RTX 3080 FE Issue

[McGee9899]

Okay so im not sure if this the right place to post this but oh well. So ever since i started using my 3080 on this game, my gpu usage never surpasses 50-60%. Of course resulting in lower performance. Ive done countless things to try to fix this. Making my PCs power “high performance” both in windows settings and nvidia control panel. I went through many settings changes with nvidia support and they were not very helpful. Ive reinstalled windows, updated my bios, reseated the gpu and nothing has worked. Even at the lowest possible settings in game, on 1080p i get about 100fps. I normally play 1440p. Not sure if this game is just not optimized for the FE because other people seem to be getting great FPS on this game with other 3080s. i get great performance of any other game. Any help would be appreciated and thank you in advance. 
 

My Specs

- MSI MPG X570 Gaming edge Wifi

- Ryzen 7 3700x @ 3.6ghz

- RTX 3080 FE

- 16gb Corsair vengeance rgb pro 3200mhz

- Game is on a 2tb SSD

 

Id also like to say that i do not believe this is a CPU bottleneck. I see other benchmarks online with the same CPU that do just fine. And is it also possible that my system being AMD is the problem?? 

 

[Naz]

It is 100% CPU bound. Modern high end GPU's will always be CPU bottlenecked , regardless of CPU Model especially at 1440p. However you can increase cpu performance several ways.

1. Assign 7dtd 4 true cores

This seems to be quirk of unity in general, It scales in performance up to 4 cores, then the more extra cores it has, you get an exponential loss of performance. You want to assign "True Cores"  not virtual cores (Hyperthreaded cores or smt for amd) your real cores are always (at least in windows) going to start with core 0 then a virtual thread (core 1) then a real one (core 3) etc so forth. There are numerous ways to do this, 1 is task manager but it won't work running eac and you have to apply it every launch. The easier way of doing it is to set up a basic shortcut to launch the game with the desired affinity. I have 1 already set up if you want to just use that i'll link it here it's setup with the default install path, so if yours is installed somewhere else you'll need to edit it to point to the 7dtd exe. there are 2 shortcuts (1 for eac and 1 for without eac) or if you'd rather set it up yourself there is a guide here This tweak will give a quick and immediate boost to cpu performance, but i can't promise it will be enough to get 100% utilization at 1440p.

2.Make sure in your motherboards bios your rams xmp profile is enabled
Ryzen love fast memory and if it's running at stock, your cpu's performance will suffer greatly.

 

3. Close or assign affinity to background programs

if it doesn't need to be running, close it. If you want to have it running however. You can use the 1st method mentioned but assign the background programs the other 4 cores on your cpu. Doing this ensures your background programs will have much less of a impact on 7dtd performance when running on different cores. However it's still not as good as not having them running at all, so make sure your only running what you need.

 

4. adjust your video options
Some options are very cpu heavy. Disable screen space reflections (checkbox on the bottom right) change reflection quality & shadows to low, disable reflective shadows. Set tree quality to medium or high. The other checkbox items will also help a little on the cpu godrays etc but don't make as big a difference as the other listed, so up to you on those.

Edited July 19, 2021 by Naz (see edit history)

[McGee9899]

Thank you for the input!! My CPU hovers around 30-40% usage when im in 7 days to die. Right now i am at work and i will be sure to try what you had just posted. Ill let you know if it works!

 

[Naz]

Yes 30-40% means 2-3 cores at 100% 7dtd will usually max out 1 or 2 cores and that's where the cpu bottleneck comes from, even tho you still have 60-70% Total cpu utilisation unused. Happy to help😃

[SylenThunder]

You can try locking the client down to only 4 physical cores, and that may improve performance.  Usually only needed on older Gen 1/2 Ryzen's that don't support multithreading.

 

Also, make sure your BIOS is up to date. Motherboard manufacturers have been pushing frequent updates that fix bottlenecks and increase performance. Your issue could be something as silly as the RAM not being utilized properly by the system, and it was fixed in a BIOS update.

