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[Mia Wilson]

Followed the advice, framedrops stopped after changing that bios setting, thanks guys! Turned off the re-resync thing in the BIOS like [community member] suggested and my frame generation latency is finally where I expected it to be—DLSS 3 and FSR 3 both feel way more responsive now. Really appreciate the help sorting this out.

"Playing Unreal Tournament 99 on instagib mode since childhood."

[Mia Wilson]

On VRAM allocation, the practical reality is that modern engines lean heavily on texture streaming pools rather than static allocation, so the single most impactful lever you control is leaving ~15-20% of your VRAM free as scratch space. When you pin VRAM at 100%, the OS texture streaming cache has nowhere to stage high-res assets and you start seeing the exact micro-stutters that kill competitive reflexes, even if your average FPS looks fine. On Windows 11, the DirectStorage-backed texture streaming cache actually manages this allocation for you, but it’s not fool

"Playing Unreal Tournament 99 on instagib mode since childhood."

[Mia Wilson]

Lumen and hardware RT cores solve fundamentally different problems, so the “which is better” framing usually misses the point. Lumen is Unreal’s software-driven GI+reflection stack that virtualizes geometry into a virtual SDF, then does either volumetric or surface light tracing with temporal accumulation—it deliberately avoids depending on RT cores, which is why it runs on DX11-era hardware and consoles. That generality is exactly the trade: it’ll run anywhere, but it pays for that with temporal flicker, low-frequency noise, and accuracy limits on small or fast-moving specular highlights.

🎮 Battlestation & Rig: Ryzen 7 9800X3D | RX 7900 XTX Taichi | 32GB DDR5 6000 CL28 | Corsair 5000D | AOC AGON Pro AG276QZD 240Hz QHD OLED | Wooting 60HE Hall-Effect + Logitech G Pro X Superlight 2 + Artisan Zero XSoft | Beyerdynamic DT 770 Pro (80 Ohm) + Focusrite Scarlett Solo Gen 4

📍 Manchester (UK)

"Smooth frame time pacing matters infinitely more than peak FPS."

[Mia Wilson]

Great topic, and honestly one where I’ve burned plenty of hours tuning. The reality is that core affinity is a double-edged sword on hybrid chips—if you manually pin a competitive title’s threads to P-cores only, you can absolutely squeeze out lower 1% lows on games that respect the affinity mask. But here’s the catch that trips most people up: games with poorly written thread pools (looking at you, older Unreal Engine titles and some RTS/sim games) will happily spread worker threads across E-cores, and Task Manager affinity doesn’t always stick because the OS scheduler reassigns threads between frames. My approach is to leave Thread Director alone for most shooters but use a tool like GameFire or process lasso to lock priority to High and pin the main thread to a P-core, rather than forcing the whole process. Forcing E-cores off entirely via BIOS can actually hurt in multi-threaded titles that expect the OS to offload background work there—the Thread Director overhead is real but usually cheaper than starving a game of idle scheduling headroom.

For competitive FPS specifically, where every millisecond of input latency matters, I’d prioritize memory timing and P-core over-clocking over affinity gymnastics—those give far more consistent gains than fiddling with core masks.

🎮 Battlestation & Rig: Ryzen 7 9800X3D | RX 7900 XTX Taichi | 32GB DDR5 6000 CL28 | Corsair 5000D | AOC AGON Pro AG276QZD 240Hz QHD OLED | Wooting 60HE Hall-Effect + Logitech G Pro X Superlight 2 + Artisan Zero XSoft | Beyerdynamic DT 770 Pro (80 Ohm) + Focusrite Scarlett Solo Gen 4

📍 Manchester (UK)

"Smooth frame time pacing matters infinitely more than peak FPS."

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