9.0/16GB of VRAM consistently.

While running both games GPU sits at 97%+ usage. CPU sits at around 30-40% usage for both games but on FF16 it spikes to 100% for a few seconds every now and then, not sure why.

My setup:

Primary Display: 2560x1440p 144hz (I also have 2 1920x1080p monitors)
Processor: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X 8-Core Processor, 3801 Mhz, 16 Logical Processors
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER (16GB VRAM)
Graphic Driver: 565.90 (Up to date in GeForce Experience)
Ram: 32 GB RAM
PSU: 800W Power Supply
Motherboard: Gigabyte B550 UD AC

I know that's long I just wanted to offer as much info as I can.

[Illusion of Progress]

Both of those games are performance heavy.

Well, I can't personally speak for Final Fantasy XVI, but that's what people say.

Silent Hill 2 I can speak for as I have it.

It mostly runs well for me, but the game does have traversal stutter. Other than that though, you should have absolutely no problem holding 60 FPS+ on high settings (at least sans ray tracing, and maybe even with it) on that hardware, unless something else is seriously wrong. Sub-30 FPS is not normal. You don't accidentally have DSR active with a resolution 4 times higher than native or something, do you? That's an absurdly low frame rate in both games, like what I'd expect if the GPU was constantly saturating the PCI Express link since it was out of VRAM. Maybe, maybe that'd have made sense on the RTX 3070 Ti and its 8 GB VRAM... but not your current GPU.

With a 5800X3D and a slightly slower 7800 XT, I'm holding 60 FPS with v-sync and most settings are on high/their maximum (besides ray tracing, which is off). I'm playing at 1920 x 1200 though, borderless full screen (I heard this is broke in this game for nVidia due to drivers at the moment?), and 150% resolution scale. Using Intel's XeSS scaling at Ultra quality (I ironically found this gives the least amount of visual anomalies, but I can't compare to DLSS obviously), and TXAA gives ghosting and pixelated hair so I use FXAA and using maximum sharpening to counteract having to use FXAA. I also see between 9 GB to 9.5 GB VRAM used at times (such as in the apartments) but that could simply be allocation, but either way your current 16 GB shouldn't be a limiting factor.

Some people say using DirectX 11 helps reduce the traversal stutters, but this will prevent ray tracing if you're using it. Another recommendation is setting shadows on low and shaders on medium. I'm playing with both on high though, and none of these things should be causing sub-30 FPS on that hardware.

You've done the usual of checking temperatures, I presume? To rule out severe throttling?

Have you disabled overlays, like Steam's, GeForce Experience, etc.?

What 800W PSU is that?

[_I_]

what mobo?
chipset and vrm config can have a huge effect on performance

edit:
Gigabyte B550 UD AC
vrm is fine, 13 phases total all with heatsinks,
figure 8-10 to cpu cores = 200-250w to coree, thats more than enough

b550 chipset might be holding it back a bit from x570, but i doubt its by much if anything

if it was a cheap a320/a520 chipset with weak vrm, then it would be held back much more

[Andrius227]

Cornisgud님이 먼저 게시:

I've reinstalled the graphics drivers, reinstalled the games, lowered the settings on both games, lower resolution of primary display and the game to 1080p, they're both installed on SSD's... And no matter what I do the games still perform poorly.

You say the games are on ssd so i assume the OS is also on ssd?

Just making sure. There are still people who run the OS from hard drives and add an ssd for games and think that its going to be ok…

[Karumati]

Andrius227님이 먼저 게시:

Cornisgud님이 먼저 게시:

I've reinstalled the graphics drivers, reinstalled the games, lowered the settings on both games, lower resolution of primary display and the game to 1080p, they're both installed on SSD's... And no matter what I do the games still perform poorly.

You say the games are on ssd so i assume the OS is also on ssd?

Just making sure. There are still people who run the OS from hard drives and add an ssd for games and think that its going to be ok…

games like ff16 prefer nvme ssd.

[Cornisgud]

Andrius227님이 먼저 게시:

Cornisgud님이 먼저 게시:

I've reinstalled the graphics drivers, reinstalled the games, lowered the settings on both games, lower resolution of primary display and the game to 1080p, they're both installed on SSD's... And no matter what I do the games still perform poorly.

You say the games are on ssd so i assume the OS is also on ssd?

