[SOLVED] CSGO 4x3 resolution decrease fps?

[yellowbluebrown]

Hi guys
I play alot of CSGO and enjoy the competitive scene. I recently switched from 1920:1080 in widescreen 16:9 to 1280x960 in 4:3, and after a few games I feel like there's no way back - I get why the pro's use these 4:3 resolutions.

However, it seems to me that the fps has become somewhat more unstable and variable after the switch, and I am wondering if this actually can be the case or not.

My specs are:
Ryzen 5 3600
Geforce GTX 1660 Ti gaming
16GB 3200 mhz ram
Superfast SSD
BenQ Zowie 24" XL2411P

Newest windows 10 and newest GPU driver installed.

When I used to play on 1080p with an fps cap at 301, I would usually average around 270 fps for a normal session for about 1 hour, according to NZXT's cam program. With the new res, the number would usually lie around 240. With the old res, I would expect the fps to decrease mostly only around smokes or whenever there are many players in frame. With the new settings, I have observed the fps going from 300 to 230 without much really happening in the frame at all, before coming back to around 300 shortly.

To add to the confusion, I ran some test in one of the FPS benchmark workshops in CSGO and was actually able to obtain better average numbers for the 4x3 res compared to the old. The numbers on average where around 330 for the old settings and around 345 for the new settings. Also, based on occasional observations of the NZXT cam overlay in game, the GPU seems to be working much less in the 4:3 resolution, around 40% and with lower temperatures, compared to around 60-90 % in the 1080p version.

 

[jimmysmitty]

At a lower resolution you are putting the bottleneck on your CPU more than the GPU. If you read CPU reviews the reason they typically do lower settings and resolution is to make it so the CPU is whats working more than the GPU.

 

[yellowbluebrown]

Ok, thanks for the input. But ingame the CPU is usually even lower than the GPU in load, according the NZXT cam. If I remember correctly, usually from 20-30 %. Based on this, I always thought that the GPU would be the bottleneck if anything in this system.

 

[jimmysmitty]

The 1660Ti is basically a great 1080 GPU. Anything above that and the GPU might start to struggle.

CS:GO is Source based and Source is capable of multicore rendering but its a very old game engine, Source launched in 2004 with Half Life 2, and it will become more CPU bound due to the older game engine. You may be able to up some of the game settings like texture quality to push more onto the GPU but the lower resolution will limit you greatly.

There is word that CS:GO will be getting a port to Source 2 which may help as it will be a more modern game engine.

 

[yellowbluebrown]

Aha, I was not aware of this. So it may be due to poor single core performance then? Would any other AMD cpu do the job, or would the only way to increase performance be the expensive route of new motherboard and cpu?

 

[cryoburner]

What happens if you enter the command fps_max 0 or fps_max 999 into the console in-game?

Also, have you verified that your RAM is congured to be running at its full 3200 speed?

 

[yellowbluebrown]

Ram is running at 3200 yes, changed to xmp in bios.

Tried max_999 and I got quite high fps but unstable, with high sv in the netgraph and some lags. With max_0 I did not get lag but high sv and fps seemed more unstable than with max_301. In both cases GPU load is higher than cpu.

I remember I had this uncapped many times before in 1080p and did never encounter any lags then.