Significant decrease in frame rates in certain titles after increasing RAM overclocking
Significant decrease in frame rates in certain titles after increasing RAM overclocking
I began playing Offworld Trading Company and encountered extremely low frame rates. After some testing, I discovered the issue stems from my RAM overclock. Enabling XMP in BIOS improved performance to a stable 60fps. Turning it off restored that speed, while enabling it caused a rapid decline to around 7 or 8 fps. My GPU appears to be aging, but it seems unaffected by this game when the overclock is disabled.
I attempted to manually adjust the RAM speed and found consistent results. Changing the CPU overclock had no impact. Raising the RAM voltage manually didn’t help either. Updating my MoBo BIOS version also failed to resolve the problem.
Details:
OS: Windows 10
MOBO: MSI Gaming M5
CPU: i5-6600K
Memory: G.Skill Ripjaw 4 DDR4 3000 (2x16GB)
GPU: GTX 670
I also tested disabling any CPU overclock to rule out conflicts, but it had no effect. All system usage stayed below 10%, and performance issues were limited to responsiveness drops during gameplay.
Have you checked the stability of the RAM to confirm there are no issues?
Yes, I ran a test and everything looks stable. If the memory were problematic, I’d anticipate crashes or blue screens.
Not necessarily.... Have you encountered the same issues in other games? I saw the same problem in another game earlier, but didn't identify the cause and stopped playing eventually. I can't confirm it for sure. I'll attempt to re-enable the RAM overclock while adjusting the voltage higher to check if it helps.
I continued testing and confirmed everything functions properly at up to 2600 MHz. Adjusting the voltage and refining the timings resolved the issue at that speed. At 2666 MHz and higher, the problem emerged. Attempts to adjust timings and increase voltage didn’t help. The XMP profile for the RAM isn’t suitable at these frequencies either. Running memory stress tests at 3000 Mhz showed no errors. It seems there’s a mismatch somewhere between the graphics card and system memory above that speed. Should I look into BIOS settings such as PCI-e voltage or frequency?
It's not really important, but on the early X99 platform, values over 3000 in XMP settings automatically configure a bclk of 125. I don't own a 170 chipset, so...