12 replies to this topic

[BigBoss]

I'm updating my cabinet, software and hardware. In doing so, I moved to a 165hz monitor and found just how smooth this runs things. I'll never go back to 60hz.

 

Anway, to really benefit from this, I want to keep most frame rates around 200+ FPS, and most tables manage this.  Some run around 110-120fps and others can dip as low as 80 fps. In analyzing this, I've brought up performance counters to see where the bottlenecks are in my system and it's a bit confusing. Regardless of if the table is running 600fps or 120fps, the CPU is always around 66% in use and the GPU is also around 60-70% in use. Nothing seems taxed at all.

 

I run 2560x1440 resolution. FPS is actually slightly lower if I lower this to 1920x1080 resolution (which seemed odd, but 1440p is the resolution I want to run anyway). I'm running an RTX 2060 Super, Intel i5-4690, 16gb RAM. The board is an H81 so PCIe is only 2.0, but 8gb VRAM should be enough to not matter too much here. Windows 10.

 

In the older days, the CPU was more important than the GPU for VP8. I think the GPU got more important with the DX9 port and even more so with VPX.

 

Also, some pup packs can really slow things down and brings the CPU usage way up. I know this is CPU constraint. For example, turning on the SWDE pup pack brought the table FPS from 230fps down to 80 fps and wasn't worth it. Oddly, batman 66 with pup running is still > 160fps with CPU again around 66%.

 

I would consider grabbing a 3080 TI but I wonder if that'd even make any difference.  Perhaps my bottleneck is a CPU with faster single core speed? Perhaps the VP and pinmame only use a couple cores of the CPU at 100% and aren't very threaded so I suppose that's why I could be seeing 66% CPU with some slower frame rates. It'd be a bummer because moving CPU requires new motherboard and possibly starting over with a fresh install

 

Ideally, I'd like to run all the PUP stuff around 240 FPS+.

 

I have a spare I5 11400F CPU and board laying around here. Perhaps I'll try to get that running and see what type of difference that makes.  Looks like the 11400 has about a 35% increase in single core performance over my 4690.

Edited by BigBoss, 25 April 2022 - 01:08 PM.

[wiesshund]

PUP is all rendered in software, so it is all on the CPU
How far it drags the PC down depends much on the resolution and encoding of the PUP media

 

GPU change wont improve that, CPU change can though

[htamas]

Perhaps my bottleneck is a CPU with faster single core speed? Perhaps the VP and pinmame only use a couple cores of the CPU at 100% and aren't very threaded so I suppose that's why I could be seeing 66% CPU with some slower frame rates. It'd be a bummer because moving CPU requires new motherboard and possibly starting over with a fresh install

 

This indeed seems to be the reason for such a trouble. VPX & PinMAME are not multi-threaded so a CPU with very good single core performance is really important. 
I suppose if they could use multiple cores more efficiently, that should help but it doesn't look like this'll happen anytime soon, if ever.

 

I'm in the same boat (although at a lot lower level) because my AMD FX 8320E processor definitely hinders / bottlenecks my GTX 1060 GPU, even while playing a few demanding tables at 1080p / 60Hz only. Single-core performance of FX processors is a lot worse compared to a better Intel CPU. I don't see any of the cores maxed out either... at least if they'd be used more intensively, that could perhaps help.
Like you, I cannot significantly upgrade the CPU without getting a new MoBo, CPU, memory and basically rebuild the whole system. Thankfully there are not that many tables causing stutter on my rig, but it's annoying enough when this happens with some that I really like to play, LOL.

[BigBoss]

I have a new motherboard, i7-12700K and RTX 3070TI coming today. I think the 3070TI may be over kill for VPX but maybe not for other simulations including pro pinball and the pro pinball stretched using reshade that runs a bit slow now. Will be "unfun" moving all this over. Hopefully I can clone my existing windows 10 install and it magically boots in the new PC. I doubt it.

[wiesshund]

Hopefully I can clone my existing windows 10 install and it magically boots in the new PC. I doubt it.

