New A750 oscilating power draw and clock speeds in certain games

[Izeezu]

Greetings,

I have bought my A750 FE a week ago and overall been rather happy. However I noticed an odd behavior I have to ask about.

I noticed the issue first when I was playing a game through noticeable coil whine coming from the GPU. However the coil whine is periodic with intervals of 0.5 seconds. Upon paying closer attention I also noticed that the coil whine period also coincides with GPU power draw drop, GPU clock speed drop, Core voltage drop, frame time increase and FPS decrease. Every half second I hear some whining sound for 0.2 seconds coming from the GPU and during the 0.2 seconds of whine my GPU power draw drops to 50w and my fps drops by %30. So far the only 2 games I have experienced this with are EVE online and War Thunder. I am attaching a screenshot of the arc control center graphs I managed to capture while replicating the issue. The stable parts of the graph are from when I am alt tabbed to my desktop however the issue is quite easy to replicate as soon as I tab back into the said games. I had a similar problem with an old graphics card I used which was hot spotting on the GPU die. It was quickly fixed after re-pasting but since this GPU is a week old I assume this is not the issue at hand here. Thanks in advance for everyone who tries to help and I will be eagerly waiting for your responses.

[Izeezu]

I forgot to mention that I am using 32.0.101.5768 drivers and I will be attaching the SSU of my system below.

[vyrgozunqk]

I see you are using Ryzen 1600, which does not support re-sizable bar, which leads to the GPU being unable to receive sufficient data... When it gets chunk of data, it crunches through it at full power, then it waits for another chunk... Which leads to the mentioned behaviour. The power drops are the wait times.
I'd suggest that you search for Ryzen 3600(or above) CPU, second hand somewhere, they are very cheap now and you should solve the problem.

Note, when you decide to install newer CPU, do not forget to enable the Re-bar option from the motherboard.

[Izeezu]

Thanks for your reply. It is actually the 1600 af model along with a b450 motherboard which both supports Re-Bar. Above 4g decoding and resizable bar are enabled in the bios and HWinfo64 reports it as enabled. Moreover most of the games I play do not display this behavior but 2 of them. What you say makes sense however I believe there might be another issue here.

[vyrgozunqk]

I still think the CPU can be somehow bottleneck in your case. 

From what i've read here in TechPowerup , the performance difference for the first generation Ryzen's is less than 1%... On Intel's website it also says minimum CPU - Ryzen 3600...
I have installed WarThunder on my machine with B450, Ryzen 3600 and Arc A750 and can run the game at 4K @ High, with "XeSS Quality" @ 190-200FPS...

My graphs are much more stable, but the ryzen 3600 is ~40% faster than the 1600. Although it still bottlenecks the GPU in some scenarios/ games.

[Izeezu]

Okay so I got my hands on a ryzen 5500 along with 32gb of ram. I have tested war thunder again after the upgrades and my graphs still look the same. Even though my FPS increased the exact behavior continues. I also suspected a power delivery issue and checked all the power cables in my PC and they all seem fine. I have a 700w PSU which is an FSP700-60AHBC that has been working fine for for the past 4 years. Here is the graphs I am getting with the new hardware installed.

[vyrgozunqk]

This looks much better and now you are fully feeding the GPU, when feeding it... 
To me this still looks like data starvation because as you have noted, happens in just two specific games. If you run something like Furmark or 3D mark and there is no such behaviour there, then the issue is definitely not the power supply or the GPU itself. 
Do you happen to run those games from mechanical HDD?

Have you also fully downloaded the game, War Thunder allows limited install and in this case gets all additional models and textures from the internet dynamically... 

[Izeezu]

As a little update I went ahead and did a clean install of win10pro since a lot of hardware has been replaced so I wanted to get rid of all the mess of drivers upon drivers and registries.

