Speed step bios setting, and its negative effects.

[Bez]

Lately I've been struggling with poor performance in many games, having to reduce a lot of graphical settings to achieve smooth gameplay at 60fps+, after switching over to rfactor 2 on steam I was getting bad shuddering and stuttering of Ai cars, gutted!
Last night I decided it was time to have a dig around in the bios and tweak some settings, last time I was in the bios was to default it after instability with an overclock, and this is where my problems must of begun.
After scrolling through the various options I decided to start with disabling the OS control over speed step technology of the cpu, instantly Windows seemed more snappy, and on firing up rfactor 2 all the Ai issues were fixed, not only that but it felt oddly smooth, so I tried upping some graphics settings, long story short, I ended up being able to max out all graphics settings and it stayed above 60 fps even with 20+ Ai cars in a race.
I replicated my experiments on other games and was able to achieve the same results.

 

[Dave Stephenson]

It's a problem I've encountered in many games on both Intel and AMD CPUs. It's generally been considered bad form to leave that functionality enabled if overclocking for as long as I can remember (can't speak from personal experience on current Intel architecture). I tend to turn it off immediately after installing the mobo on my gaming machines whether I'm overclocking them or not.

 

[Bez]

It's crazy the difference it makes to performance, breathed a new lease of life into my crusty old PC.
Happy dayz!

 

[Dino Paolini]

This is not the norm though, before everyone goes and deactivates their power-saving features