u/systemnerve

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I tried a lot of items and boxes I had laying around, like the framework of a metal phone case, but this somewhat bulky box of some stuff, that I bought a few years ago for a few dollars and then never used, was the thing I found that had the right height.

According to my phone's gyro, which is not the most reputable indicator, probably, but it's the one I got, I took the photos so that they were from a hopefully perfectly horizontally level angle.

I hope I am not adding cable stress down there to the PSU, am not blocking the air flow or the fan blades, and am not hurting the GPU by changing the angle it had been resting at at for the last two years.

Unnecessary background info alert (starting here):

'twas the year 2024, or 2023, I don't quite remember. I bought my EVGA RX3080 10GB used, already having a drooping custom cooler, one that has to be controlled through the mainboard directly.

Let's just say the PC has been put to good use. a

Since the DIY cooler is so loud, I always keep it under 40% fan speed, even at max load, and it's usually at around 30%, where it's basically silent. I do this because audio quality is almost as important as visual fidelity and perceived loudness and audio detail is ruined by loud fans—If I had to choose one, protect my hearing or amazing audio, I wouldn't choose my tinnitus.

I keep the PC silent by a combination of undervolting and having optimized every single fan curve; all fan curves are sort of synchronized with their loudness; when the temps rise, the case coolers push harder first, so the GPU coolers won't have to. The GPU cooler at 40% is louder than the CPU cooler at 100%. The GPU cooler at 80% is louder than opening the window to a busy street (not a big fan of car traffic in cities). Anyways...

Apart from those DIY coolers, the GPU itself, not the cooler, is also sagging; it's almost perfectly horizontal and straight (not saggy) towards the back of the PC case, where the ports are and it's screwed to the casing but as it's pretty long, it saggs as it extends towards the front of the PC case (where the start up button is). At its right side, it's probably 0.7cm lower on the left side.

The GPU is running at a clock of 1725Mhz at 0.762V, 10002Mhz memory clock, and drawing under full load 250W.

Sometimes, I also run it at 1825Mhz at 0.800V, same 10002mhz mem clock, and drawing at max under full load almost 300W. The GPU never exceeds 80°C; the fan curve ramps up aggressively after to prevent prevent 80°C or more, but it only comes to that under rare circumstances (summer + cpu intensive game + long gaming sessions + 1800mhz preset).

It's a steady 78°C, according to MSI afternoon, after long gaming sessions that are GPU bound, as almost gaming sessions all are, as it's paired with a Ryzen 5600x that pushes 4750mhz at 120W under full load (basically only during shader compliation, though some ue5 games can push it to like 80W).

I do this because I really like this card because it's running all the best games flawlessly, like Hitman, though I wish Transformer DLSS would be less costly but Preset K runs well enough (sure it's no M but other than E, it's actually usable).

And I can't quite afford a new one in this economy, or it would be to painful, so I try to coddle this one to max out its life expectancy.

TLDR: good undervolt with good temps; tried to fix slight sagging issue of the GPU (not the custom coolers) for the sake of life expectancy and now hope it'll hold.

PS: everybody looks ugly when photographed with a flash light; there also only very few cobwebs and it's a very much cared for rig, so no judgement. besides, I got 32gb RAM, quad channel style, albeit ddr4 ram, which is a veritable luxury none the less lol

All this should be applicable to the major emulators (Winlator, GameHub, GameNative). I use the OnePlus 13 with a Snapdragon 8 elite. After dozens of hours of troubleshooting, I learned a lot that I couldn't find in one place, some from info scattered across the internet, some from first-hand experience of trying to get things to run, and some from doing lots of benchmarks (all under the same thermal throttling conditions). You can skip the small text if you aren't a novice. No AI was used. Don't trust what the AI in Google's search tells you! It believes newer is always faster and turnip is always faster than qcom; it has little nuance and tells a lot of bullshit.

First, let's discuss what emulator is best.

The answer is that all of them are good and usable, so it's all about preference. GameHub is easy to use but balloons in size like crazy quickly; all the file system are hidden and difficult to access to clean up, so regular resets of the app might be required. It's the most plug and play experience out there.

Winlator provides the most freedom and customizability. You can choose how many containers you want and choose which to you for what games or software, whereas GameHub seems to create new ones for each game and for each proton version a game was launched with.

I prefer Winlator because you can simply clean up bloated containers or delete them at will. It is freedom and, as opposed to GameNative, not heavily tied to Steam

How to access Proton Containers (works with Winlator and some GameHub forks, like BannerHub): You need to use the internal file manager on android. Now other will work because of how restrictive android is nowadays. You will not find it in the Android/data folder, not even with Shizuku/ADB. Launch the internal file manager either by downloading the shortcut (under 3MB in size) like this one: Playstore com.marc.files

Or by launching the file manager with ADB (I use Shizuku paired with "aShell You" but any adb terminal works fine:

am start -n com.android.documentsui/com.android.documentsui.files.FilesActivity

<small>Remember that if you send the adb command from PC you need to prefix the command with "adb shell": the "shell" part basically has it execute the command on the device or rather from the point of view of the device.</small>

Now, about what driver to pick: Turnip V34 has best compatibility and the most stable performance. HOWEVER, with versions higher than DXVK 2.4.1, Turnip suffers an fps penalty (~20% according to my testing) due to a feature called timeline sephamores. DXVK versions released later are often offered with the word "binsem" in them, which is to try and mitigate that regression. This doesn't undo the regression. Therefore, for optimal performance and compatibility, I recommend using Turnip V34 from StevenMXZ on GitHub as basically the default game configuration paired with DXVK-2.4.1-prereg or, if you don't like shader compilation stutter, DXVK-2.4.1-gplasync.