Just making sure. There are still people who run the OS from hard drives and add an ssd for games and think that its going to be ok…

Yeah, the OS is on the same SSD

[GOD RAYS ON ULTRA™]

Well, I hope you have four rams, since the motherboard has four dimm expansions. Two rams on four dimms is going to be unfavorable for performance. What kind of ram kit is installed and how is it configured?

[Cornisgud]

Illusion of Progress님이 먼저 게시:

Both of those games are performance heavy.

Well, I can't personally speak for Final Fantasy XVI, but that's what people say.

Silent Hill 2 I can speak for as I have it.

It mostly runs well for me, but the game does have traversal stutter. Other than that though, you should have absolutely no problem holding 60 FPS+ on high settings (at least sans ray tracing, and maybe even with it) on that hardware, unless something else is seriously wrong. Sub-30 FPS is not normal. You don't accidentally have DSR active with a resolution 4 times higher than native or something, do you? That's an absurdly low frame rate in both games, like what I'd expect if the GPU was constantly saturating the PCI Express link since it was out of VRAM. Maybe, maybe that'd have made sense on the RTX 3070 Ti and its 8 GB VRAM... but not your current GPU.

With a 5800X3D and a slightly slower 7800 XT, I'm holding 60 FPS with v-sync and most settings are on high/their maximum (besides ray tracing, which is off). I'm playing at 1920 x 1200 though, borderless full screen (I heard this is broke in this game for nVidia due to drivers at the moment?), and 150% resolution scale. Using Intel's XeSS scaling at Ultra quality (I ironically found this gives the least amount of visual anomalies, but I can't compare to DLSS obviously), and TXAA gives ghosting and pixelated hair so I use FXAA and using maximum sharpening to counteract having to use FXAA. I also see between 9 GB to 9.5 GB VRAM used at times (such as in the apartments) but that could simply be allocation, but either way your current 16 GB shouldn't be a limiting factor.

Some people say using DirectX 11 helps reduce the traversal stutters, but this will prevent ray tracing if you're using it. Another recommendation is setting shadows on low and shaders on medium. I'm playing with both on high though, and none of these things should be causing sub-30 FPS on that hardware.

You've done the usual of checking temperatures, I presume? To rule out severe throttling?

Have you disabled overlays, like Steam's, GeForce Experience, etc.?

What 800W PSU is that?

Thanks for the thorough response! I turned off the overlays and don't use ray tracing. I also launch with the -dx11 arguement.

My resolution scale is 100% but I checked the OS Display settings, not sure if there's somewhere in the game settings that can also affect it I didn't see it.

I can test the performance now that the overlays are off tonight but I've run out of time atm.

My PSU is the NZXT model.

I have DLSS on Balanced, Shaders on Medium, and Shadows on low already :(

Yes I forgot to mention my temps, For SH2R it hovers around 59C and FF16 it hovers around 47C.

[_I_]

GOD RAYS ON ULTRA™님이 먼저 게시:

Well, I hope you have four rams, since the motherboard has four dimm expansions. Two rams on four dimms is going to be unfavorable for performance. What kind of ram kit is installed and how is it configured?

only if the cpus imc cant run the 4 dimms at the dimms xmp profile

else 4 dimms is fine and will not make much difference at all

since the gpu is at 97% nothing is wrong
its all working as intended
just gpu bottlenecked
lower res or graphic settings to ease up on gpu and you can get higher fps

[Cornisgud]

GOD RAYS ON ULTRA™님이 먼저 게시:

Well, I hope you have four rams, since the motherboard has four dimm expansions. Two rams on four dimms is going to be unfavorable for performance. What kind of ram kit is installed and how is it configured?

It's 2 16GB sticks for 32 total. The RAM is Corsair... Does putting 4 sticks in help performance? I guess I don't mind having an excess of RAM if it's worth trying

[r.linder]

Cornisgud님이 먼저 게시:

GOD RAYS ON ULTRA™님이 먼저 게시:

Well, I hope you have four rams, since the motherboard has four dimm expansions. Two rams on four dimms is going to be unfavorable for performance. What kind of ram kit is installed and how is it configured?

It's 2 16GB sticks for 32 total. The RAM is Corsair... Does putting 4 sticks in help performance? I guess I don't mind having an excess of RAM if it's worth trying

Having 2 RAM modules instead of 4 isn't going to be the reason why you're seemingly underperforming.

What they're talking about is dual rank RAM across 4 DIMMs which sometimes can give a *slight* (literally a few frames) increase in performance that nobody would ever notice. Also requires that all modules are dual rank modules.