It will but, do yourself a favor
Clone the drive and then boot the drive in the existing PC

 

Now, go and uninstall as much of the present hardware drivers as you can
ignore requests to reboot until you are done, then do not reboot, just shut down.

 

And here is a BAT file to purge the existing monitor entries so they dont come back to haunt you
have to run it as admin

reg delete "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\GraphicsDrivers\Configuration" /F
reg delete "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\GraphicsDrivers\Connectivity" /F
reg delete "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\GraphicsDrivers\ScaleFactors" /F

Then put the cloned drive into the new hardware
and once windows is loaded, go on and install all the appropriate drivers from the hardware vendors.

Then arrange the screens in windows as appropriate.

 

You should be mostly ready to go then, minus probably a little bit of tweaking

 

[BigBoss]

Thank you yea. My plan is to clone the drive with reflect and hope it boots. If so, I'll have no problems. If not and I have to reinstall windows to get it to boot, that's the nightmare I dread.  As far as uninstalling hardware drivers, I don't have any that are running as services or with tray apps other than nvidia control panel (which I'll still have).  A hardware driver won't get loaded if the hardware isn't present. When windows boots, the PnP manager scans the bus and for each device, loads the driver. If the device isn't present, the driver isn't loaded.

[wiesshund]

Thank you yea. My plan is to clone the drive with reflect and hope it boots. If so, I'll have no problems. If not and I have to reinstall windows to get it to boot, that's the nightmare I dread.  As far as uninstalling hardware drivers, I don't have any that are running as services or with tray apps other than nvidia control panel (which I'll still have).  A hardware driver won't get loaded if the hardware isn't present. When windows boots, the PnP manager scans the bus and for each device, loads the driver. If the device isn't present, the driver isn't loaded.

 

Some of the hardware may be similar
but the configuration wont be

GPU wise, best to scrub the GPU fully, even when using same GPU in a new MOBO
The other stuff?
I would uninstall all audio adapters (just blow them out from device manager)

If moving from Intel to AMD or AMD to Intel, i would definitely make an attempt to blow out the chipset drivers.

 

Most times Windows 10 will flop from one hardware base to another, and self rectify itself to the changes
but it does not always do it optimally.

Now that does not always mean a total reformat and reinstall.
A lot of times you can do a windows reset, which gives you a quick mini reinstall.

VPX wise, this is not exactly so terrible as, you can fully export your VPX VpinMAME and B2S registry entries to reimport
And usually we do not install any of our pinball stuff to windows controlled folders, so that stuff is still intact.
so we can reimport registry, then do a quick reregister of vpinmame, b2s server and flexDMD and like magic we are back again.
Worst case, we rename our original folders, run an installer and point it at what the path was, when when finished, delete the new folder and rename the original back

 

I try to get rid of anything that is specific to the motherboard and graphics card i am running and the audio chipset
That may be a little easier with AMD stuff because they have a driver scrubber that POOF all presence of AMD stuff gone, then you shut down and swap the drive over.

[BigBoss]

So far none of this matters. It won't boot with the cloned drive. Looks like a full install from scratch is required

[BigBoss]

Turns out the original drive was formatted and installed on a MBR partition and modern machines are all GPT partitions so there was no transferring this one live. I did a reinstall fresh using my notes sheet and everything is 100% up and running. Took about 3 hours which included the copying of all the files over the network.

 

And holy crap The SWDE that was around 40FPS on the old system is running about 450 FPS with the pup playing.  That table ran around 500 FPS without the PUP before but 40fps with. Metallica premium was around 130fps before but dropped in the 80s at times. Now it's solid over 200.

 

Old system was Intel i5 4960 / RTX 2060 Super / 16gb ram / pci-express 2.0

New system is Intel i7-12700K / RTX 3070 TI / 16gb ram / pci-express 4.0

 

Other things that have improved are the pincabview tables. All of those use to stutter but now they're super smooth

Edited by BigBoss, 26 April 2022 - 09:24 AM.

[wiesshund]

Turns out the original drive was formatted and installed on a MBR partition and modern machines are all GPT partitions so there was no transferring this one live. I did a reinstall fresh using my notes sheet and everything is 100% up and running. Took about 3 hours which included the copying of all the files over the network.

