BLOAT is killing your FPS

don't lie you filled that nice squeaky clean windows installed with garbage didn't you oh i get it you wanna chat with your friends and download games and edit videos but did you ever stop to think that all those things could be killing your fps now of course everyone knows that having programs open in the background consumes system resources so it stands to reason that a lightweight windows install should perform better but do you need to be concerned about that if you have a modern system well in this video sponsored by seasonic we'll be finding out exactly what sort of effect all the junk you might have running in the background will have on your gaming performance and you should get rid of it and if getting rid of it will even fix the problem in order to a b test anything you need to eliminate as many variables as possible that makes setting up our test here a little bit tricky because here's the thing even two identical model cpus or gpus can have marginally different performance characteristics so that means that every one of our benchmarks needs to be run on exactly the same hardware not just the same spec hardware down to even our seasonic prime tx1000 power supply this puppy sick by the way modular interface super quiet fan and 80 plus titanium efficiency the only non-identical part is our boot drives we've got a pair of crucial 1 terabyte ssds we're gonna have the full details of our bench and our affiliate links down below the hardware is not the story today though where things get really interesting is in software both of our drives were configured with a fresh install of windows 10 then we applied identical update regimens that is where the similarities end the clean build got only what was required for operation system drivers steam uplay epic games launcher and nvidia's gpu drivers plus chromium for a light-ish internet browsing experience oh and 7-zip because you need to unzip stuff we then went a step further and installed win arrow tweaker it's a super cool little tool that bricks windows ability to phone home aka telemetry as well as putting a stop to things that most people don't need like cortana windows inc workspace task view and the like it also attempts to intercept windows updates before they are forced on the pc like the windows malicious software removal tool a notorious resource hog as for the dirty build it's downright filthy we've got multiple pieces of security software fighting for resources then we've got skype discord spotify share x logitech gaming software course our iq steam ubisoft connect epic games launcher it's a lot of stuff and the craziest part is that it's not that crazy and these are all things that a normal gamer could easily have running behind the scenes to add a little bit of a dynamic load we're also throwing a 4k video on youtube running in the background because i heard zoomers are super into multitasking let's start then with idle loads as a baseline that was a snappy boot up and task manager has us pulling a grand total of one percent cpu of which point two we are at zero percent cpu usage not too shabby i don't know if i've actually seen that before zero percent cpu what's up with our ram at and for memory we're sucking back a whopping 2.3 gigabytes not much else to say other than damn that's clean time to see the dirty boy by the way yes we know we're not using the gen 4m.2 slot it's a gen 3 drive it's fine there it is oh you know what it's the coating on the screwdriver tip colin ah that's why i wasn't able to short it before the store.com actually it's going to be wan hoodies before we have screwdrivers like that available v2 baby got pockets for days that's a dirty welcome all right oh god the microsoft store is still here got some malwarebytes down here i mean to be clear when we said it was going to have bloat we didn't mean like bad bloat having malwarebytes on your computer's perfectly legit thing to do oh god corsair device update what the hell is glary utilities calling i just clicked all the boxes on nine night you know all things considered not that bad in terms of cpu usage anyway only about two percent but memory is an entirely different story we were sucking back over five gigs of memory now that's more than double what we were doing with our clean machine now the obvious answer to this is just to install more ram but most people these days are running 16 gigs and buying more ram costs a lot more than closing some background programs okay this is not staying at necessarily two sometimes around three there it is it's at three now four five wait what do you mean what is windows explorer doing i don't even have it open now we've reached the point in the video where i have to do a little taste test and see can i tell the difference between the clean drive and the dirty drive i'm gonna go sanitize this i'll be right back let's try two different games and then i'll i'll try and tell the difference between them so i think the thing that you would have the hardest time knowing the difference between is like csgo or doom because they're already like 350 fps why don't we do hitman i think there's like a zero percent chance linus gets this without an fps counter oh okay okay all right uh i will