Fixing memory bandwidth issues on G.Skill Trident Z DDR4?
Fighting giant bosses was a strange experience; the FPS looked high, but every few seconds there was this subtle 'twitch' in the movement that felt off. I checked the logs and found that because the G.Skill Trident Z DDR4 3200 8GB was running in single channel, bandwidth was oscillating between 18GB/s and 22GB/s, creating 20-30ms of instruction latency. I tried enabling Windows Game Mode, but that's just a placebo—the bandwidth bottleneck remained. I had to go into BIOS, switch the memory frequency from Auto to a manual 3200MHz, and bump the memory controller voltage to 1.1V. AIDA64 confirmed read/write speeds stabilized at 21-23GB/s, and the twitching completely stopped. I actually got memory parity errors at first, but relaxing the timings from 16-16-16 to 16-18-18 fixed the stability. RAM temps are now 38-44℃ and the board is 42-48℃. Frame times are finally steady at 5.1-6.4ms, though 8GB is barely enough for this game.
