Windows 10 and low performance in DX9 titles

[JaCkBoston]

So a couple of months ago I bought myself a new laptop with an i7 7700HQ, 16GB of DDR4 and a GTX 1060 6GB. That is ACER Predator Helios 300. I enjoyed it's performance for quite some time before I decided to play some old games(including Skyrim) which use DX9/DX10 API and started getting very werid slowdowns where even my much older and much weaker system wouldn't have any issue at all.

 

I used RivaTuner to see how's the hardware utilized and found that it is utilized very poorly. I don't have Crysis 1 and Crysis Warhead screenshots at the moment, however Skyrim one's show identical situation across the board. Low GPU utilization(at around 40%) and low CPU utilization(one core is stressed at 80-85%, the rest are not loaded whatsoever).

 

Yes, drivers are up to date.

Yes, DX runtime, visual studio and NET. are up to date

Yes, I checked affinity - set to all processors.

Yes, the game IS running on a discrete GPU, I checked.

Yes, I did clean driver installation.

Yes, I used DDU.

Yes, DX11 titles use my system fully.

Yes, this is vanilla. Had some mods installed along with ENB. Saw these weird slowdowns, unistalled everything, ran it in vanilla state - same s***.

Yes, I tried turning Afterburner and RTSS off and it didn't help either.

Yes, GameDVR is off.

Yes, windows updates that adress VRAM issues on DX9 API in WIN10 ARE installed.

No, VRAM and RAM can't be an issue.

No, it's not a CPU bottleneck and this assumption is ridiculous. This game worked with the same settings at 60FPS on a very old i3 530 paired with a GTX560ti back in 2011.

No, I don't want to play Special Edition instead, if I wanted to, I wouldn't post here to try and find the solution for the problem.

 

Now that we got all that out of the way...I'm clueless! Completely so.

 

I noticed, however, some problems in other games recently. In BF4, which I casually play quite often, I get hitches and sudden stutters from time to time and on MSI Afterburner statistics screen I see this weird anomally where my GPU temp numbers are constantly going between 0 and 47(it's idle temp).

 

I ask you for help. If anyone ever had the same problem and/or knows how to deal with it other than possibly revert back to Win7 or "buy a new PC", please share the solution!

 

P.S. I have no clue on how to attach screenshots here because of 250kb file size limit, but here's DXDiag.txt for now.

 

[JimboUK]

Have you installed the Fall Creators Update for Windows 10? if not it's worth doing, it fixes a lot of DX 9 issues.

[JaCkBoston]

Jim...

 

 

Yes, windows updates that adress VRAM issues on DX9 API in WIN10 ARE installed.

[HeyYou]

That machine should run the game without any problems at all.

 

Have you tried using SKSE with the memory fix?

[JaCkBoston]

Yes, tried. Slightly better, but still not good enough. Within the margin of error. As I said same thing happened previously with DX10 Crysis games. I have the game installed on a laptop HDD which is 5400rpm, but I don't think it excuses the performance either. This hardware must be able to run the game at way over 100FPS in vanilla state at 1080p...I'll try to put it on my SSD and come back with the feedback.

Edited November 26, 2017 by JaCkBoston

[JaCkBoston]

So I moved the game to my SSD and...well, it got worse. Where I had 45-46 FPS now I have 40-41. I have absolutely no Idea what to do about it other than to try install Windows 7 on a separate partiotion and test it there to make sure OS is to blame.

 

P.S. Shortly after I posted this comment I realised that it would be too much of a hassle to reinstall Windows and I'm too lazy to make new partitions for experiment sake only, so I guess all I can do now is just HATE Microsoft and forget about doing another playthrough of Skyrim until better days come by.

Edited November 26, 2017 by JaCkBoston

[HeyYou]

Just pick up another little harddrive, install win 7 on that, and the game, and see what happens.

 

Trouble is, that doesn't really eliminate the O/S as the problem, it just tells you its a software conflict. (assuming it runs better.) There may be some background process/service that is screwing everything up.....

[TheMastersSon]

So I moved the game to my SSD and...well, it got worse. Where I had 45-46 FPS now I have 40-41. I have absolutely no Idea what to do about it other than to try install Windows 7 on a separate partiotion and test it there to make sure OS is to blame.

 

P.S. Shortly after I posted this comment I realised that it would be too much of a hassle to reinstall Windows and I'm too lazy to make new partitions for experiment sake only, so I guess all I can do now is just HATE Microsoft and forget about doing another playthrough of Skyrim until better days come by.

I agree with the previous post. First look at your background processes (Ctrl-Alt-Del/Task Manager/Processes) and installed programs (Control Panel/Programs), and uninstall anything that's either unnecessary or unwanted. Laptops usually include a ton of this software, but don't uninstall anything unless you know exactly what it is and whether removing it will cause problems.

 

Also try going into Nvidia's control panel and make sure your game profiles are set to defaults.

 

Also, does renaming your skyrim.ini file (in your \My Games\ folder) make any FPS difference?

[Erik005]

The first thing I like to do with a new laptop is reinstalling windows.

 

That is usually the only way to get rid of the oem's programs.

[TheMastersSon]

I won't rehash my opinion about Windows 10 other than to say Win 7 is still way better overall for a gaming machine. :)