I’ve been playing Raft, a survival base building game.
EVGA Precision also does nothing, but now watching it in front of the game, it says it’s capping the power draw but the gpu is still running at 98% utilization with fan speeds in the high 1800s. That’s not really helpful.
I fear that adjusting this video card in any way is beyond me. Right at this moment I can’t think of anything else to try.
Check out this screenshot:
If I’m reading this correctly, EVGA Precision is telling me that the gpu is currently pulling 70% power draw, while HWInfo64 says the gpu is at 98% usage. (HWInfo64 is the correct one based on the fan noise.)
EDIT: Okay, yeah, HWInfo64 does confirm that it’s using 100 W instead of the normal 120 W. Also it’s 5C cooler and the fans run 200 RPM less: 18xx vs 20xx. That’s what I get when I drag the slider all the way down to the lowest allowed limit. Now I’m thinking that afterburner “worked” too. It’s just that the change from turning it all the way down is almost imperceptible.
I loaded up Outer Worlds, and damned if there wasn’t screen tear all over the place. I was putting out 100+ fps, but I had to enable VSync at 60Hz to get rid of it.
Now, that didn’t seem right. So.
I started playing around with my monitor settings again, and realized that the refresh rate was set on 60 Hz. I thought that was weird, so I started looking around for ways to change that. No luck. What the hell.
Then I realized what happened: When I installed the new GPU, I didn’t initially get any video input to my monitor. I did a few basic checks, and then (this is the key) I swapped out the Display Port for HDMI just to see if that would help.
It didn’t, but eventually I realized that one of the power connectors wasn’t completely seated. But then, once I had signal…I forgot about the HDMI.
So I’ve been running off of an old HDMI cable this whole time. I just switched back to the Display Port cable, and as soon as I did that my monitor realized that it wants to display at 144 Hz rather than 60. And boom; screen tear gone.
Lately shooters, but looking for any suggestions. I play a lot of Fortnite with my kid and Warzone with friends. I’ll probably end up grabbing Escape from Tarkov because I’m a masochist.
The displayport protocol has an adaptive function built in (if the monitor and card support it) - so it probably wasn’t the increased frame rate that fixed the tearing, but the fact that your video card could use the adaptive sync (what they called “g-sync compatible” - it’s not an actual g-sync hardware unit, it’s just using displayport’s adaptive sync)
Well that’s great news. I had a similar headslap moment when I built my computer a couple years ago for the first time ever.
Building the whole thing went well, plugged everything in, monitor is black. It took me about 6 hours and a couple posts here that didn’t really help and getting really frustrated before I realized that my old computer used a DVI connector, and my new computer used HDMI. (I have since upgraded to a nicer monitor and now use displayport.)
But after 6 hours I finally realized that I needed to change the monitor input from DVI to HDMI. Oh hey look at that, the computer had been working flawlessly from the start. I just couldn’t see it because I was looking at the DVI feed on the monitor, which of course nothing was connected to. Doh!
Afterburner absolutely works on EVGA cards (and all other cards). I’ve used it on multiple EVGA cards in the past. EVGA Precision software is junk.
Here’s a fairly easy guide to using Afterburner to undervolt your card. Really, it’s mainly just a cycle of “Tweak voltage down, apply, test, do it again”. Once you get that down, adjust your fan curve to not ramp up until you need it to.
Sweet, thanks much, that’s exactly what I was looking for.
Confirmed that Afterburner does work, it just has the same imperceptible effect as EVGA Precision. The fan noise annoys me by the low 1000s RPMs. 1850 vs 2050 RPMs is a distinction without a difference, so I mistakenly thought it wasn’t working at all.
Here are two screenshots showing the extremes. This first picture is running normally, without changing anything in afterburner:
Sliding both core clock and power limit as low as afterburner allows does almost literally nothing for my noisy fans. Instead of running at 73% normally, they run at 69% in “quiet mode.” And it costs me 25% of my fps, though I suppose I could try to recover some of that. And hell, I wouldn’t even mind the 25% loss of fps if it actually made the fans quieter.
Reducing fan speed from 73% to 69% isn’t a noticeable difference in sound levels. Am I doing something wrong? Is there a way I could limit the fans directly?
(For both tests I started a new world and played normally until seeing the first island. 5-10 minutes, maybe?)
Are you actually adjusting the curves or just hitting the sliders? In Afterburner, you should be pressing Control+F to open the voltage curve window like this:
…and then adjusting that curve downward. You’re not decreasing the clockspeed (in fact, you might be able to increase it) but rather lowering the amount of voltage the card receives per level of frequency.
As for the fan speed, you can set a custom curve saying how quickly the fans should spin per temp checkpoint…
…So then you can keep the fans slower unless you really need them.
Obvious disclaimer that those curves are just illustrative of what the screens look like and not examples of what your curves should be looking like.