Alternatively, pair the qcom 863.1 driver with DXVK-3.0.1.-gplasync (or just async is fine as well).

<small>Side note for those who don't know: DXVK is used to translate the graphics api DirectX11, which is Windows only, to Vulcan, which is an open standard and requires shader precompilation.</small>

What Container to choose: Proton-X-Arm64ec or Proton-X-x86_64? This determinations if you are going to be using FEX or Box64, respectively. Everybody tends to say Fex is better and has lower overhead, but Box64 is, in my opinion, a bit underrated. If you want to use some software or a setup.exe to install a game, be it a repack or gog-installer: always go for Box64 with a preset set to something like "Intermediate" (not "performance" or "extreme"). For most games, FEX is considered to be better, as it is has a lower overhead. With older and badly optimized cpu-bottlenecked games, it is worth trying it in a x86_64 container with Box64.

Which Proton Version: Now it gets a bit more complicated. Generally, newer is better. Therefore, as the go to container for state of the art performance use Proton 11 arm64ec paired with the newest DXVK (gpl-/)async and VKD3D and the qcom driver. This is the riskiest bet (as in it might not boot or have shader glitches) but has the highest potential fps. For Proton 11, use a FEX version that has PPA and Unix in it. The Unix loader feature is only compatible with Proton 11.

As the go to container in order to just play a game a not bother min-maxing the performance after the initial setup: Proton-10-arm64ec with the turnip driver v34 and dxvk-2.4.1-prereg and just use one of the more recent stable vanilla FEX(Core) versions that likely come pre-installed in your emulator.

<small> With V33, there was a slight performance regression when compared to V32. Apparently, it supposed to have fixed with V34, though I am not certain. </small>

Best FEX Preset is usually the "Performance" preset, which has Multiblock Compilation and Reduced Precision enabled. One modification to that preset I would make is set "FEX_TSOENABLED" to 1(/yes/true) and, optionally, also do so for "FEX_BARRIERTSOENABLED".

<small>Why have I been talking all about DXVK and mostly ignored VKD3D? DXVK is for DirectX 11 and lower, it is extremely good and has very little performance overhead (fps loss due to the emulation). VKD3D is for DirectX12, which is what all the recent games made with modern engines likely use. Not only are those engines (and by extension games) inherently build for stronger hardware with better graphics, the VKD3D translation also has a lot more overhead, so you need every bit of performance your phone has but are able to use less. Light DirectX12 Indie Games are still completely playable but I would focus on DirectX11 titles because they are better suited to being played on your phone.</small>

In Winlator, I would also think about making a third container with Proton9_x86_64 (or Proton10_x86_64). If I have learned one thing, then it's that newer isn't always better. There are older games, like Dead Space 2, I could not make work without lag and graphicsl glitches when using a more recent configuration.

<small>Also, remember to find out your phones wide screen resolution, calculate its 1080 and 720p versions, and input that as a custom resolution. It's quite remarkable how many games work perfectly fine with such a resolution (except you, Drova Forsaken Kin). For example, I have a OnePlus 13 with a native resolution of 3168x1440 with 120hz. For Winlator, I almost always use 2376x1080 and target 40fps in non-2d games, which looks smooth enough on an OLED 120hz, but if a game is too heavy, I do 1584x720. Often it's a CPU bottleneck in 720p anyway, so I prefer 1080p and enjoy 100% GPU usage.</small>

In case of any dissent or even misconceptions on my part, please call me out on it in the comments. Enjoy .

Tried to export my State of Decay 2 Saves via GameHub. The result was over 20GB.

GameHub has a serious issue. The size of the app keeps ballooning in size with leftover trash, accidentally downloaded proton installations, oversized containers, shader caches, logs, and what not.

When not using GameHub lite, all those files come protected because android doesn't let u do jackshit nowadays. Even adb is useless because it shows all the folders in question as empty.

But you can actually inspect and remove all this bloat without root by going into the wine environment and opening Wine Configuration and adding a drive with the same path of the first drive but up several folders, so you end up being able to inspect everything (tried this in BannerHub).

However, this is a real hassle and you gotta navigate through lots of folders named after the LocalID of games. It may be better to just export the saves and reset the app entirely regularly. But if you don't want to do that, manually trying to do it in wine is the way to do it. (I had to install a second keyboard app because the wine enviroment wouldn't let me type numbers, let alone copy and paste paths.)

I've been looking for a way to extract my definitely legitimate game backups directly on the PS5 because a 30gb rar has the habit of ballooning into a 90gb folder and I sure don't have all that much free space on my PC, so I gotta make do with what I have (I mean in this economy? Have you seen how much another 1TB SSD costs this day 'n age?

Well. anyway, I was putting my reading comprehension to the test trying to configure the damn config.ini file for the payload but like I can just copy the example 1:1 lol

Broke college student here, I've been playing on this 4k monitor (Samsung U28E590 4k60hz) for the better part of 10 years now.

Have I been missing out.

I played Stalker 2 recently with DLSS Quality on my 3080 on medium-high with 40-55fps and to me, and it felt perfectly fine to me; as long as it doesn't dip often below the 40fps mark (VRR range is 40-60Hz), there is not much of a noticably lag or chopping.

I play most of my games like this and actually prefer it that way because at 60fps, I get frame tearing. I also always use Riva tuner 60fps cap because without it, or using in-game frame caps, 60fps feel like shit.

I could avoid tearing with vsync but that just sucks ass (input lag, exacerbated stutters)

But I know many would consider this unplayable: if I get a new monitor, will that change my habits somehow because of motion clarity and pixel response times?

The displayed panel is literally starting to get a green tint, due to age, that I need to fix by changing Nvidia color settings but I am also can't afford an OLED that would have got pixel response times, nor can my desk sustain the weight of a CRT.