Testing Micro

The topic of timer resolutions is quite popular in the PC gaming scene since this is one quick change that can improve the way your game and inputs feel. Upon further investigation, however, it becomes clear that the topic of system clocks and ticks is quite complex and has quite a few options you need to explore.

Amit is quite well known in the PC tuning scene and as he describes it, he found another unique interaction of the timer resolution by pure coincidence.

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Amit goes on to describe how he accidentally used a random value for the maximum supported timer resolution (0.5ms) and stumbled upon an interesting find. What he noticed then is that he could increase the precision of the timer by using a higher resolution than the standard 0.500ms getting a closer value to 1ms when it comes to sleep delays.

Source

I was curious about the results since he did mention that this change did help most of the people included in his testing and although quite late to the party, I wanted to see for myself if I can improve the precision of the timer by using a different value than the standard 0.5ms.

To conduct the test I downloaded the MeasureSleep utility from Amit’s GitHub and proceeded to tweak the value of my timer resolution. On my system, I am using a TSC clock with a TSC tick, and for the timer utility, I am using Memory Cleaner.

In my testing, I checked the initial 0.5ms values then tested Amit’s 0.507ms, and then kept going lower until I found spikes in ms and variances in the delta. This way I have confirmed that an adjusted value does provide higher precision compared to the default 0.5ms and have adjusted the value to what I have found to be the best for my settings and setup (PC hardware, Windows installation, settings, etc).

The value that worked for me might be different for your build therefore I suggest going through the same steps of testing the default 1ms, 0.5ms, and the tweaked 0.507 from Amit. Once you have noted the values for those 3, you can start making your adjustments to the timer resolution until you hit a stable value that is the closest to 1ms and has no random spikes or variances.

I tested the new timer resolution value while idling, while gaming, and while benchmarking with a high load just to make sure that the value is stable no matter what.

Once I confirmed that everything is working as intended under different loads I kept the value with the highest precision for my system.

As Amit noted, using a tuned value for your timer resolution utility improves precision so instead of using a default value of 0.5ms you should test different possible values and stick to the one that is the closest to 1ms.

About The Author

Custom Windows ISO enjoyer, FPS optimizer, and aim improvement enthusiast. Will disassemble all of his peripherals (and sometimes PC parts) to mod them even if all of them work perfectly fine. Discord/Twitter: vile_is_dead

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