But the problem is that with each additional DIMM you add to the motherboard, you're putting greater strain on the CPU's IMC anyway which makes more optimized memory profiles less stable. So for overclocking RAM, 2 DIMM configuration is ideal (and this is why memory OC motherboards have 2 slots and not 4), there's almost no reason to specifically go for 4 DIMM.

To me, based on the random spikes in CPU, just looks like the CPU is struggling to keep up with the GPU when it really matters. Also make sure that XMP/DOCP is enabled.

[C1REX]

The FF16 is a heavy game but with enough hardware power it should be stutter free. It’s basically perfect for me.

12GB of VRAM should be enough if you don’t run any apps in the background (paused YT video can use surprising amount of memory).

It sounds to me like overheating CPU or slow memory. Double check if DOCP profile is on and you don’t run at 2133-2666MT/s.

Also make sure you have all motherboard/chipset drivers installed.
Some people on FF16 forum reported that they had GPU in the wrong/slower PCIe slot. Make sure you use the main/top slot.

[andreasaspenberg575]

using only 2 of 4 ram slots can cause performance issues. i upgraded my ram from 2 times 8 gigabytes to 4 times 8 gigabytes and i got a massive performance boost. though i also ran out of ram a lot. a final fantasy game might struggle in open world areas if you do not have enough ram.

[r.linder]

andreasaspenberg575님이 먼저 게시:

using only 2 of 4 ram slots can cause performance issues. i upgraded my ram from 2 times 8 gigabytes to 4 times 8 gigabytes and i got a massive performance boost. though i also ran out of ram a lot. a final fantasy game might struggle in open world areas if you do not have enough ram.

You got a performance boost because you were running out of RAM, simply adding DIMMs when you don't need to doesn't increase performance. Dual ranks is a rare occasion with Ryzen CPUs where it can but it's not a perceivable amount.

There is no reason for OP to waste their money getting more DIMMs unless they're already running out of RAM with 32GB, in which case it wouldn't be a waste.

[Illusion of Progress]

r.linder님이 먼저 게시:

Cornisgud님이 먼저 게시:

It's 2 16GB sticks for 32 total. The RAM is Corsair... Does putting 4 sticks in help performance? I guess I don't mind having an excess of RAM if it's worth trying

Having 2 RAM modules instead of 4 isn't going to be the reason why you're seemingly underperforming.

This, there's something else going on here.

I'm not sure where this "two DIMMs in four DIMM slot motherboards will cause issues" is coming from because it's not true at all. Two DIMMs are less effort to stabilize than four, always, so the opposite is typically more likely to be true anyway. The only thing to ensure if you're using two DIMMs in a four slot motherboard, that you have them in the "correct" DIMM slots (often 2 and 4 instead of 1 and 3) and the reason is because on daisy chain motherboards, using slots 1 and 3 while leaving 2 and 4 open results in them being "open ends" that adds a lot of electrical interference and that can make it harder to stabilize the RAM configuration. But here's the thing; you'll already know if this is an issue because the attempted RAM configuration likely won't boot or be stable at attempted speeds if this is going on.

Silent Hill 2 is demanding if you're running at maximum settings at higher resolution (1440p and above) without scaling, sure... but not "you should be getting 20 to 30 FPS in it with the settings you listed on a RTX 4070 Ti Super" bad. Even the RTX 3070 you had before shouldn't have been nearly that bad.

Since you're also having the problem with Final Fantasy XVI, something is amiss beyond the game itself.

Do you have other games you've tried? Are they running fine and it's just these two? If so, list a few that run well.

What happens if you set the game to "low", ray tracing off, with 50% render resolution and scaling off? (Most other settings shouldn't matter.) If your performance is still low, something odd is going on.

I asked about temperatures. Have you checked those?

r.linder님이 먼저 게시:

To me, based on the random spikes in CPU, just looks like the CPU is struggling to keep up with the GPU when it really matters.

I was sort of thinking the opposite and that the issue was on the GPU side because the thread starter said the GPU is nominally sitting at 97%+, and they're still only getting 20 FPS to 30 FPS. Silent Hill is demanding... but not that demanding at the settings they listed. I hold 60 FPS on a weaker 7800 XT at higher settings.

In fact, typing that out gives me an idea so thanks for saying this. With utilization numbers that high at performance that low in a scenario I know the GPU itself should have more performance headroom... it's sounding like the GPU is stuck in a lower frequency clock state?

