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What does Thunderbolt 2 bottlenecking look like on your system?


jddh

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Time was, with my old 750M dGPU, I’d load a new game, and be pleased as punch that it ran at all. Now I finally built my rig, and I’m getting all worried about performance.

Generally speaking, playing with brand new games that are famously not optimized (Deus Ex, Obduction), my 1070 SC/TB2/2014 rMBP seems to do pretty darn well: 50-100+ FPS on “very high” or “ultra” settings.

 

That said, I’m seeing two things occasionally:

 

1. Definite frame drops with very complex scene renders—perhaps dropping to ~30FPS and then ramping back up with simpler renders

2. Periodic hitching, where the video will freeze right up for maybe 500-1000ms, particularly in Obduction, where level streaming is happening.

 

I guess I’m a *little* disappointed by these drops, but only in the context of the brand new video card on its own. In the context of the rig, I gather neither of these things should be terribly surprising while running a waterfall through the garden hose that is the Akitio/Thunderbolt 2 connection. According to GPU-Z, I’m barely using half my video memory at any time.

 

What do you experienced folks generally see when the Thunderbolt connection bottlenecks? Is it similar to general slowdown in an under-powered system, or are there very particular symptoms? My guess is that the hitching I’m occasionally seeing is particularly indicative of the Thunderbolt stream, but honestly I’m not used to things performing relatively well!

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To me bottlenecks appeared only in benchmarks by lower scores and in games with lower fps!

The problems you are describing seem to be CPU related. My guess would be that the CPU will down clock in stressful situations and create a performance drop. Make sure your CPU boost is limited to 3GHz, turn off every CPU hungry app, lift the MacBook a bit up to provide optimal cooling and try lowering your CPU voltage with intel xtu (doesn't work on all MacBooks)

Edited by Dschijn
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