Haven't really messed with C-states, but this video recently popped up in my feed and made me curious.
The gist of it is that forcing C-states on (by manually enabling the setting in the BIOS, instead of just leaving it on "auto") can reduce micro-stuttering in games with the 7800X3D (and 9800X3D, according to comments).
I'm mostly curious about two things:
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The "auto" (default) setting should equate to "enabled", according to AMD's own representatives. The guy in the video, conversely, claims that "auto" can, in fact, disable the setting in some mobos;
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My understanding has always been that disabling C-states actually improves performance and latency in games, due to the cores not changing states (with the downside of added energy consumption and, consequentially, higher temps).
So, which one is it? And is it worth experimenting with the setting to improve performance and latency, while potentially alleviating stuttering?
4 Comments
It can improve performance but i’ve seen people getting more stutters because of it, for me? I can’t tell.
I thought “Global C-state Control” is about “package C-states”, meaning it’s about parts in the CPU that are outside the cores. It’s then not the C-states you are thinking about in your point 2, it’s not about the cores sleeping.
I only ever heard about package-C-states causing problems, never about helping with performance. Enabling it is in my mind more of a thing with laptops on battery for powersaving, on a desktop PC this doesn’t seem interesting. But maybe there’s a bug that the person in the video ran into and that’s where his stuttering came from?
I’ve run it on Auto since ever, did try disabled and enabled and literally didn’t see any uplift from it or decrease in stutters when I had issues w my board neither enabling or disabling this feature. For me disabled makes no sense at all, why would I want the CPU to not lower states when it’s idling?
The added temps are negligible and enabling it made me have more stutters.