Taking steps: please remind me why AMD and this game don't mix well

That works odd way, for me there is no chance to performance no matter which I use, temps are bit lower in balanced plan.

Then again my CPU temp on gridmap is 32-36C with single car. Idle is around 25C and maximum number of vehicles gets that to 52-54C, doing benchmarks for an hour can get temp up to 62C and this all with CPU fan speed of 580rpm which does not change as there is no need to change it.

But I don't have AMD, have no idea what those runs normally, but would think 75C for stock clocks would be high for other than doing Blender benchmark or similar.

You can adjust fan curves too, usually in Bios or then with software, I can adjust only in bios as Asus software would require Win10 which is too automatic for my liking, so I have set fan speeds at Bios, but CPU fan will not go lower than 580rpm, there is no point setting it higher either as cooling is not any better, Intel TIM limits heat transfer more, so it just is that modern stuff is not quite optimal in this regards.

Anyway, I think this link has everything you need, just make sure you measure case temps, just in case, my case does not have any heat built up, but I remember old days with cases without open roof that did need a lot of airflow, hence I stay away from such horrible case designs. https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/8n4bni/info_about_ryzen_5_2600x_safe_temperatures_and/

 

Alright, so trying some things. Power plan had defaulted to Windows 10 High Performance which explains the high idle temps I was seeing; taking it down to Windows 10 Balanced reduces idle temps quite a bit but with no effect on either gaming FPS or peak temps which still spiked to 177F/81C while bombing around Italy in a single K-series. Dynamic reflections down to 60 (I'm on some pretty frickin' high settings, originally had it at 100, didn't want to go lower than 80 as that's where I started to see the reflections themselves start to change) helped my FPS and it can now stay above 50 with aforementioned car/map combination, not that it was ever slow enough to bother me anyway. Using Windows 10's integrated recording tools doesn't seem to affect FPS at all, or at least not enough to notice, and did not eclipse the earlier 81C heat spike either, so I recorded a short video which is currently uploading.

What I'm worried about here is the high temps killing CPU or mobo as even after the first temperature spike gets reined in it can still hold in the mid-high 70C range while running multiple cars or strenuous maps. If that's not a problem then it's probably fine for now (though I still think it needs more fans either way) but it will probably require more intensive solutioning once "Car vs. Canyon" becomes a thing in earnest.



EDIT: After more rec testing, I think WCA might be more demanding on my PC than Italy; recording there absolutely does hose framerates - the numbers on the screen don't change, but the smoothness goes down the flusher and the CPU temp hit 84C at one point though I don't know if that happened while I was recording. Having a couple of traffic tubes spawned up may have had something to do with this. They were to mark my start & finish lines, and having two was definitely better than having four; I'll see if switching to cones fixes anything.

FURTHER EDIT: While recording at WCA, turning headlights on cuts my FPS by about 7-10. Also, Win10's built-in game recorder absolutely murders the quality and smoothness of the resulting video; if it has a smooth 50FPS while recording on fairly high settings, the resulting video will look like it was filmed at 35-40 FPS (in-game day) or 20-30 FPS (in-game night) on trash settings. However so far I've only seen it do this on WCA, and is worst when driving at night.

A screen recorder is just supposed to record whatever crosses your screen, right? So what gives here?

 

That ETK K-series is very heavy on CPU, it has lot of LUA code running, so it can be 10fps less than say Moonhawk.

Another thing is that WCUSA has larger objects, but that is on GPU side of things, GPU wait would get higher there if GPU hits limits.

That video looks really choppy, tbh.

Your CPU is good for 90C however you might hit power limits which lowers clocks and makes CPU struggle where it should not. Lowering Vcore helps with that, but there is a limit how low one can go.

There is instructions on first page how to run this:
https://www.beamng.com/threads/banana-benchmark-results-comparison.8595/

Then you can compare here https://www.beamng.com/threads/ultimate-amd-vs-intel-cpu-battle-has-graphs-and-awards.60389/ does your CPU get numbers that it is supposed to when hot. You might want to run beamng so that CPU gets hot close beamng and run that banana bench right after that to see if there is difference to results you get.

Going above 80C when gaming with single car, now I would say that is way too hot, I try to post video in a moment from same spot with same car, but consider this, with single car you are not using even half of maximum wattage of your CPU, what will happen if you try to render something which uses full wattage? It might melt or catch fire.