[McGee9899]

Okay, so i assigned certain cores to the game and it helped but still only getting like a solid 55-60% gpu usage. Weird thing is that when i pause the game, the usage shoots up to 90-98%. Any other ideas?

 

 

[meganoth]

16 hours ago, McGee9899 said:

Okay, so i assigned certain cores to the game and it helped but still only getting like a solid 55-60% gpu usage. Weird thing is that when i pause the game, the usage shoots up to 90-98%. Any other ideas?

 

 

 

What is your goal? Getting the highest possible GPU usage or good framerates at highest settings? 

 

This game is unusual in that it is very CPU-bound and additionally at your resolution even most typical AAA games (which are usually GPU-bound) would be CPU-bound (like Naz already said). An underemployed GPU is to be expected

 

If GPU usage is your goal you should buy a monitor with a 4k or even 8k resolution or decrease the frequency your GPU operates at 😉. If it is good framerates then increase your settings to ultra and post what framerates you get. Someone here with a similar setup might be able to tell you if that is in the expected range or if it could be better

 

 

[The_Great_Sephiroth]

I have never had to "lock my CPU to four cores" as suggested, but I do not have a Ryzen. I can get close to 144fps on my current setup after working around the Unity refresh rate bug (Unity locks itself to whatever your desktop refresh is) but I am running an older setup than you. I have an i7-6950X and an RTX 2080 Ti coupled to a Dell S2417dg (1440p G-Sync) monitor.

 

Having played on an older i5-2500k a few years ago I can say that many modern games become bottlenecked by CPUs and cannot get data to the video card fast enough to produce a real framerate. I am looking at you, Ark. Naz and Meganoth mentioned this though.

[Naz]

19 hours ago, McGee9899 said:

Okay, so i assigned certain cores to the game and it helped but still only getting like a solid 55-60% gpu usage. Weird thing is that when i pause the game, the usage shoots up to 90-98%. Any other ideas?

 

 

There are some other tweaks you can try, but they're more involved and yield not that much more performance. I've never been able to break 60% avg usage on my 3090 at 1440p. So it's important to understand at 1440p in the current alpha 100% utilisation isn't possible. As long as the performance your getting is enjoyable to you, then you don't need to doing anything more.

1. Create a custom stripped windows 10 install iso 

This can help a little with your 0.1% lows, but on a modern cpu they'd yield 5% better at best.

2. CPU Overclocking
This can maybe give you a couple % more gpu utilisation.

3. New hardware
swap your 3200mhz ram for 3600mhz or drop in a 5700x, that will give you around 20-30% more performance (just upgraded to the 5950x so i've not run it through my usual suite, but that's from initial testing to give you an idea). But i totally get that the 3700x isn't that old and 3200mhz ram is perfectly fine in most games, but it is an option. Upgrading to a 4k monitor as meganoth  mentioned would also see much greater usage of the gpu.

I benchmarked many of these tweaks with my old 3950x, so it should give you an idea on what to expect and if it's worth it for you. Link

[The_Great_Sephiroth]

7 minutes ago, Naz said:

As long as the performance your getting is enjoyable to you, then you don't need to doing anything more.

This is the most important thing in any game, and is why I don't mind Unity locking me at 60fps. This isn't Unreal Tournament or Quake Champions. I can kill zeds all day at 60fps, and my GPU stays cool while doing it.

[McGee9899]

Yeah so im just mainly looking for the highest fps in 1440p ultra settings. The thing that just mainly sparked this whole thing is that my buddy with a 2070 super, was getting higher frames than me in 1440p ultra. That aggravated me because a 3080 is more powerful than a 2070 super of course. But if it is like you said and upgrading the cpu could get more performance. Then i might just do it. He has an intel based system and im not entirely sure of his cpu but i know it has 10 cores. Another buddy of mine has been offering a ryzen 9 5900x he has at a discounted price. Would it be worth my time to take it and get a little more performance on 7 days and future proof my system for a good bit? Also thank you for everyone responding and actually being helpful. This is the first forum i ever posted on and it is suprising to me to see how nice it is and how much players just know. 

