Major Stuttering

[Turd Ferguson]

Hi All,

I am having issues with this game and I am not sure what to do. I have enabled HAGS and I continue to get frequent stuttering while playing. I have noticed while monitoring my GPU usage it will dip to below 30% when the stutter occurs. I have tried enabling high performance in the nvidia drivers for the application the stutter would still occur. GPU usage never really goes over 70%. Are there issues with specific graphic setting in-game?

This game is not stressing my machine, temps aren't an issue. I have tried changing various settings within the nvidia control panel for the specific application, nothing has made a difference.

The game is installed on a Samsung 970 Evo NVMe so I don't think that texture streaming is the issue.

Below are my specs. There is no reason for this to be occurring so any input is welcomed.
Is there a issue with Ultra settings in game? I am really at a loss here.

10700K
RTX 3090
32GB 6400MHz

[fnoigy]

I also am having sudden issues with performance on an RTX 3070, even though I played the game about 5 hours with 80fps average, suddenly getting 20.

[Roccondil]

What are your in-game settings?

reset all settings in the Control Panel, you shouldn't need to touch those at all.

You have tried the game using default CP settings, right? try running the game at 1080p, not 1440 or 4K, with all 'High' settings in the in-game menu.

I have a GTX 1070, with an R7 2700x, none of my CP settings have been touched (they are all on default) and the in-game menu settings are "High" with a resolution of 1920x1080, and it runs really well, no stuttering much at all.

[MysticDaedra]

Originally posted by Roccondil:

What are your in-game settings?

reset all settings in the Control Panel, you shouldn't need to touch those at all.

This is factually incorrect. HAGS itself is known to cause major performance issues in many modern games, and the Windows Game Bar stuff all causes performance issues as well.

I am also getting major frame drops periodically, from ~100 down to 1fps. I have an RTX 3070 and Ryzen 5 3600 with 32gb RAM. Something is bugged with the game to be causing these performance issues.

[MysticDaedra]

Just moved to my M.2 pcie4.0 NVMe drive. Stuttering is still happening just as before with no change. Whatever is causing the frame drop is not storage medium related.

[juliejayne]

Is there a particular point at which this stuttering occurs? Do you have anything else running in the background? Windows updates for instance?

It seems strange that I am (so far) running smooth on a HDD, i3 9100 and 1650Super. It would suggest that it is not the game but something else in your system that is grabbing resources. Or maybe I just haven't reached the stuttery section of the game yet?

[MysticDaedra]

Nothing running in the background. No windows updates. Watching Resource Monitor on my second monitor, and there is no spike in drive usage or CPU usage during the FPS loss. GPU usage seems to drop during the stutters, evidenced by watching my GPU overlay and hearing the fans spin down.

There is nothing in-game to indicate an approaching stutter. Given my hardware, I exceed the recommended specs by a wide margin, and have great frames except for the very random FPS drops.

I want to clarify, because we are all throwing around the word "stutter", but what I'm actually experiencing isn't a stutter, it's an extreme FPS drop from 100+ to 1 fps for several seconds. Normally I would indeed expect to see something running in the background causing this, but I can confirm that it is H:ZD, not anything else, that is the cause of the problem.

[pega3]

As can be seen in similar threads in this forum, having the latest version of Nvidia drivers is not always the best idea. Try downgrading to a version before April and see if that fixes it, it was the solution for a couple of other people.

What puzzles me a bit is the memory frequency that the OP specifies. 6400??? Is that realistic? Memory overclocking is know to cause issues in some cases, however, with that hardware the game should be running with Ultra settings and top performance. Something's definitely mis-configured or broken.

What GPU monitor are you using? If none, install GPU-Z, that will give you much more insights into what your 3090 is up to.

[juliejayne]

Originally posted by MysticDaedra:

Nothing running in the background. No windows updates. Watching Resource Monitor on my second monitor, and there is no spike in drive usage or CPU usage during the FPS loss. GPU usage seems to drop during the stutters, evidenced by watching my GPU overlay and hearing the fans spin down.

There is nothing in-game to indicate an approaching stutter. Given my hardware, I exceed the recommended specs by a wide margin, and have great frames except for the very random FPS drops.