 

And holy crap The SWDE that was around 40FPS on the old system is running about 450 FPS with the pup playing.  That table ran around 500 FPS without the PUP before but 40fps with. Metallica premium was around 130fps before but dropped in the 80s at times. Now it's solid over 200.

 

Old system was Intel i5 4960 / RTX 2060 Super / 16gb ram / pci-express 2.0

New system is Intel i7-12700K / RTX 3070 TI / 16gb ram / pci-express 4.0

 

Other things that have improved are the pincabview tables. All of those use to stutter but now they're super smooth

 

Well, it is too late now, but you did not need to do that, ALL PC's will boot MBR
but you have to go in the bios and change it from UEFI boot to Legacy boot, most motherboards come set as UEFI by default anymore.

[TT11]

I would say also your Ram class and speed may have contributed.  I found no amount of DDR3 ram helped my old core i5 4670K system, but on an updated mobo, 9th Gen i3 9100 and 8GB of faster DDR4 at 2400hz made a huge difference.

[BigBoss]

 

Turns out the original drive was formatted and installed on a MBR partition and modern machines are all GPT partitions so there was no transferring this one live. I did a reinstall fresh using my notes sheet and everything is 100% up and running. Took about 3 hours which included the copying of all the files over the network.

 

And holy crap The SWDE that was around 40FPS on the old system is running about 450 FPS with the pup playing.  That table ran around 500 FPS without the PUP before but 40fps with. Metallica premium was around 130fps before but dropped in the 80s at times. Now it's solid over 200.

 

Old system was Intel i5 4960 / RTX 2060 Super / 16gb ram / pci-express 2.0

New system is Intel i7-12700K / RTX 3070 TI / 16gb ram / pci-express 4.0

 

Other things that have improved are the pincabview tables. All of those use to stutter but now they're super smooth

 

Well, it is too late now, but you did not need to do that, ALL PC's will boot MBR
but you have to go in the bios and change it from UEFI boot to Legacy boot, most motherboards come set as UEFI by default anymore.

 

 

In legacy mode, it did show the HDD as a boot device, but it instantly blue screened.   I think it is possible to convert MBR to GPT without data loss, but it's too late now. Part of the problem is that this was an NVME drive and moving it to another computer to work on it was very tough because my USB M2 to Sata adapter doesn't support M2 NVME slots. 

[wiesshund]

 

 

Turns out the original drive was formatted and installed on a MBR partition and modern machines are all GPT partitions so there was no transferring this one live. I did a reinstall fresh using my notes sheet and everything is 100% up and running. Took about 3 hours which included the copying of all the files over the network.

 

And holy crap The SWDE that was around 40FPS on the old system is running about 450 FPS with the pup playing.  That table ran around 500 FPS without the PUP before but 40fps with. Metallica premium was around 130fps before but dropped in the 80s at times. Now it's solid over 200.

 

Old system was Intel i5 4960 / RTX 2060 Super / 16gb ram / pci-express 2.0

New system is Intel i7-12700K / RTX 3070 TI / 16gb ram / pci-express 4.0

 

Other things that have improved are the pincabview tables. All of those use to stutter but now they're super smooth

 

Well, it is too late now, but you did not need to do that, ALL PC's will boot MBR
but you have to go in the bios and change it from UEFI boot to Legacy boot, most motherboards come set as UEFI by default anymore.

 

 

In legacy mode, it did show the HDD as a boot device, but it instantly blue screened.   I think it is possible to convert MBR to GPT without data loss, but it's too late now. Part of the problem is that this was an NVME drive and moving it to another computer to work on it was very tough because my USB M2 to Sata adapter doesn't support M2 NVME slots. 

 

 

Yes, you can convert MBR to GPT, it's a one time one way conversion.

Id have to see the stop code it threw at you, and it does not matter anymore.
Probably a boot time driver that didnt match the new system
A lot of things, as you said, windows will readjust on the fly, but there are a few things that it does not always adjust to.