Dogtown is choppy as ♥♥♥♥

[Roald]

Just bought the DLC and it's barely playable. The rest of the locations are fine, but when I'm in dogtown ♥♥♥♥ freezes every 7 seconds. Anyone else?

Any tips before I ask for a refund?

[Nar!]

Hmm.. What are your PC specs?

The DLC expansion is a bit more resource heavy. Could be that it's loading shaders if you're running it for the first time. When I first ran the expansion, specifically on the part where I was rescuing the president from the crashed airliner, it stuttered a bit as if I had some stuff running in the background, but then it smoothed out like butter.

Even on my second playthrough, that section no longer gave me any issues.
Not sure what caused the choppiness on my first run.

If it's choppy for you only when you're in Dogtown in general, try verifying your game files to see if it may be able to find and fix any errors. If that doesn't work, then I don't know what else it could be. Are you using a spinning platter hdd?

[Roald]

NVMe SSD and RTX 3070 Ti, Intel i9 @ 5.30GHz, 30gb of RAM... it should run smoothly, the rest of the game runs fine with Ultra settings. It's just Dogtown. I tried downgrading to Medium, still stutters.

[tbloyzz]

ASUS board?

[Aqu]

I've understood Dog town is especially hard for CPU - didn't they increase min specs for CPU in PL? I have i7 10700 and RTX3080 and it felt maybe bit sluggish in the Dogtown sport arena so lowered crowd density to medium.. might have helped a bit

[Bjørn]

Originally posted by pL:

NVMe SSD and RTX 3070 Ti, Intel i9 @ 5.30GHz, 30gb of RAM... it should run smoothly, the rest of the game runs fine with Ultra settings. It's just Dogtown. I tried downgrading to Medium, still stutters.

I'm also using an RTX 3070 Ti (rest of specs in profile), playing at 1440p, and there is a quite noticeable difference in performance in Dogtown. I usually turn down DLSS setting a bit when playing in there for a while, from Quality to Balanced or even Performance.

Lately though I've turned down the Texture quality (only available when on the main menu of the game) from High to Medium.

I hardly see any difference, but it helps a lot with performance. I like pretty graphics over high fps (I lock it at 60 fps in Nvidia Control panel), so I can use Ultra ray-tracing and max most other graphics settings, and keep DLSS on Quality everywhere, also in Dogtown.

Also, since the 8GB VRAM on the 3070 Ti is quickly filled up with max texture resolution, you also avoid those slowdowns when going to the menus and such when memory is constantly full, and moves a lot of data around.

You'll rarely fill up the VRAM with medium textures.

I can recommend you test it out, even though I know it's a bit like swearing in the church to lower texture resolution for some This game looks great with medium textures!

Can mention I also play with reduced Crowd Density like Aqu mentions above, btw, set to Medium. It helps especially for CPU usage, I think I've read, and I only have a 6-core one.

[Roald]

Originally posted by tbloyzz:

ASUS board?

Yes, ASUS TUF Gaming Z490+

[Bjørn]

Originally posted by Bjørn:

I can use Ultra ray-tracing and max most other graphics settings, and keep DLSS on Quality everywhere, also in Dogtown.

Felt I should mention that I also use DLSS Sharpness set to 1 (max). It makes a big difference.

I used 0.70 before after reading that was recommended, but the game looks MUCH better with it set to 1.

[tbloyzz]

I had to do a BIOS update for my ASUS Prime Z690-P WiFi in order to make the game run after the last major update in spring. Worked for me. Just down to the question whether you want to do that only for one game.

[Nar!]

I hope it's not his CPU causing the stuttering. There's a whole saga on i9s right now. Some of which include some games stuttering when the CPU is having issues communicating with the GPU. It pushed motherboard manufacturers to put out bios updates to help circumvent these issues.
Maybe something worth looking into.

[Bjørn]

I saw in a recent PC Gamer article that Intel had released updated drivers for those 2 generations of flawed CPUs now

[Roald]

Originally posted by Nar!:

I hope it's not his CPU causing the stuttering. There's a whole saga on i9s right now. Some of which include some games stuttering when the CPU is having issues communicating with the GPU. It pushed motherboard manufacturers to put out bios updates to help circumvent these issues.
Maybe something worth looking into.

The rest of the game runs flawlessly on Ultra. Doubt it's that.

[Rune]

Just set up Afterburner + RTSS and measure your usages. It will give you a better understanding what's happening.

[Bishop-Six]

Originally posted by pL:

Originally posted by Nar!:

I hope it's not his CPU causing the stuttering. There's a whole saga on i9s right now. Some of which include some games stuttering when the CPU is having issues communicating with the GPU. It pushed motherboard manufacturers to put out bios updates to help circumvent these issues.
Maybe something worth looking into.

The rest of the game runs flawlessly on Ultra. Doubt it's that.

Do you mean Dogtown in general or especially the first mission when the plane crashed? Because there they use a special graphic setting for the streets which is immensely more demanding than standard Dogtown later.

[Blur]

30gb? You have like 3 different RAM sticks?

[Roald]

I mean all of Dogtown. It gets choppy as soon as I drive through the checkpoint.

Also, I'm on Linux.