In some games, MSI Afterburner overlay can negatively impact FPS by 9-16%

[RussianSensation]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dL7l9pW78Kg

Example:

GTA 5
i5-6500K@4.6
R9 390x@1140/6200

With Overlay vs. Without

0:11-0:12 mark (+9% to +11%)
44 fps vs. 48 fps
45 fps vs. 50 fps
45 fps vs. 49 fps
46 fps vs. 50 fps

0:24 mark (+14 to +16%)
44 fps vs. 51 fps
43 fps vs. 50 fps
42 fps vs. 48 fps

Since most review sites do not show or explain how they test games, this is a very important point. Some of these differences are huge, amounting to moving up a full tier in GPU price bracket such as from a $280 R9 390 to a $380 R9 390X (or competing brand's product).

We cannot assume that all GPUs will react so negatively to the MSI AB overlay, so it seems best to test all games without it for accurate bench-marking.

 

[tential]

Has this been confirmed by anyone else? Have you tested yourself?

 

[Seba]

Maybe it's because they use MSI Afterburner Overlay and FRAPS Overlay at the same time.

 

[RussianSensation]

Has this been confirmed by anyone else? Have you tested yourself?

This is actually a well known issue in many games but I decided to bring it up since it was a topic explored again.

BF3:

"So after much testing today, i think ive pinpointed what was causing the FPS drops/cpu lag while playing BF3 after the CQ release.

Allot of you seem to be posting what your fps is etc. And how much its dropping and all that jazz. Well if you're like me you were probably using a 3rd party program that displayed your FPS on screen such as

MSI Afterburner
EVGA Precision
Fraps

The list goes on. What appears to be happening is the OSD (On Screen Display) part of those programs is conflicting with BF3, which in turn is causing your fps drops."

or on our forum"]Battlefield 3 on our forum:

"I was suprised yesterday when i accidentally booted BF 3 without them, and i noticed more smoother gameplay.

I enabled the perf overlay and the latency on both the cpu and gpu were booth pretty consistent, where as ussualy i would get weird cpu spikes every few seconds."

Borderlands 2:

"So I opened msi ab. (I didn't touch any of the clock rates) I was trying to use it to have the overlay in my games. I then set all my settings and tested the overlay in borderlands 2. Worked well...

It then told me I was getting 20fps, it was really laggy. I closed ab and everything and opened fraps to see fps. Still 15-20fps. I got a bit scared and restarted my pc. I opened borderlands 2 and got 150fps."

Far Cry 2:

"I am always running AfterBurner in the background so I can monitor my GPU Usage/temps and framerate while gaming.

I bought another 6850 the other day and am now running in crossfire. This afternoon I decided to do some Far Cry 2 benchmarks to see how it performed.

My framerate dropped as low as 60 and the average was about 100. I knew I should have been getting higher than that with the settings I had selected.

First thing I did was exit AfterBurner and I noticed an immediate difference. Framerate didn't drop below 100 and the average was about 150.

Is it normal for AfterBurner to hurt FPS this much? Does anyone know of a similar program I can use to monitor my GPU Usage/temps and framerate in-game?

Cheers."

Same link from above by another poster:
"I have this issue with some games (Far Cry2, F1 2010), but not all."

Also,

"msi ab is causing my games to microstutter and I don't know how to fix it. If I don't start ab before my games, games run smooth. However if I start ab to monitor my cpu temps, the frame rate starts dipping. I'm experiencing it while the osd is active only on origin. I searched the bowels of the internet for a solution. Nothing.

On steam games, it runs flawless in enabled. In titanfall and battlefield 4 stutters. I cannot monitor my temps and frame rate. Every 12 secs or so a stutter drops to anywhere from 24fps to 40 fps drops. I'm currently on a 720 display maxed out on a 970."
http://www.gameplayinside.com/optimize/how-to-check-your-frame-rate-and-gpu-usage-in-any-game/


I am not saying this is a typical behavior in all games or even on the same GPUs or even the games I mentioned for everyone, but it's definitely documented online to know it exists.

Also, Joker has mentioned it various times when he finds a game whose performance stutters/FPS drop with MS AB overlay.

The proposed solution in games that suffer from this is:

"In OSD menu, add the game exe with the huge + sign in the bottom. Then just choose the exe from the list and choose "application detection level" to none or just change "On-Screen Display Support" to off. Ask again if you dont understand.

Hope it helps. Only downside is that you wont get any OSD info on screen, and wont get fps measurments on the MSI-AB Hardware Monitor. But you can use Fraps to check if youre FPS is any higher. This doesnt work with all games, but it does work in some games that dont like the OSD. Also disable the exe from D3Doverrider as well, same way there as on MSI-AB OSD Server."
http://forums.guru3d.com/showpost.php?p=3994303&postcount=17

 

[Tapoer]

I can confirm that some games are affected by any OSD overlay on my AMD GPU, Fallout and Skyrim are some of them, I don't use overlays now, so don't know how many more games are affected.

Also from:
http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=37397306&postcount=56

The reason why my Radeon's Wolfenstein Old Blood benchmarks were wrong.

Radeon owners, don't use MSI Afterburner with Wolfenstein Old Blood

And the new 7950 video

[new] Wolfenstein Old Blood 1920X1080 Ultra(-) 7950 @1.1Ghz CORE i7-860 @4GHz

Ultra(-) means Ultra preset but only 4xAA.

55fps from 32fps, due to the OSD, lol.

