Remaster Update and Game Stuttering / Online Stability

[EA_Caden]

Fellow Command & Conquer fans,

The game has now been live for several hours, and we’re already getting a ton of feedback from the community across all our channels. We’re actively reviewing this feedback, and just like we did with the Community Council when they started playing the game, will begin prioritizing these items going forward. Our goal is to continue maintaining a transparent dialog with all of you as we make this transition into post-launch support, and we’re not going to hide from issues within the game. With that in mind, we’ve been tracking two primary issues since the launch earlier today.

Online Stability
The first issue is the online stability of the game has been troublesome during the launch today. We’ve seen some games getting disconnected, occasional Quickmatch games failing upon load, and times when the online services are down completely. This is not the experience we wanted you to have with the Remastered Collection upon launch, and for that we sincerely apologize.

The team is working on further optimizations to the online infrastructure, and how to efficiently expand server capacity in this launch window of high demand. While we know many of you are eager to get into multiplayer, we certainly hope you can enjoy the Campaign, Skirmish, or play with a new piece of UGC while we work on these issues.

Game Stuttering
The second issue is that we are seeing reports of players who are experiencing game stuttering while playing in both single player and multiplayer. We had heard isolated incidents of this issue over the past few weeks with pre-launch players, but were unable to gather enough data and diagnose the exact cause in our research prior to launch.

Here’s what we know so far:

The stuttering seems to happen most often in the first playthrough of early missions, or when large armies of units are clashing during open battles or base attacks
The stuttering seems worst if it’s the first playthrough after restarting your computer
The stuttering doesn’t seem to happen as much (or at all) if you’re in the legacy graphics mode
Early reports show the issue is much more prevalent if the game is installed on a standard HDD versus a SDD
These data points lead us to believe the issue is tied to something like texture loading, as the game attempts to load the remastered textures for the first time during a playthrough

The team is working on gathering more data from players to discover further patterns and hardware configurations. We admit this issue has been a little more difficult to diagnose, as we do not have access to our standard QA PC lab of hardware due to the pandemic. If you are encountering this issue and would like to help us gather more data, please consider posting your experience / hardware configuration here on this Steam thread or on the EA Technical Support forums at:

https://answers.ea.com/t5/Technical-Issues/Info-Request-Game-Stuttering/m-p/9180031#M68

In the meantime, if you are encountering this stuttering issue, we have the following suggestions based on the information we’ve gathered so far:
If you have an SSD drive, we recommend installing the game to that drive
Try changing the resolution to a lower one, then back to the original resolution
Before playing, close all web browsers and other applications which could use Video RAM or actively ping the hard drive
While certainly annoying, consider starting a mission and then reloading it after a few seconds to allow the textures to cache first

We greatly appreciate your patience as we look into both these issues, and will keep you updated here on Steam and other channels with our progress.

Thanks for your continued support and feedback.

Cheers,

Community Manager Caden

[GReeNDeMoN91™!]

Opprinnelig skrevet av 1-900-490-FREAK:

I've played through the entire GDI campaign on TD and played some multiplayer and have literally encountered one crash in the final mission and an odd one where unit queuing disabled itself on one occassion.

Other than this, my experience has been pretty flawless. Now before anybody cries "well good for you it's stll bad it doesn't work burn EA" etc., lets consider the opposite side of that coin where there are plenty of people this game does work for and there's nothing constructive attributing it to some form of malice on the behalf of the devs.

Put your pitchforks down, report your issue and move on. They can't help if you don't. Calling for resignations or crying about how much a videogame not working for you has hurt your feelings without offering anything constructive isn't helping anyone.

Good call my friend, I was only trying to get bugs i have found noticed, I haven't been demanding a refund or blaming Ea/Devs for the issues. I am perfectly happy waiting for them to sort things out, the game has been out for less then a week! Nobody should be expecting the game to be perfect right from the start.

[Typhoon]

Opprinnelig skrevet av GReeNDeMoN91™!:

Good call my friend, I was only trying to get bugs i have found noticed, I haven't been demanding a refund or blaming Ea/Devs for the issues. I am perfectly happy waiting for them to sort things out, the game has been out for less then a week! Nobody should be expecting the game to be perfect right from the start.

Oh don't worry I wasn't aiming it at anyone in particular, but there are many threads where people are crying and demanding a refund or the devs heads. There's one I've just seen where they're upset they're having issues but it's clear their machine doesn't meet the minimum spec. They then say the devs are terrible coders and that it's all a conspiracy to help manufacturers sell better hardware than the GT210 they're playing on. You couldn't make it up.