OP, try setting "prefer maximum performance" and/or look at what clock speed your GPU related stuff is running at with these games. Use GPU-Z to see why it's limited. Ensure the PSU power cable(s) are connected properly, and it might be worth trying another PSU if you do find out the GPU clock speed is stuck low.

[Cornisgud]

Illusion of Progress님이 먼저 게시:

r.linder님이 먼저 게시:

Having 2 RAM modules instead of 4 isn't going to be the reason why you're seemingly underperforming.

This, there's something else going on here.

I'm not sure where this "two DIMMs in four DIMM slot motherboards will cause issues" is coming from because it's not true at all. Two DIMMs are less effort to stabilize than four, always, so the opposite is typically more likely to be true anyway. The only thing to ensure if you're using two DIMMs in a four slot motherboard, that you have them in the "correct" DIMM slots (often 2 and 4 instead of 1 and 3) and the reason is because on daisy chain motherboards, using slots 1 and 3 while leaving 2 and 4 open results in them being "open ends" that adds a lot of electrical interference and that can make it harder to stabilize the RAM configuration. But here's the thing; you'll already know if this is an issue because the attempted RAM configuration likely won't boot or be stable at attempted speeds if this is going on.

Silent Hill 2 is demanding if you're running at maximum settings at higher resolution (1440p and above) without scaling, sure... but not "you should be getting 20 to 30 FPS in it with the settings you listed on a RTX 4070 Ti Super" bad. Even the RTX 3070 you had before shouldn't have been nearly that bad.

Since you're also having the problem with Final Fantasy XVI, something is amiss beyond the game itself.

Do you have other games you've tried? Are they running fine and it's just these two? If so, list a few that run well.

What happens if you set the game to "low", ray tracing off, with 50% render resolution and scaling off? (Most other settings shouldn't matter.) If your performance is still low, something odd is going on.

I asked about temperatures. Have you checked those?

r.linder님이 먼저 게시:

To me, based on the random spikes in CPU, just looks like the CPU is struggling to keep up with the GPU when it really matters.

I was sort of thinking the opposite and that the issue was on the GPU side because the thread starter said the GPU is nominally sitting at 97%+, and they're still only getting 20 FPS to 30 FPS. Silent Hill is demanding... but not that demanding at the settings they listed. I hold 60 FPS on a weaker 7800 XT at higher settings.

In fact, typing that out gives me an idea so thanks for saying this. With utilization numbers that high at performance that low in a scenario I know the GPU itself should have more performance headroom... it's sounding like the GPU is stuck in a lower frequency clock state?

OP, try setting "prefer maximum performance" and/or look at what clock speed your GPU related stuff is running at with these games. Use GPU-Z to see why it's limited. Ensure the PSU power cable(s) are connected properly, and it might be worth trying another PSU if you do find out the GPU clock speed is stuck low.

I turned on prefer max performance setting and installed and ran GPU-Z.

Then I ran around in both games doing some stuff and took screenshots of GPU-Z.

PerfCap reason is "Vrel" for both games.
Power consumption SH2R: 48.8%, FF16: 27.9%
16-Pin Power: SHR2: 112.4W (Chart looks low) FF16: 58.4 W
16-Pin Voltage: 12.4 for both (Chart appears maxed or maybe barely under maxed)
CPU Temps: moves between 77-82 for both games

I don't know if any of those numbers are concerning or if there's another i should be looking at.

Then I tanked the settings and ran around in both games.

FF16 literally no change. The 3070 TI was playable but now with completely potato settings it's still 13-15 FPS and in slow motion.

SH2R: So this is tough, I got it where it had no textures on a lot of things and it seemed to run real smooth but still had the same frequency of freeze stutters. To describe them, 2ish seconds of completely frozen followed by 3-5ish seconds of what feels like 10 FPS.

I can't track the FPS because I didn't have the overlay on and now for some reason SHR2 went back to the previous settings even though it all still says low, and refuses to change no matter what I do. So I didn't get a specific framerate check.


As for games that run smoothly on max settings, even some with ray tracing:
Cyberpunk 2077
RE8
RE4 Remake
Dead Space Remake
Callisto Protocol
FF7 Remake

I don't know if those are good comparisons to these games cause they're older, but I booted them up again to mess around a bit and verify even on the new card they're still running smoothly.