In all fairness Unwinder warns about using Vector 2D in RTSS, that's why I never use it, but that's the only setting that worked in this specific game.

In any case, lesson learned. Very sorry for speaking ill about the AMD drivers. That's second time in two weeks. It seems the driver is more solid than I want to believe.

If reviews are using overlays, they most probably are crippling performance on AMD GPU.

 

[RussianSensation]

If reviews are using overlays, they most probably are crippling performance on AMD GPU.

Thanks for adding more data to this thread. It's not even just AMD GPUs because it could easily affect the competing brand's products too. We'd need more extensive testing and statistical data but there seems to be enough definitive evidence that for accurate FPS benchmarking, MSI OSD overlay should not be used in games unless it's already been proven in that particular game/bench scene that it has no effect.

 

[Ansau]

Done a few tests on my r9 285:

With Overlay
Heaven: 44.0
Gw2: 41
Talos: 38.2
GTA V: 38-39
Witcher 2: 22.5

No Overlay
Heaven: 44.4
Gw2: 41-42
Talos: 39-40
GTA V: 42-43
Witcher 2: 22-23

GTA V is the most sensible: +4fps, a +10.5%. WOW... Gonna play without it xd.

 

[dogen1]

Pretty sure the author confirmed the overlay reduces performance a long time ago. Maybe it does it more in some games, but there was always some overhead.

 

[RaulF]

I know afterburner did cause my games to crash a while ago.

Was always getting the device hung crash. Finally i turned off AF and they went away, same thing with precision X.

 

[Mondozei]

Yes, MSI AB not only causes slowdowns, it even causes crashes in some cases. I know that NS2 crashed a lot for me with MSI AB overlay on. I removed it, and it went away.

It's overlays in general, though. There's a program(I don't remember the name of it), which adjust the brightness automatically depending on the day to get better readability or whatever. Well, it happened to crash games too(although it wasn't obvious when it happened, I found out via research online).

 

[psolord]

As you may have seen in the performance videos I post, I use MSI AB vigorously.

To reduce the performance hit to almost none, you have to:

- Set application detection level to low
- Set stealth mode to off
- Set custom 3D support to off
- Set on screen coordinate space to framebuffer

And especially for AMD cards don't use vector 2D as per my quoted post above.

You should also set a shortcut key in the settings, to easily enable/disable OSD to see right then and there if it brings any performance hit.

If some games do not display the osd with the above settings, they are prone to have some performance hit. Maybe.

Aside from the Wolfenstein case above and a couple others a couple years back, I haven't seen anything grave on my AMD cards.

 

[gamervivek]

Might be CPU or GPU side, this example looks CPU heavy and perhaps afterburner is taking too many CPU cycles.

Interestingly, have seen less CPU usage from Fury X vs. 980Ti videos here,

https://www.youtube.com/user/DudeRandom84/videos

The recent video of JC3 however shows more CPU usage on AMD side.

 

[railven]

Yes, MSI AB not only causes slowdowns, it even causes crashes in some cases. I know that NS2 crashed a lot for me with MSI AB overlay on. I removed it, and it went away.

It's overlays in general, though. There's a program(I don't remember the name of it), which adjust the brightness automatically depending on the day to get better readability or whatever. Well, it happened to crash games too(although it wasn't obvious when it happened, I found out via research online).

I believe you are referring to f.lux, and I can confirm that it does negatively affect some games. I tried using it for a few weeks, and ended up removing it.

EDIT: Also, f.lux at least for me would some times get stuck in dim mode but would use the CPU cycles as if switching to off mode. I would have to force shut down it and reboot since my screen would be stuck in dim mode.

Adding to this, since I Just experienced, for some odd reasons some monitoring software get stuck in loops. For example, I had Corsair link for no apparent reason using 15% of my CPU. I couldn't determine what it was checking, nor was my system compromised. Force Shut down return my CPU to idle, reboot and Corsair Link was back to using <0.2% CPU.

 

[b-mac]

Is this specific to afterburner and its overlay or any overclocking tool? I use sapphire trixx, that shouldn't cause any problems?

 

[slag]

This is nothing new. Fraps overlay and other video overlays have been affecting framerates on games since the tools came out.

 

[RussianSensation]

As you may have seen in the performance videos I post, I use MSI AB vigorously.

To reduce the performance hit to almost none, you have to:

- Set application detection level to low
- Set stealth mode to off
- Set custom 3D support to off
- Set on screen coordinate space to framebuffer

And especially for AMD cards don't use vector 2D as per my quoted post above.

You should also set a shortcut key in the settings, to easily enable/disable OSD to see right then and there if it brings any performance hit.

If some games do not display the osd with the above settings, they are prone to have some performance hit. Maybe.

Aside from the Wolfenstein case above and a couple others a couple years back, I haven't seen anything grave on my AMD cards.

:thumbsup: Good tips. Could you maybe do a YouTube video with the above directions and we can sticky it on a forum for everyone as a great AB overlay tip? In the same video you could even compare the performance hit with Overlay without these tip settings and with them on and try both camp's cards.

 

[psolord]

You are welcome.

I thought of making a video at first, but then I thought that, well they are only four things that a user needs to remember. No need for a video.

I did grab a few screenies though with and without MSI AB OSD to show that there is minimal performance impact or none.



Also, sorry for the OT but wow, I don't know what they did in Project Cars 6.0 but it's running like crazy on the 7950, without it even reaching max load on the Q9550 due to cpu limits. Most probably I didn't max out some settings but I will recheck.