[Resolved] RX590 Acting odd.

[GloomerO1]

Good afternoon all, thank you in advance for any advice you may have and an apology for the wall of text. I have been scratching my head at this issue for a week now and I am just lost as to what could be the problem. It all started playing Path of Exile and has just been acting up in general otherwise. Let me start by saying I have not been having stability issues, crashing, shutdowns etc.

Back to the PoE issue. The game gets downright unplayable, it starts out... decent, and progressively get worse. To start here is my comp setup.
Computer:
Intel i5 9600-K
MSI Z-390A Pro
MSI RX-590 8Gig - GPU Clock 1545mhz
16 Gig DDR 3000
Muskin m.2 512mb SSD

Nothing super great, but decent enough to game. Currently my PoE settings, currently running in windowed mode at: 2399x1533 (Custom res on a 4k mon). Vsycn: disabled, Anti Aliasing Off: Lighting: Shadows (Default), Shadow Quality: (Low Default), Sun Shadow Quality: Low, Number of Lights: Low, Post Processing: Enabled (Default), Water Detailt: Low, Texture Quality: Medium, Texture Filtering:, 2x Anisotropic Filtering, Dynamic Resultion: Enabled (Default), Target Framerate: 60, Engine Multithreading: Enabled (Default).

With these settings, im sitting in town 140FPS, good enough, I can handle that. Then running around the map, decent density of mobs, some explosions, me cycloning its going ok, 90-100 FPS I can do that. But then all of a sudden 5 minutes in, that same situation and now im running 55FPS with 20 frame time then the game speeds up super fast and im back to the normal 90 to 100. It will bobble back and forth for a bit and then maybe after 30 seconds the game comes back to being more stable. Then you get into a real mess, huge grouping, delerium, explosions and its dropping to 40FPS with 20ms frame time.... and the game is moving so slow, but incredibly smooth it just floats along as if it was running in slow-mo.
When I set it to full screen 1920x1080, sitting in my hideout im running around 200FPS, ok great, more than I need or want, running around a map with decent density and its 100fps, when everythings going off, huge packs in a delerium with explosions and all that, 55FPS with 25ms Frame Time.

I am surprised with these game settings the game is not running completely smooth at all times. I cannot for the life of me understand or explain how it just gets to be running in slow mo, but reaction times are just terrible.


I have an almost identical computer I use at work, swap the RX590 for an RX570.... and PoE performs vastly better. It is the Frame Time spikes that cause me the most grief, I just get pockets where it freezes, half a second here and there.

Lastly, the card is also running HOT, only in PoE, not in Overwatch, or D3 which are the only other games I play. Constant 100%GPU usage, 2700RPM on the fans (loud.....) recording temps around 81c. From what I can tell that is not unusually hot for an MSI Armor RX590, but it has the noticeable, electrical fire smell to after 30 minutes of gaming so I end up quitting because that is not a normal smell.

The last thing I can note is, I bought a new monitor awhile back, a 4k IPS panel and every once in awhile when waking the monitor up it will sort of be artifacted, not the typical pink dot stuff, just the entire screen looks like its bright white and black (like an old CRT static tv but incredibly small pixel sizes). However all I have to do is unplug the HDMI cable and plug it back in and the screen comes on fine, computer hadn't shut off or reset or anything... so I just chalked that up to a weird monitor issue.

 

[Stuka87]

You will never have a fully fluid feel with VSYNC turned off. That needs to be on if you want to prevent hitching and screen tearing. Running with it off will also cause the card to run at 100% utilization at all times, so yes, IT WILL RUN HOT. The only real time you should have VSYNC off is for twitch shooters like CS:GO. So do yourself a favor and turn VSYNC on.

As for the main issue you are mentioning, it sounds like a loading issue. It would be worth running MSI Afterburner to graph everything. It almost sounds like you are running out of a VRAM, and textures are having to be swapped out of the card, which means going to main system memory. Or, in a worst case scenario, the system is having to go to disk to grab assets. So, after turning VSYNC on, and giving it a play through, install and run MSI Afterburner, hit the 'detatch' button to pop out all the graphs, go play, and after a hitch happens, tab out to look at the graphs and see if anything spikes up or down.

 

[GloomerO1]

You will never have a fully fluid feel with VSYNC turned off. That needs to be on if you want to prevent hitching and screen tearing. Running with it off will also cause the card to run at 100% utilization at all times, so yes, IT WILL RUN HOT. The only real time you should have VSYNC off is for twitch shooters like CS:GO. So do yourself a favor and turn VSYNC on.

As for the main issue you are mentioning, it sounds like a loading issue. It would be worth running MSI Afterburner to graph everything. It almost sounds like you are running out of a VRAM, and textures are having to be swapped out of the card, which means going to main system memory. Or, in a worst case scenario, the system is having to go to disk to grab assets. So, after turning VSYNC on, and giving it a play through, install and run MSI Afterburner, hit the 'detatch' button to pop out all the graphs, go play, and after a hitch happens, tab out to look at the graphs and see if anything spikes up or down.

Thank you for the suggestion, that may have been part of the issue, but I was able to resolve the issue based on a suggestion from another post regarding performance issues.

I had been running the game with VSYNC and it was giving the same issues, even with keeping the FPS a constant 60 with the occasional drops when a lot going on, but the real issue it seems was since I had the settings on Low (as I thought that would help ease the GPU) it was doing exactly that, easing the GPU and offloading more to the CPU which was now bottlenecking the system when Path of Exile was having a lot going on. Once I bumped my graphics settings back up to the High (Default) settings it ran just fine.

 

[Stuka87]

Thank you for the suggestion, that may have been part of the issue, but I was able to resolve the issue based on a suggestion from another post regarding performance issues.

I had been running the game with VSYNC and it was giving the same issues, even with keeping the FPS a constant 60 with the occasional drops when a lot going on, but the real issue it seems was since I had the settings on Low (as I thought that would help ease the GPU) it was doing exactly that, easing the GPU and offloading more to the CPU which was now bottlenecking the system when Path of Exile was having a lot going on. Once I bumped my graphics settings back up to the High (Default) settings it ran just fine.

Interesting, I wasn't aware PoE did that kind of offloading when on low. I assume your temps (and thereby fan speeds) are much better with VSYNC enabled?

 

[GloomerO1]

I honestly am not sure if it is PoE exclusive, the way the other poster had explained it and I understood it to be, is that frames are first pre-loaded by the CPU, by setting the GFX settings to Low instead of Higher settiings, the CPU then processed more of that frame than sending it over to the GPU. I had always been under the assumption that the computer was smart enough to identify and detect you have a GPU and to utilize it as efficiently as possible, regardless of your GFX settings. However that would probably be a great deal more coding than to simply allocate appropriate resources based on the GFX settings chosen, Higher settings = the assumption you have a GPU that can handle the workload and therefore it is shifted to the GPU vrs the CPU.

That said...the fan is still fast, but I had also adjusted to the fan curve to try and keep it more reasonable, its running a bit cooler, 75c. From what I read though the MSI RX 590 Amour OC just has a junk heatsink and fan assembly that does not cool it as well as it could and so the fans are running full blast.

In the other games I have played the card never ran this hot, but they are also not nearly as visually intense and more likely to be optimized. Overwatch, while nice and shiny, not tons of physics calculations... I would imagine.