The HPET bug: What it is and what it isn't

I just wanted to report here as I have an opposite results

I tried with HPET OFF/ON and HPET ON without forcing Windows OS to use it

I have the best results when when having HPET ON in BIOS but without forcing it on Windows OS

Here is the screenshots

https://imgur.com/a/CVy4zXr

Zitat aus einem Post von mat

Hello,

I don't see anything unusual in the first two screenshots. They show without any doubt that Skylake is horrible with HPET on and you should disable it on your system.

The interesting screenshot is your third one! I have never seen a 10 MHz timer ever. The result is clearly from TSC, but this seems to be a very strange Windows bug with a totally wrong calculated startup frequency. I already have a workaround for this and will upload an updated version soon.

Thank you mat I will disable it now

But isn't the results with HPET (On) in BIOS without forcing windows to use HPET are having the best results in those screenshots than others? Right?

I even feel the system is snappier and smoother and no lag and also windows start up very fast with HPET (On) in BIOS without forcing windows to use HPET

Anyway I will disable it for now and I will wait for your updated version ))

Thank you (^.^)

Zitat aus einem Post von Majestic12

That 10 Mhz bug appeared on the newest Windows 10 update (1809).

Thanks for the information, I will look into it!

TimerBench will not run for me.
It says "The following component(s) are required to run this program: DirectX Runtime".

I have a default Windows 10 Home installation which purportedly already has DirectX.

Mike

TimerBench uses DirectX 11 for its "game test", so that's a requirement. As you noted, not every Windows version comes with DX11 preinstalled. Thx for your post, I will add it to the article.

"Unknown" means that you have the latest version of Windows which reports a QPC frequency of 10 MHz. This will still always be the "Invariant TSC", TimerBench just doesn't understand it yet.

As for the frame times, I wouldn't count to much on them, especially if they are that low. I've added them to show a possible bottleneck of the CPU due to a slow timer configuration. If that happens you would've seen max frame times of hundreds of milliseconds and a stuttering every other second during the game bench.

That said, TimerBench only has a single function: To show if your QPC timer configuration is not holding your CPU and graphics card back. If you switch to HPET as QPC mode, you would see much higher frame times, which concludes that iTSC is the fastest possible setting on your system (and Coffee Lake in general). So you're good.

There is nothing specific that helps to achieve lower frame times. But whatever helps in any game, should help here. Overclocking of GPU, CPU and memory. Slicker Windows with less in the background and so on.