[Ultrabot]

GT210 won't run anything much more than OPENTTD. If they're below spec, that's that sadly.
They'll have to upgrade or get something modern.

[Bill]

i don't get stuttering on cnc 95 missions, hd or legacy, sp or mp, i only get it when i play the red alert sp and mp. but yeah, it's like textures are trying to load so i'll get a hickup and then we're fine. to be honest i kind of expected performance issues on the first week of launch, i mean going live vs test environment will usually produce different results anyways, these are my pc settings:

windows 10 build 18363 <- heavily tweaked, i have sysmain, windows search, and telemetry services off, as turning some of these services off helped with mem usage and cpu usage, i used black viper's guide for windows 10 tweaks
4790k standard clock at 4ghz <- i leave this alone, and make sure i'm either using liquid metal or artic mx4 insta cure (clear stringy paste) so temps are controlled
32.0GB ddr3 1600 mem <- to me the bare min is 8, but windows will use about 1.8 to 3.0 while from bootup to in use for a few hours
7200rpm drive for windows installation <- 1 tb drive, has os installation and maybe word on it.
7200rpm drive for media <- all of my games, have about 350gb out of 1024gb, i sometimes fell that the more you pack on the slower these things can get, but i optimize and defrag them a lot.
hot swappable drives that sit silent unless i want to throw something onto them, same with an external drive via usb 3.0.
r9 390x amd card <- latest drivers, standard clocks, fans are at max, not that loud because i have carpet everywhere.
850 watt corsair 80+ certified bronze

probably the first game i get this kind of stutter in, other games run fine, i play a mixture of recent and older games. the more that i think about it, though, i had similar issues with wolfenstein the new order, when it was ready to load in new textures, i would get mad stuttering. i'm not going to disprove the hard drive theory, but it is possible, just didn't think that 120MB/s read and write speeds would cause that... but when they get more full they do get slower.. so maybe i'm not running at the full 120MB/s anymore, maybe it's closer to 85MB/s or 75MB/s, because, again, it's got a lot of games pack onto it, but a google search will debunk that reasoning as well, stating that nothing should affect the "read write speed of the drive" no matter how full it is.

anyways, love the game, reminds me of the old days, hopefully we can get it patched up, looking forward to red alert 2, tiberian sun, remakes one day, fingers crossed.

[ComposedJam]

The game deletes my saved progress when I restart my computer. This is unacceptable, so I hope there is a fix soon. It's frustrating to not be able to play it.

Thanks for fixing it in advance!

[Chafe]

I have just played a game of red alert multiplayer and when my radar dome got destroyed performance increased dramatically. When i re-built it the performance problems started again. Maybe this could help with debugging.

EDIT:
Tested this in Tiberian Dawn and it has the same issue. Performance is fine until you build a communications centre and then the game becomes jerky and laggy (even on single player). The problem goes away when the communications centre has been destroyed/sold.

[Meat Miracle]

The game works fine for me, but I have a issue where some remapped keys act as if they were pressed twice. for example I moved the graphics switch from Spacebar to Tab key, and now the game switches graphics twice when Tab is pressed - once on press, and once on depress.

Holding a modifier key (alt, ctrl, shift) before depress can make the depress not register, and allowing me to switch graphics.

What's more annoying is that I remapped Repair and Sell to C and Shift+C and they get immediately toggled out too... I can still hold them down to use the repair tool, but it's annoying.

[Typhoon]

Opprinnelig skrevet av Chafe:

I have just played a game of red alert multiplayer and when my radar dome got destroyed performance increased dramatically. When i re-built it the performance problems started again. Maybe this could help with debugging.

EDIT:
Tested this in Tiberian Dawn and it has the same issue. Performance is fine until you build a communications centre and then the game becomes jerky and laggy (even on single player). The problem goes away when the communications centre has been destroyed/sold.

Fancy trying by building a radar dome and then selling your power plants to put you in low power? I feel if that was to remove the performance issues it would lead me to believe the problem for you is with the mini-map display

[Chafe]

Opprinnelig skrevet av 1-900-490-FREAK:

Opprinnelig skrevet av Chafe:

I have just played a game of red alert multiplayer and when my radar dome got destroyed performance increased dramatically. When i re-built it the performance problems started again. Maybe this could help with debugging.

EDIT:
Tested this in Tiberian Dawn and it has the same issue. Performance is fine until you build a communications centre and then the game becomes jerky and laggy (even on single player). The problem goes away when the communications centre has been destroyed/sold.

Fancy trying by building a radar dome and then selling your power plants to put you in low power? I feel if that was to remove the performance issues it would lead me to believe the problem for you is with the mini-map display

Looks like selling \ rebuilding the power plants resulted in the same behaviour.