go away and then you either will or won't switch it i guess yes opening window i have my guess okay i say this is clean and the previous one was dirty that is exactly wrong i'm disappointed in myself my family um all my friends my supporters really let us down it's the opposite of an acceptance speech a rejection speech here's the thing though just because i can't tell the difference by hand doesn't mean that there is no difference so we did our homework and ran both of our setups through a gauntlet of benchmarks starting with synthetics in 3dmark time spy we were within margin of error i think it's fair to call this a tie but moving on to blender's classroom render we actually saw a significant gap with the render taking an additional 14 seconds on our dirty machine that's about three percent we then saw a similar story for browser bench's javascript based speedometer 2.0 which netted a 4.25 reduction in performance on our dirty machine the results then tipped even further in our in-game tests with cs go seeing our greatest difference with a 5 drop in fps now to be clear that is still not the kind of thing that you're just going to be able to feel using the machine especially when you're pushing over 300 fps but it is measurable f1 was tighter only a two and a half percent drop and we saw a similar story with hitman 3 in both the dartmoor and dubai canned benchmarks so across the board the loss was minimal but measurable and there are two main takeaways here one is that the more over spec your machine is the less likely you are to feel any kind of problem if we've been running eight gigs of ram and a quad-core cpu we might have seen very different results maybe that's a good experiment for another day the second takeaway is that even with an overspec machine your background tasks are acting as a drag on your gaming performance i mean we didn't put this in the script because we didn't know yet but it's funny to see about a three percent difference in performance with about three percent cpu usage at idle so bottom line you need to keep an eye on it about half of you today are running 16 gigs of ram or more which is great today but as your background programs get more resource intensive as they're apt to do that might change hopefully ddr5 with its faster speeds not to mention greater capacities is gonna bring some respite we've actually got some content in the works around that so make sure you get subscribed so you don't miss it now what i want to do is see if we can get some of that lost performance back so what's the best one to run probably cs go then right since that's where we saw the greatest difference yeah why not let's start let's start closing shiz see you later onedrive see you later dropbox oh god bye everything so is it as simple as that and we get all of our cpu back oh no corsair still has services running in the background who else does we're down to only one percent cpu usage though okay well we should be able to see that it's time three two one scroll lock here we go point of clarification our benchmarking was all run at 1440p for 10 40. 410 40. how close are we okay so in our benches dirty like fully dirty was 403 222 now so we've picked up seven fps the clean build was 423. it looks like just closing stuff wasn't enough and when arrow tweaker is actually contributing to a difference in our performance here yeah what do we have still running in the background that's pretty cool i mean there's still like anti-malware services sitting there drawing point four percent sometimes corsair service is still running in spite of the fact that i closed the actual tray application you wanna just try force closing those things yeah we could try it dropbox service is still running dropbox update it's still running everything search still running like a lot of this crap is still running okay so we further trim the fat do you want to go check it again iq started again iq service for msi motherboard i think wait the lg hub updater started again let's see if we can pull another couple fps out of that let's try it one more time borrow 864. we got nothing more it's even less yep the good news is this benchmark is really consistent so it tells us that our our difference between clean and dirty is real and also tells us i think we're pretty much done here rather than to thank seasonic seasonic power supplies whether you got a clean rig or a dirty rig they have got the power for you they've got everything from value power supplies all the way up to ones with insane 12-year freaking warranties on them and all the performance that you could need you can check them out at the link in the video description if you guys are looking for another video to watch hey maybe check out the does a faster ssd matter for gaming video that we did a while back we tried everything from a sata ssd to a top spec nvme ssd and did a blind test to find out if our gamers could tell the difference

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 4,114,559

Keywords: clean, dirty, gaming, bloat, bloated, bloatware, garbage, apps, icons, desktop, windows, RAM, CPU, overhead, fps, cs:go, blender, render

Id: yVNkMNVv4Y4

Length: 11min 34sec (694 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 02 2021