I think so. In the second screenshot I linked above it shows the Ctrl+F screen open with the active curve way below the default curve. (I set it to the minimum, -502 MHz.) Let me see if I can figure out how to embed it…
There we go. Looks like embedding shrinks it and gives no access back to the original. Here’s a repost of the link to where you can enlarge it to read the text. (And see the default line in the Ctrl+F screen more clearly.)
Technically I am not adjusting the curve, only lowering the curve with the slider. I pretty much don’t care about clock speed or FPS, though if I can get some back later with further tinkering I might. Right now all I’m interested in is for it to be quiet and not stutter when I record video. Just moving the slider still counts as a change that should take effect when I hit the Apply button, right?
Thanks much for the red arrow showing the fan config button. My afterburner looks different than yours; I think the button you’re pointing at looks like a person on mine. (For “User defined.”) I’ll play around with that a bit. I would never have looked at that since it gave off a “Share” vibe as an icon, so the red arrow materially helped. And clicking it now, yep, that’s exactly what that little person icon is, custom fan curves. Sweet!
Further tinkering is warranted, but my very first attempt was a smashing success. Fans start in the 900s RPM – which I cannot hear (yay!) – and then slowly creep up. By slowly I mean several minutes of silence to start the game, and the GPU is still in the low 60s C at that point, just like the normal curve. (I restored the clock speed but kept the power slider all the way down.) That is infinitely better than getting hit with the fan noise full blast as soon as I start loading a save game.
Pretty sure I can improve on this first try by a lot, but it is in and of itself a massive improvement. Not sure if I can keep this card longterm – eventually the fans do have to kick in – but this solved my issue with raft well enough. So happy.
…or maybe not! Just did a longer test run, same as the first try, this time also recording it to make sure no stutters. Ended up being around 25 minutes because I kind of zoned out and was just enjoying it, but then survival started kicking my ass (so hungry!) and I remembered I was just testing.
After 25 minutes with recording there were no stutters, the gpu was running at 66 C (maybe 3 degrees warmer than stock settings?) and the fans were still under 1200 RPM, which I couldn’t really hear. (Maybe barely? Just fine.) The power limiting in afterburner helped keep it cool, and keeping the default clock speed didn’t sacrifice any fps as far as I can tell. Still getting 120s like I do with stock settings.
This could not have turned out better, at least for raft. Exactly what I was dreaming of. I’m getting double the fps as the 1050 ti (it was low 60s) and it’s just as quiet. It’s like Christmas come early.
Epic has been ordered to pay around a half billion in fines to the FTC for deceptive and malicious microtransaction practices and for failure to adequately protect children playing the game. About half of it will be disbursed to players by the FTC (how is to be determined) and half is just straight fines and penalties.
[T]he FTC alleged that Epic violated the COPPA Rule by collecting personal information from children under 13 who played Fortnite, a child-directed online service, without notifying their parents or obtaining their parents’ verifiable consent.
[…]
Epic employees expressed concern about its default settings. As early as 2017, Epic employees urged the company to change the default settings to require users to opt in for voice chat, citing concern about the impact on children in particular. Despite this and reports that children had been harassed, including sexually, while playing the game, the company resisted turning off the default settings. And while it eventually added a button allowing users to turn voice chat off, Epic made it difficult for users to find, according to the complaint.
[T]he FTC alleged that Epic used dark patterns to trick players into making unwanted purchases and let children rack up unauthorized charges without any parental involvement.
[…]
Epic ignored more than one million user complaints and repeated employee concerns that “huge” numbers of users were being wrongfully charged. In fact, Epic’s changes only made the problem worse, the FTC alleged. Using internal testing, Epic purposefully obscured cancel and refund features to make them more difficult to find.
For a chuckle, read the tonal differences between the FTC’s statement linked above and Epic’s own spin on events
I’ve loved city building games since the original Sim City on Commodore 64. I’ve played a bunch; I continue to download games like Banished and Depraved and Frostpunk and Civ and all that, but nothing has ever come closed to Cities: Skyline. My problem is I modded it to high heaven so many times with so many extra assets and tools that I don’t even know how to use that I pretty much seized the engine and it just stopped working worth a poop. I’d gone through waves of subscribing and unsubscribing and had some rehab success and continued to have fun, but this holiday I decided to buy a bunch of DLC stuff and take them out for a spin. To that end … I unsubscribed to every last thing that I ever subscribed to in the Workshop and deleted every save file and temp file I could find related to the game and completely re-downloaded and re-installed everything.
I miss my mods so much.
I’m pretty sure I have in mind the most important ones (Move-It, Find-it, Better Menus, etc) but I’m not sure I even remember all I had. I’m going to steer clear of assets (maybe I’ll go there to round out my public works) but I’ll just stick with vanilla buildings for the time being.
Anyone else still playing this? Modders? What are the don’t-miss mods?
EDIT: Comments on downdetector dot com indicate this is regularly scheduled weekly maintenance. Hopefully so and that it’s over soon. I fully cannot log into steam. Rebooted and everything!
EDIT 2: Still super slow logging in but I appear to be connected. For the first time I found myself not wishing my entire game library were exclusively on steam.