I have 2 NVMe SSDs in my system. 1 intel 660p as my C: drive in it's proper m.2 slot, and 1 crucial P3 as my bulk storage where all my games reside. However since I only had 1 m.2 NVMe slot on my motherboard I had to improvise by getting a PCIe x4 to m.2 adapter, putting my P3 on it, then installing it to my second x16 slot. Although the P3 is a PCIe gen3 x4 it is running on gen2 x4 which is fine-ish since I made myself believe I didn't need the extra speed and saw gen2 x4 better enough than a sata ssd.

When it comes to War Thunder I am indeed running the full client. One other wierd thing I realised is that the Vsync toggle does not work in that game for me. No matter what I set it my FPS is uncapped. And yeah the problem still continues after the clean install aswell...

I tried some other games I deemed hard to run to see how the GPU behaves. These were Cyberpunk2077, Total War Warhammer 2, Rainbow Six Siege, Batllefield 1 and a couple of lighter titles along with the Witcher 3 again. I ran them at 2560x1080 Max settings for 2 minutes then took the screenshot of the graphs.

Cyberpunk is butter smooth and a joy to play, graphs look perfect as well.

Rainbow six is smooth, graphs are okay as well. Screenshot is from the in game benchmark and from the power draw we can see the scene changes which just sometimes introduce a tiny microstutter but I believe that is normal.

Battlefield1 is butter smooth with great graphs as well.

Witcher 3 surprised me as it looks to be fixed! it is butter smooth now with the graphs looking as good. Maybe the clean install did something afterall? Though the problem was not as bad as war thunder to start with.

Warhammer 2 campaign map is smooth with 170w of stable power draw. However when I enter a battle the power draw does not surpass around 110w and my FPS feels in the 40s when all the units are engaging each other. Although the power graph is not as atrocious as war thunder, it is still odd that it's only drawing at most 115w while only delivering 40 fps. Seems like we have found another problematic game.

I will be attaching the screenshots as attachments this time to not clutter up, feel free to take a look.

[vyrgozunqk]

The Vsync issue, I believe you should report it to the game devs.

As for the WH2 graph, it doesn't look bad. The GPU normally does not always consume the maximum available power since not all games would utilise all of its features. If you look at the GPU clock you would see that the GPU core was running full speed, just not needing more power at this specific moment or type of workload. Maybe the current scene had something which did not used all of the GPU features, but was taxing on whatever it required... Or if you have played it on high resolution (e.g. 1440) the textures were massive in size and the Vram was not enough.
I haven't played WH2 and don't have it in my library, but I saw online that it has both DX11 and DX12 modes, from what i've read, DX12 was experimental in 2018-2020(and with not very good implementation), but you can try changing the DX mode and see if there would be some improvement in the overall performance. 

I have also found that in some games(mostly DX9/10, but even some on DX11) using DXVK can actually improve the performance a lot. So you can try experimenting with that.

I would also suggest that you try MSI Afterburner for on-screen display of the current actual FPS and usage. I've noticed that the Intel OSD is making performance hit in some games, for some reason(3 to 8FPS). 

At least you know that there is no hardware fault in your GPU...

[Izeezu]

I have just discovered another game which displays this oscilatory power and clock issue.

EVE online but only when I am sitting in hangar, not flying around. Just wanted to give a quick little update.

[RonaldM_Intel]

Hi @Izeezu 

I tested War Thunder (4K/High presets - XeSS: Quality) on my Intel Arc A750 LE + Win10 19045 + Core i5-12400 and driver 32.0.101.5768. I did not observe any noticeable power oscillation and couldn't hear any abnormally loud coil whine (as common as it can be on GPUs). See this video of my test: https://youtu.be/5gtI3k5ggPk (you can see the only drop occurs when I Alt+tab out of the game).

The CapFrameX data I captured during gameplay (attached) shows steady GPU power (minimum 148W with minimum 2000Mhz GPU clock) resulting in average FPS 130.6 on that run which I think is pretty good. Just to be sure let me know the following:

• Is your A750 from another vendor? (e.g. Acer, Sparkle)
• Have you done any overclocking with Intel Arc Control?
• I know it may sound odd... but have you updated the BIOS recently? 
• Do you have any power profile in BIOS and in Windows for PCIe? For reference check this link.

Hopefully this helps.