Video recording does a lot of processing, I'm using nvenc codec with OBS Studio which is using GPU to do all the work, still it is around 5-7fps slower, or was with old CPU, haven't checked with new one.

If you have side panel of your tower open (just let it lean against tower so that it covers side of it) and then remove sidepanel and stick your hand inside the case can you feel lot of heat there? Then you would need case fans.

Also, BeamNG changes powerplan to high performance by default, you might want to change that from game options, but I would suspect this being more of high Vcore as temps come down soon, but that is easy to see by monitoring temps and CPU clocks with HWinfo64 it can also show you if there is power limits active etc. Run sensors only. I will try to post video in an hour or so.

 

It's like 2:46AM here so I'm not really in condition to be trying to think through this right now, but right off the top of my head there are probably settings I could turn down to boost performance without really losing anything. Grass density and the like.

The really weird part is, it can run any of Gamergull's intense scenarios, 3 runners, dynamic traffic, whatever he feels like uploading, without getting all that much hotter. The framerate can get a tiny bit choppy but not even close to enough to interfere with my driving. Of course I'm not recording or night-driving in those situations, but still.

There's gotta be a reason headlights cut off 7-10 FPS even in the daylight. I probably don't want to know what it is, but there has to be one. That's probably what wrecked my "not-K-series at Mt. Wallis" recording test... large objects + night racing + recording = however choppy you think that video looked, this was a million times worse. Enough to be irritating in real time, and then whatever the Win10 recorder spit back was all but painful to watch.

The video I actually posted, now that I watch it again, does actually look pretty janky. Hate to think what it would have looked like at night. Have to start figuring things out in earnest tomorrow. I probably shouldn't be too afraid of dropping some of the more esoteric settings, after all, YouTube compression is going to make it look terrible anyway, it always does with this game for some reason.

I find it interesting that in-game FPS counter still shows decent FPS when recording, even when the FPS can be seen to be obviously not decent. Like there's a disconnect somewhere. That, too, could mean something.

This whole thing just started as a test to see if the Win10 screen recorder would actually work at all, so I was recording back to the same drive I'm playing from; doubtless that had an effect on it and is probably (expensively) dumb with an SSD anyway. Tomorrow maybe I'll stop being lazy and get my external terabyte drive hooked up; given that it's an HDD it might not help, but then again it might. In a pinch, I could probably record to a thumb drive if I had to.

It's not like I don't have plenty of time to figure this out, after all, I still need a ton of driving practice before I'm ready to start recording my series in earnest (heel + toe - ABS = crash, AT gear lockout abuse + muscle memory = money shift), plus I have to figure out which roads to use, and so on.

 

I don't think that I have driven this road more than once before, so pretty much first time on this road, it is quite easy to crash it seems, especially with that annoying car, it likes to plow straight or go too sideways and bit random, I think that improvements to ESC that were announced might help that car.

Single core performance and drive you are recording are such that they affect a lot, single core performance usually is that odd thing that makes fps poor and GPU utilization low, then people look at CPU load and it is not 100% so it can't be CPU, but that is the thing with single core load, it does not show up as 100% even when it's limiting performance.

What I have found out is that SSAO off makes much smoother recordings, even my FPS is not really dropping from 60fps like at all:


With SSAO on, video gets choppy bits, kinda like your video, but also notice that GPU chip is up to 80% utilized at times and this is gtx1080, power usage of GPU is lot less, there is video recording and AA settings from Nvidia control panel that make little extra load:


Bottom temp is VRM, Tsensor_1 is thermal trobe on top of VRM heatsink, PCH is chipset other two are CPU temps from different programs which sometimes show different readings that I have not figured out yet, then there is GPU temp, load and power usage as well. Also CPU voltages and frequency are shown.

I'm running balanced powerplan with i7-8086k stock clocks, so it might not be comparable to yours, but SSAO is something I don't use in Italy, it is really heavy and with dynamic reflections it just likes to mess up with video recording.

Because your experience is that you can run multiple cars without much of dropping fps, then it is gpu or single core of CPU that is limiting and clock speed of CPU is what defines what kind of single core performance you have, if your CPU drops clocks because of heat/exceeded power or VRM hot, then you will face more challenges in running constantly 60fps which makes smoothest videos etc. What numbers I have seen from your CPU, it should be able to keep 60fps, but SSAO might be too much, even for your GPU.