[Naz]

yeah the 7dtd community are a great group, happy to welcome you aboard😜I hear that quite a lot, "my old hardware ran 7 days better" and they're not wrong, but once you apply the affinity tweak you're back on even ground and then the newer hardware is surprise surprise faster. I think it's because unity likes 4 cores and for a really long time intel 4 core i5's were the choice for gaming. Fast forward a couple years and 16 cores are available on consumer chips and unity just doesn't react well to having so many threads available to it with modern cpu's, especially with ryzen cpu's that have multiple dies, you want to keep all the process for 7dtd one 1 die for the lowest latency. Intel still benefits from the affinity tweak but not to the same degree.

 

If you have the budget for it and are happy with it, then sure ryzen 5000 chips are the fastest gaming cpu's available today and 12 cores could be put to use in other games and certainly future games. I certainly understand wanting to get the most out of your system, especially with the prices of gpus that's been going on, gotta get every pennies worth out of it

But keep in mind even ryzen 5000 probably won't max out your gpu at 1440p, but you will be getting the most fps possible at 1440p (excluding overclocking and faster ram)

 

[Beelzybub]

On 7/19/2021 at 5:05 AM, McGee9899 said:

Even at the lowest possible settings in game, on 1080p i get about 100fps.

This thread is so confusing to me. On the one hand, I would kill for a 3080 card. On the other hand,

I get 120+ fps on lowest setting with my i5 3550 from 2012 and a GTX 1060 6Gig.

I guess my computer is just magic.

[The_Great_Sephiroth]

Intel has higher per-core performance than AMD, especially in that era. The newest AMD setups (Ryzens) are on-par with Intel, so you likely have a decent setup for what it is, Beelzy. I run an i7-6950X and it beat out many newer generations of both Intel and AMD chips, which is likely why I am able to get the framerate I do. Another question I always ask is whether that is a real framerate. In other words, is vsync on? If not, 50% of those frames maybe a single pixel, half a frame, or anything else that isn't a filled buffer. I can show you close to 200fps on my setup if I disable vsync, but my monitor would be unable to top 144fps anyway.

 

The biggest fix would be making Unity (or maybe the code for the voxel-based world?) to use our CPUs better. I peak around 60% usage on one core and the others never peak that high, whether I run two cores or all ten, or even all 20 (the second threads). If we had a few threads that could eat 80%+ of a few cores we could probably get data to our GPUs faster and thus get a higher framerate.

[Naz]

4 hours ago, Beelzybub said:

This thread is so confusing to me. On the one hand, I would kill for a 3080 card. On the other hand,

I get 120+ fps on lowest setting with my i5 3550 from 2012 and a GTX 1060 6Gig.

I guess my computer is just magic.

Read the post above yours and the magic behind the curtain is revealed XD

[Beelzybub]

@Naz@The_Great_Sephiroth

So, let's say we lived in an alternate universe where people could actually buy GPUs.

I install a RTX 3080 FE, just like @McGee9899 has. According to your statements,

my i5 3550 would get a better frame rate in 7 Days to Die than his Ryzen 3700x.

 

Every benchmark I can find has a Ryzen 3700x having better single core and multi core

performance than my i5 3550.

Except in 7 Days to Die? I'm really skeptical.

[SylenThunder]

11 minutes ago, Beelzybub said:

@Naz@The_Great_Sephiroth

So, let's say we lived in an alternate universe where people could actually buy GPUs.

I install a RTX 3080 FE, just like @McGee9899 has. According to your statements,

my i5 3550 would get a better frame rate in 7 Days to Die than his Ryzen 3700x.

 

Every benchmark I can find has a Ryzen 3700x having better single core and multi core

performance than my i5 3550.

Except in 7 Days to Die? I'm really skeptical.

I did a hardware comparison once between my i7-3930k with different clock settings, and then my R9 3900X.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/251570/discussions/4/2247803885925802071/#c2247803885925903682

 

GPU was a constant across all the tests. Pretty sure that was on Alpha 18.

