Hello guys,

I am struggling with continous fps drops in Quake live. Story began when my ingame friend noticed and told me, that I have frame drops and advised me to do some benchmarking with timedemo and fps monitor. After that I found out that my 250 fps in QL fps meter is only average and that my real minimum fps is quite lower than this value. Discovering that I went through a long journey trying improving and fixing everything possible to improve fps.

I have this HW: i9 9900k, GTX 1080ti, 32 GB RAM (3600 MHZ, cl 16), 750 W PSU

Changes I consulted and made include:

-Config: bloom off, post processing off, vertex on, player shadow off, dynamic light off, r_primitives 2, many other settings to improve performance
-BIOS: EIST off, Intel SpeedStep off, C-states off, overclock of CPU to 5 ghz
-Power management of CPU in Win set to max performance
-Afterburner - setting fixed clock frequency and voltage of GPU
-Proceslasso - reserving only one core for QL process, turning HT off
-Windows defender - setting exception for QL
-reinstall Nvidia drivers with DDU
-some registry changes

Before these changes I already had set this:

-Config: com_idlesleep 0 and, r_picmip 5
-Nvidia control panel: texture filtering quality = max performance, shader cache = on, threaded optimization = off, power management mode = max performance.

With these changes I improved average fps in Asylum timedemo from +- 450 to around 700+. Overall fluentness of the game improved noticebly. Most of the fps improvement came from config changes and power managements setting of CPU in Win. Other changes did not do much, max few percents.

When I turn devmap on with bots for example on Quarantine now, I have fps in range of +- 500-800, with lowest value not falling under these 500.

However in normal game without timedemo I still suffer from drops and my fps values looks like this (examples measured with FrameView):

com_maxfps 250
avg: 249
90th: 248
95th: 247
99th: 201

com_maxfps 200
avg: 200
90th: 197
95th: 195
99th: 184

com_maxfps 125
avg: 124
90th: 121
95th: 116
99th: 111

That shows, that the issue of the fps drops was not fully solved and that my system is still pushing always only 80-100% of the value of actually set com_maxfps, although hardware itself with these settings is capable to push constantly 500+ in most demanding maps. Some part of HW is clearly giving for some reason less performance, than game needs for 250 fps.

I also tried changing resolution to lower one or to some 4:3, it makes no difference.
I also tried setting com_hungmegs to higher values, it helped a bit (1-3%), but the game is then unstable and crashes.

I slowly run out of ideas, what is the reason and what to do more to get rid of these drops. Last of actual spoken ideas of people which helped me are:

-low usage of GPU memory, which is supposedly fixed by Win to max 250 MB. When I checked GPU memory usage in task manager, there was constantly around 120 MB. Some motherboards allows to raise this value in Bios, that is not my case. Also there is new AMD Smart Acces Memory feature with their new CPU and GPUs, but I am not planning to buy new PC. Nvidia should be also working on some improvement in this area, but it is just in progress.
-weak PSU (I doubt that)
-setting of RAM in BIOS - I have absolutely no knowledge here
-bad optimization of Nvidia drivers
-just bad optimization of QL engine - I see this less likely, because I spectate other players and some of them have no frame drops at all. It seems that problem is my side.

I look forward of any information or idea, that could help me solve this once for ever, or any way how to do more deep benchmarking to find the reason.

Thank you