I want to clarify, because we are all throwing around the word "stutter", but what I'm actually experiencing isn't a stutter, it's an extreme FPS drop from 100+ to 1 fps for several seconds. Normally I would indeed expect to see something running in the background causing this, but I can confirm that it is H:ZD, not anything else, that is the cause of the problem.

A bit of a long shot here... But do you have/have you ever had Razer Synapse on this PC.

[Turd Ferguson]

Originally posted by pega3:

As can be seen in similar threads in this forum, having the latest version of Nvidia drivers is not always the best idea. Try downgrading to a version before April and see if that fixes it, it was the solution for a couple of other people.

What puzzles me a bit is the memory frequency that the OP specifies. 6400??? Is that realistic? Memory overclocking is know to cause issues in some cases, however, with that hardware the game should be running with Ultra settings and top performance. Something's definitely mis-configured or broken.

What GPU monitor are you using? If none, install GPU-Z, that will give you much more insights into what your 3090 is up to.

I meant 3400MHz. That was a typo. Lol. I got that new DDR10 ram.

I’m currently just running on the ultra preset. The dips appear to be random.

[pega3]

Originally posted by The Prince of Florida:

I meant 3400MHz. That was a typo. Lol. I got that new DDR10 ram.
I’m currently just running on the ultra preset. The dips appear to be random.

That makes sense. Okay, with a machine like that, you should be able to run HZD however you like it. Some questions:
- what resolution are you running
- what frame and have you limited it in some way? (e.g. even though my 3090 could hold 120fps easily, I've capped it at 60fps and vsync, because that is the best my monitor can do)
- did you try the driver downgrade? What are the results?
- did you check out what GPU-Z shows you? Most interesting bar for you right now is probably "PerfCap Reason" which could show you the reason for any dips initiated by the card. If there is none, check GPU clock and memory clock.

[BuzzardBee]

Try turning off Motion Blurring.

[MysticDaedra]

Memory overclocking should have no downside if it is stable. Performance issues on overclocked RAM (note that virtually all DDR4 ram over... 2333?mhz is overclocked when you turn XMP on) are directly related to either faulty RAM modules or an unstable overclock. That all being said... I'm glad it's 3400 and not 6400, I'd have been extremely jealous lol!

I've never had Razer synapse installed on this computer. I avoid Razer products and software like the plague.

My FPS is uncapped, as the highest option is 120hz and I have a 144hz monitor. Steam overlay shows the FPS staying around 100 at any given point (slightly less and night, and slightly less during periods of high on-screen activity such as larger battles), so that shouldn't be a factor.

My card has been flashed with the latest VBios, which means I cannot downgrade the latest drivers. I also am taking advantage of Resizable BAR in other games, so I'd rather not throw all that away just for HZD. For the record, this frame drop has only occurred in HZD for me, not in any other game I've played since updating to the newest drivers.

I hadn't thought to use GPU-Z's sensor display. I'll keep an eye on PerfCap to see if something displays the next time I get a frame drop.

[MysticDaedra]

According to GPU-Z, PerfCap is going to Idle during the frame drops.

[pega3]

As for memory overclocking having no downsides - if it's correctly done and stable as you state, I agree to the "no impact", or even increase performance a slightly bit.
If you check out past forum posts, you will find several where memory overclocking was "an issue". I assume that HZD's load just revealed weaknesses in the tuning, but consequently the recommendation to look into that corner - and if it's only to rule it out as a cause.

Too bad you can't downgrade your drivers, the number of similar reported issues in this forum hint that there might be a problem in the latest driver version which introduced the BAR. Guess, that's the price for being at the frontline of innovation - you're always also a guinea pig. And if you encounter a new bug, you have to be able to help yourself - or wait until fix is released or a workaround found.

if GPU-Z says your card is idle when the frame drop occurs, and the memory and GPU frequencies on the card do not change, it normally would indicate that the issue is not with the GA. However, given how bad the power management was implemented, I would not be surprised if it's exactly the new BAR function which gets in the way between CPU and GPU and causes the frame drops. And since it is so low-level (requires BIOS and vBIOS updates), there's a good chance that disabling it will help nothing. Patience is a virtue. :-)

I hope the root cause for this is found soon and I am curious what it will be.

[MysticDaedra]

Yeah, thems the breaks. I still think it's mostly an HZD problem though. Again, this is the only game that has these issues for me at the moment. Perhaps HZD has a different way of accessing memory or something? Dunno.