General Discussions

[kingfish]

If you face FPS drops and stuttering, you can try changing the HPET settings to increase the performance of your PC and get smoother gameplay.

HPET stands for High Precision Event Timer (formerly Multimedia Timer) and has been used in PCs for a long time. It is used to produce periodic interrupts, which can be used to synchronize multimedia streams, in turn, providing smoother playback. It also reduces the need for other timestamp calculations. Performance of PC can also be increase by enabling Win32 Priority Separation which you can read here.

You can use the device manager to disable the High Precision Event Timer. I’ll show you how to use device manager settings to disable HPET.

• From search, type Device Manager and press Enter to open settings.

• Locate System devices.
• Right click on High Precision Event Timer and select Disable to stop the HPET service.

[DimkaTsv]

Just to add, you can test this change via "TimerBench". As well as toggle between HPET and iTSC timers.
Actually disabling it through device manager doesn't change anything. It is registry edit that must be done for it to work. Personally do it through TimerBench itself.

Basically every test run have variability (for me 99% frametime can be from 3.14 to 3.24 no matter iTSC or HPET), but amount of calls per second is more important. iTSC is just having higher timer resolution.

To disable HPET manually you can use command line with administrative rights and write
bcdedit /set useplatformclock true

To enable HPET again just delete this value
bcdedit /deletevalue useplatformclock

Result of changing HPET status on my 5600X via TimerBench. On other side "Toggling High Precision even timer" as device didn't change anything

[kingfish]

I should have included the other way to change tis setting...as using the device manager works for me.

# Method 2 (Using Cmd)

You can also use the cmd to stop the HPET and reduce gameplay stuttering. Follow the steps to disable HPET using cmd

• From Search, enter cmd and select Open as administrator.
• Type the following commands to disable HPET

bcdedit /deletevalue useplatformclock

bcdedit /set disabledynamictick yes

• Restart the PC for the changes to take place.

• Note: In Windows 10, you must use cmd as an admin to make changes to the HPET.

To restore the HPET settings back to on, follow these steps

• Open cmd as Administrator using the steps given above.
• Type the following commands to re-enable HPET

bcdedit /set useplatformclock true

bcdedit /set disabledynamictick no

• Note: disabledynamictick works only on Windows 8.1, 10 or newer.

Conclusion

If you are unsure about the HPET affecting your gameplay, I suggest you run benchmarks on your own system instead of believing others. There is a variety of tools available online that can help you with that, e.g. TimerBench. Use these timer benchmarks to measure if turning off the High Precision Event Timer can affect the timer performance.

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So there you have it. Now you know how to disable HPET and improve the system gaming performance. Did you find the methods useful? Comment down below if you found the HPET affecting timer performance.