Sufficient power - lag
Insufficient power - no lag

Looks like it is the mini-map

[CobraA1]

Opprinnelig skrevet av Robocop4188:

i don't get stuttering on cnc 95 missions, hd or legacy, sp or mp, i only get it when i play the red alert sp and mp. but yeah, it's like textures are trying to load so i'll get a hickup and then we're fine. to be honest i kind of expected performance issues on the first week of launch, i mean going live vs test environment will usually produce different results anyways, these are my pc settings:

windows 10 build 18363 <- heavily tweaked, i have sysmain, windows search, and telemetry services off, as turning some of these services off helped with mem usage and cpu usage, i used black viper's guide for windows 10 tweaks
4790k standard clock at 4ghz <- i leave this alone, and make sure i'm either using liquid metal or artic mx4 insta cure (clear stringy paste) so temps are controlled
32.0GB ddr3 1600 mem <- to me the bare min is 8, but windows will use about 1.8 to 3.0 while from bootup to in use for a few hours
7200rpm drive for windows installation <- 1 tb drive, has os installation and maybe word on it.
7200rpm drive for media <- all of my games, have about 350gb out of 1024gb, i sometimes fell that the more you pack on the slower these things can get, but i optimize and defrag them a lot.
hot swappable drives that sit silent unless i want to throw something onto them, same with an external drive via usb 3.0.
r9 390x amd card <- latest drivers, standard clocks, fans are at max, not that loud because i have carpet everywhere.
850 watt corsair 80+ certified bronze

probably the first game i get this kind of stutter in, other games run fine, i play a mixture of recent and older games. the more that i think about it, though, i had similar issues with wolfenstein the new order, when it was ready to load in new textures, i would get mad stuttering. i'm not going to disprove the hard drive theory, but it is possible, just didn't think that 120MB/s read and write speeds would cause that... but when they get more full they do get slower.. so maybe i'm not running at the full 120MB/s anymore, maybe it's closer to 85MB/s or 75MB/s, because, again, it's got a lot of games pack onto it, but a google search will debunk that reasoning as well, stating that nothing should affect the "read write speed of the drive" no matter how full it is.

anyways, love the game, reminds me of the old days, hopefully we can get it patched up, looking forward to red alert 2, tiberian sun, remakes one day, fingers crossed.

I don't think it's the read/write speeds of your drive that is causing stuttering - I think it's the seek time. Or, to be less obtuse: You might have highly fragmented files, even though you defrag frequently.

There is a major issue with Windows' built in defrag, and many defrag utilities might do the same thing: It doesn't defragment files larger than 64 MB, which means it won't touch the data files that C&C Remastered is constantly using.

Most reports are that moving to SSD fixes the stuttering, which tells me that it's a disk performance thing. I personally did not have stuttering when I have the game on my HDD, so I suspect if the game's files are contiguous the problem does not reveal itself. Since defrag does not touch most of the data files and fragmentation is known to cause problems with performance on machines, I suspect this is a major factor for most people who are experiencing the stuttering problems.

I suggest using a utility like Contig by Sysinternals[docs.microsoft.com] to defragment the major files in the game.

[Alio]

As others have stated remapping Repair/Sell/Graphic Swap forces the button to double press and cancel itself out.

[HoPeY]

Running top end SSD inc NVme and get up to 20 second freezes. Don't just blame old HD's. Will try moving to another SSD.

Edit moved to another SSD, same issue.

[CobraA1]

Opprinnelig skrevet av ^4H^2o^7P^6e^2F^5u^1L^3L^8L:

Running top end SSD inc NVme and get up to 20 second freezes. Don't just blame old HD's. Will try moving to another SSD.

Stuttering is the primary symptom for the HDD issue. Outright freezes are something else altogether. I don't know what would cause 20 second freezes.

[HoPeY]

Updated to latest NVidia drivers, seems good now.

Edit, nope, still stuttering.

[Ultrabot]

Worth trying if your nvidia and having issues.
Download this, press run and install it. Create a desktop icon so you can find it.
https://driver-sweeper.en.softonic.com/download Don't run the program yet.

Boot to safe mode
https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/12376/windows-10-start-your-pc-in-safe-mode
Uninstall nvidia drivers
Run driver sweeper as detailed here
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/forums/game-ready-drivers/13/95834/clean-driver-install/#:~:text=1)%20Uninstall%20your%20GPU%20drivers,Driver%20Sweeper%20do%20it%20once.

reboot and go into windows as normal, install drivers.