Best Regards,

Ronald M.

[RonaldM_Intel]

Hi,

Did you get a chance to see my previous post?

I hope the information helped.

Best Regards,

Ronald M.

[Izeezu]

Hello @RonaldM_Intel ,

I apologize for my rather late response as I have missed your initial post.

I got the founders edition A750 so it is from Intel. Bought it from a MediaMarkt.

I haven't tried any OC from ARC control as I have not felt the need for it yet. Only thing I changed in that menu was to set a custom fan curve since I noticed the VRAM getting quite toasty for my liking reaching 85 C.

Last time I updated the bios was many months ago, far before I got my A750. My motherboard is an ASRock B450M Pro4-F model running on BIOS 7.40 which has a release of mid 2022.

Regarding power profiles, I have the performance power plan set from the windows control panel. The only 2 settings regarding power tuning in the bios I changed was setting -24 to the curve optimizer for my ryzen 5500 and giving my ram 1.35V for reaching 3600Mhz.

Looking forward for your reply,

Thanks in advance

[RonaldM_Intel]

No worries on the delay, I'm just happy to help here.

Can you share a screenshot of your fan curve configuration? I'll see if I can reproduce this behavior with the same setting. In parallel why don't you test by setting it to default fan speed?

We can come up with some educated conclusions based on these tests.

Best Regards,

Ronald M.

[Izeezu]

I have attached my fan curve settings to this reply. It is nothing out of the ordinary, just much more aggressive than stock as I don't really mind the extra noise with my headphones on and would much rather have the card run colder.

Also tried with the stock settings as you have said but unfortunately the power draw and clock speeds are the same with oscillations.

I went ahead and tried running the problematic games (EVE online, War Thunder) in windowed modes and reduced resolutions to no avail as well. Graphs are the same once again. I attached another screenshot of telemetry data from ARC control from EVE online while I am standing in hangar. This time running on borderless window mode at 1680x1050.

Let me know if there are any other tests you would like me perform.

[RonaldM_Intel]

I'm leaning towards the thought of a hardware issue... but let me get some extra info.

Can you check this other user's experience and verify if you observe the exact same behavior? https://discordapp.com/channels/554824368740630529/1273316610198732890 this one is specific to FPS drop to single digits for some time.

Finally, if you could capture CapFrameX telemetry during your War Thunder session and then zip the .JSON file and share it here, I can then compare your GPU's overall power draw vs. my GPU. You can check instructions for CapFrameX here.

Thanks for your patience while we deal with this one.

Ronald M.

[Izeezu]

Hello again,

First of all, I was unfortunately unable to view the discord post you have linked. I believe it has something to do with permissions and such as nothing is loading in that channel for me.

I have also set up CapFrameX just as described in the other link you have sent me and I managed to replicate the issue ONLY in EVE Online.

I do not know what happened exactly with War Thunder. Maybe because Windows decided to corrupt itself so I had to reinstall it (Yes, it now is the 3rd windows installation I have had since the start of this post...), maybe because of 32.0.101.5972 driver update or maybe an update from war thunder. The issue is just, fixed... The VSync toggle is working and the frame dips with the oscillating graph is gone.

However I was still able to reproduce the issue in Eve Online. The recording from CapFrameX will belong to it with VSync in game options turned on. Talking about VSync, I realized that when I turn VSync off, the GPU runs fine and the graphs and performance along with power draw and clock speed become steady. As soon as I turn VSync back on the issue returns which leads me to believe this only happens to certain games when they have VSync enabled. (Previously War thunder's Vsync toggle was not working. Even while set to on, the game was reporting more frames than my monitor refresh. Though setting vsync off did not fix the issue in that case but there was definitely something weird going on there. Might be related)

It took me a while to set windows up once again and download the games to run tests but here are the updates on the matter.

Looking forward for your reply and thanks in advance once again.

[Izeezu]

I forgot to clarify that the huge spike in the middle of the graph is just me undocking from the station so the GPU is loading assets for the star system so it is normal. You can disregard that couple seconds of the graph.