Headlights, that is single core CPU load usually, has been at least, haven't really checked in 0.15 yet, but driving at night is kinda thing that is not much worked on yet I believe, that might get better at some point, but it is not so great right now, 4-6 lights on cars kills almost any CPU.

So keep SSAO off, it does come to single core performance I think, it just runs out, also SSAO seems to cause CPU run much hotter.

Also I keep vsync on and make sure never drop below 60fps, that is smoothest, other settings are choppy when turning, but also if fps drops below 60fps, then vsync is choppy too.

Another thing to keep in mind, discord and other messaging apps etc. like to use unreasonably lot of CPU even when running on background. There are GPU manufacturer made utilities that can use up to 10% of CPU while doing nothing.

I'm using MSI Afterburner for GPU custom fan curve and showing up temps in game, even I don't have anything MSI, that uses some CPU too, so less running stuff, better fps you will have if you are running near limits of your CPU single core, which video recording will be. Well, Italy is using many cores, but with K-Series single core will be bit of issue.
--- Post updated ---
Also if you disable all driver camera movement, then you can get better quality video in youtube as cockpit is static object and it kinda saves bandwidth so youtube allows more bandwidth for moving stuff.

 

I made video for you from WCUSA, while fps were steady 60fps and smooth when playing, there are times that recording gets choppy, not sure why:

Dirt and racing slicks don't mix too well

SSAO was off if I remember correctly, but GPU load still did reach 83% as peak, I think it is higher than Italy, where only with SSAO on GPU load reached those numbers.

GPU load will be less when/if Occlusion volumes and zones start working again, so that might help you there and I would think that WCUSA might get more improvements sometime too as game engine improvements can be utilized there.

 

SSAO after looking it up sounds like something I can turn off without anyone noticing too much of a difference, but honestly, what you said about headlights and single-core performance would explain a whole lot - both why the temperature spikes up to start and then won't go that high again without extreme load, and why both the gameplay and resulting footage always seem to start smoothing before going down the toilet. Also why the game seems a little slower after I've been playing for a while.

Recording to external HDD will have its own problems; this particular drive draws power from a transformer which is about 3 outlets wide and has centered prongs... meaning it leaves nowhere for me to plug my wheel in.

EDIT: Can confirm, turning off SSAO produces an instant 20FPS boost by the in-game counter while possibly causing the stupid temperature spike to top out at 74C instead of more like 84C. SSAO does make things (especially indoor areas and the area under the car) look a little less antiseptic and "gamey", but at this point I wouldn't say it was worth 20FPS and 10C.

MORE EDIT: Nevermind it got up to 80C later. But the FPS boost stayed.

EVEN MORE EDIT: Seems to make a much smaller difference at Italy, and none in towns, where I'm getting mid-40s to mid-50s either way, not recording, in "K-series at Italy stress test" mode. Out of town, I can get 70-73FPS with this combination with SSAO on and not recording, or 75-80 with SSAO off; both decrease in areas with a lot of trees and removing SSAO makes a bigger difference here. Turning down mesh quality seems to be worth about 4-5FPS per level in these areas as well, in exchange for really not that much difference. Shader quality, meanwhile, makes a big difference in graphics but does nothing to help smoothness. 5FPS from turning lighting quality down to normal as well.

Still have the high temps to deal with, unfortunately; I suspect I'll have no choice but to start messing around with voltage offsets in order to deal with that.

 

UPDATE for anyone still watching this thread. I'm actually at a loss here. Where once my CPU would spike into the high 70s or low 80s and then never get hot again, now it just seems to have a repeated series of spikes which can now easily hit 89C when playing Beam. I've taken the CPU voltage down to 1.3 (from a default of 1.4xx) and it's made absolutely no difference, "precision boost overdrive" which was on auto is now completely disabled and that didn't do anything, soc voltage is by default far lower than @fufsgfen's Reddit link said to turn it down to, I'm actually at a loss what to do here other than order more fans, or get rid of the stock thermal paste and use my own.

 

ANOTHER UPDATE: after poking around the BIOS some more I found that the system fan never had Smart Fan Control enabled, so was always getting a constant voltage and thus a constant speed. I set the mobo to feed it significantly more voltage from 55C on, and also set the CPU fan to come in much more aggressively so that it now goes to maximum at 70C instead of 85C. I'll have to test this, but it should help a little.

I'm going to order a 3-pack of fans today; so which would be the better setup - two in one out, or one in two out?