GPU performance/load with frame lock vs unlock

[Deleted member 289973]

I've got a little bit unusual situation. One of the games I play occasionally is World of Warships, and across the entire game the frame rate has been locked to 75 FPS. With my RTX 3060, I can run the game maxed out and it puts my card under about 30-40% load.(For comparison Skyrim Special Edition is locked to 60 FPS and utilizes about 40-50% maxed out but uses way more textures and the motion is much faster.)
Recently the developers have announced the frame lock is going to be removed, and I have a 165 Hz monitor with FreeSync, and the cross sync works perfectly for me. So, theoretically, I should be able to play the game with 165 FPS so long as the card can support that.
My question is, how much of an increase in load should that cause? Since 165 is a little more than double (2.2x to be exact) 75, would the increase in GPU load be linear, or is it exponential, or maybe something else? My concern is the unlocked frame rate will suddenly put my card under much higher load, sending temps way up (cooling is currently an issue in my PC overall, GPU fares a little better than other components) and possibly not being powerful enough to run at the 165 my monitor supports. Additionally I'm not sure if it will put any extra load on the CPU, which currently cools horribly, or something else like higher RAM utilization. If so, other than turning down the graphics settings in-game, what would my options be? The game will not have an ability to lock frames within, to my knowledge. Perhaps I can do this in Nvidia settings, some other way, or maybe I'm overthinking it and should just let it do its thing?
For reference, I have an RTX 3060 (not Ti) with a Ryzen 5 5600G and 16 GB DDR4-3200 RAM (overclocked to 3466).
Thanks in advance!

 

[Mchart]

You can cap frames in the NVCP per app. Just do that if you want to keep the load down.

 

[Deleted member 289973]

Thanks. I'll look into that if need be. I'd love to be able to run it at a higher frame rate if the load won't go up too much.

 

[JSHamlet234]

The increase in load will be very close to linear.

 

[Andrew_Carr]

I was just watching an interesting review that went over super high FPS in games. It seems like the higher you go, the more memory speed becomes a bottleneck, so you might want to look into that as well if you aren't hitting your target.

 

[Armenius]

I was just watching an interesting review that went over super high FPS in games. It seems like the higher you go, the more memory speed becomes a bottleneck, so you might want to look into that as well if you aren't hitting your target.

Shouldn't be an issue at this resolution and refresh rate on the 3060 (113 gigapixels/second fillrate).

 

[crazycrave]

I really don't see a need in uncapping it other then 120Hz = 120 fps cap for 1080p , so maybe it was for the 4K players is my best guess, I can't hold 165Hz/165fps with a RTX 3070 and the 3700x and 5600g are pretty close in gaming bench marks.

I don't play it much anymore and was just trying out the update.

 

[Dan_D]

Thanks. I'll look into that if need be. I'd love to be able to run it at a higher frame rate if the load won't go up too much.

Why does a load increase matter?

 

[oldmanbal]

Thanks. I'll look into that if need be. I'd love to be able to run it at a higher frame rate if the load won't go up too much.

You can often alter a few game engine variables, or find a small patch from the modding community that will remove the frame cap altogether on pc games. With the introduction of higher refresh rate monitors, game engines haven't quite caught up at the pace of the emerging need for 120fps or higher displays. Older titles especially benefit from these tweaks as modern graphics cards are able to deliver frame rates well beyond those higher frame rates.

For example, this is a simple way to unlock your frame cap in world of tanks:

1. Download and install “XML Copy Editor”. (balthazar's advice: make sure to download from a trusted source.)

2. Open “engine_config.xml”, from “\World Of Tanks\res” folder.

3. Look for “maxFrameRate” tag. The value is the fps cap (120). Change it to higher value like 300 or 500.

4. Save, then play the game.

 

[t1k]

You can cap frames in the NVCP per app. Just do that if you want to keep the load down.

I personally cap all my games at 93 FPS this way, and it is amazing for noise reduction. 93 FPS is just my personal sweetspot. I determined after a lot of testing that I just don't notice any difference whatsoever beyond that many frames.

 

[Deleted member 289973]

Why does a load increase matter?

Fundamentally the load itself doesn't, but in practice I'm concerned about keeping temps under control. In my current setup, I have pretty bad airflow and even a modestly warm GPU will send my CPU temps way up. GPU running under full load hits a little over 80 C, which itself is fine, but then the CPU runs in the 80s as well even at just 20% load. If both are running hard then I get throttled.

I personally cap all my games at 93 FPS this way, and it is amazing for noise reduction. 93 FPS is just my personal sweetspot. I determined after a lot of testing that I just don't notice any difference whatsoever beyond that many frames.

This is a cool idea. I might have to experiment and find a sweet spot of my own.

Shouldn't be an issue at this resolution and refresh rate on the 3060 (113 gigapixels/second fillrate).

This. I've not been bottlenecked at all by memory so far.

So I did some experimenting on my own with the game and frame unlock, and it turns out I was able to get 165 FPS, pretty much the maximum my card can handle. I backed it down to 100 and then 75 and saw a reduction to about 70% load and then about 50%, respectively. Temps went from around 80 to low 70s to mid 60s. So it seems the card performs completely as expected, it's simply a matter of keeping CPU temps under control which are indirectly but heavily affected by the GPU load and temps.