[Jugginator]

8 hours ago, Beelzybub said:

This thread is so confusing to me. On the one hand, I would kill for a 3080 card. On the other hand,

I get 120+ fps on lowest setting with my i5 3550 from 2012 and a GTX 1060 6Gig.

I guess my computer is just magic.

 

 

I guess mine is, too, lol. Stayed between 168-173 FPS everywhere outdoors. RX 480 8GB (with a -5% power limit) / R3 3200G (CPU wasn't even overclocked) running at 1080p. Sorry for the overlay I was too lazy to fix it and MSI afterburner was giving me issues.

 

Edited July 21, 2021 by Jugginator (see edit history)

[Naz]

22 minutes ago, Beelzybub said:

@Naz@The_Great_Sephiroth

So, let's say we lived in an alternate universe where people could actually buy GPUs.

I install a RTX 3080 FE, just like @McGee9899 has. According to your statements,

my i5 3550 would get a better frame rate in 7 Days to Die than his Ryzen 3700x.

 

Every benchmark I can find has a Ryzen 3700x having better single core and multi core

performance than my i5 3550.

Except in 7 Days to Die? I'm really skeptical.

Yes out of the box you would get better performance because your cpu is already running the game with 4 cores since your i5 has 4 cores. However newer hardware can get the same 4 core advantage by simply assigning 4 core affinity and since the newer hardware is more powerful, it will perform better apples to apples.

3 minutes ago, Jugginator said:

 

I guess mine is, too, lol. Stayed between 168-173 FPS everywhere outdoors. RX 480 8GB (with a -5% power limit) / R3 3200G (CPU wasn't even overclocked) running at 1080p. Sorry for the overlay I was too lazy to fix it and MSI afterburner was giving me issues.

 

case and point another 4 core cpu

[Jugginator]

7 minutes ago, Naz said:

case and point another 4 core cpu

Yeah again being lazy, in the middle of testing other stuff and that was said enough lol

[Naz]

haha no worries i get that, sometimes you just have time to skim😛

[The_Great_Sephiroth]

Using more than four cores did not hurt me a bit. It helped, but VERY little. If I disable HT on my i7-6950X and set affinity to four cores only, I get around 100-144fps depending on where in Navezgane I am. If I stand still in one place and enable the other six cores, I gain 6-10fps. Not worth anything unless I was REALLY low on framerate, like sub-30fps. I play in 2560x1440, true/native 2K. Now, when I take it down to three cores, I drop to 50-60fps. Two cores gives 29-36fps. One is in the teens. What this tells me is that more cores do indeed help, so long as they are real cores and NOT secondary threads.

 

I just leave HT on normally and play with all 20 logical CPUs and still get 100-144fps. I believe the PCI-E bus gets saturated at times though, hence the drop. I also normally just leave my desktop on the standard 60Hz refresh rate and thus Unity selects 60Hz since it is less capable than the original Quake, so I get a solid 60fps the entire time I play.

[Pernicious]

Just popped into this thread to thank @Naz for his tips. I had actually given up on the low FPS issue a few days ago after trying a lot of things on the web (and not trying things that sounded like the author/vlogger didn't know what he was talking about). 

 

I have a 3080Ti, overclocked (and quite a high overclock too), 8086k overclocked (Again, 5.1Ghz all cores so not fantastic, but still above average),  I was getting anything from >100fps, to mid 20s during a horde night. Tuning the shadows and reflections a bit, I could keep it to high 30s, even though the Nvidia Overlay said I was rarely using over 30% GPU.

 

Set the affinity to only the last 4 physical cores as per Naz's links, and so far, I've cranked everything back up to maximum including shadows and reflections, and I'm averaging 80fps, with no drops below 58fps yet. GPU is now averaging in the mid to high 40s%. I haven't had a horde night yet though, but I'm pretty hopeful for a much smoother experience.

 

Cheers @Naz. Appreciate the heads up.  

[Vampirenostra]

any tips to try affinity with Macs?)))

[The_Great_Sephiroth]

Overclocking can hurt your performance in many modern engines, unless you go to the extreme. Have you tried going back to stock (save your OC settings first) and seeing how it plays?