Major lag spikes

[ThreeSon]

When playing the demo on Steam Deck, there is a major lag spike that essentially freezes the game about once every second. So the game is more or less unplayable. This doesn't happen in any of your other games on Steam (tested Mini Ghost and Unmetal), so I assume this one must be using a different engine.

The solutions I've tried include limiting the frame rate/refresh rate, trying different Proton versions, and launching with Steam in offline mode, but so far nothing has made any difference.

Looks like it will be a great game and I'll probably buy it anyway, but if you have a Deck to test on and are able to find a fix somehow, I would be grateful.


EDIT: After further testing, these lag spikes actually are occurring in Mini Ghost as well, except that in Mini Ghost, the lag spikes are only present during gameplay, not while sitting at the main menu, whereas in Pampas they start immediately when the game launches. And the frequency is only about once every 4 seconds, instead of once per second.

Maybe that helps diagnose the problem?

[Jacklifear]

Thanks for the feedback. I'm putting it on the list for Fran to look at.

[franfistro]

Hi there!
I'm sorry you're having issues. I'm trying to think what could it be.

We had several people playing on the Steam Deck and they had no similar issues. in fact the game ran smooth and they're very happy with it.
Is there anything peculiar on your SteamDeck? Any sort of special configuration or custom configuration different from the default ones? Any addon?

First thing I can think of is the background music, which is streamed and is read from the hard disk every 2 seconds. But the main menu should have no issues when no music is being played (and looks like you're having them anyway).

Also try to go to options/video and check the "Lock FPS to 60" to see if anything changes.

[franfistro]

One of the team told me if you're executing the game from a SD card or the internal memory of the Steam Deck.
If you have it stored in a SD card, please try installing it in the SteamDeck itself and try it again.

Let us know.

[ThreeSon]

Originally posted by franfistro:

One of the team told me if you're executing the game from a SD card or the internal memory of the Steam Deck.
If you have it stored in a SD card, please try installing it in the SteamDeck itself and try it again.

Let us know.

Thank you for replying. As to your first question about installed add-ons: I did have Decky Loader installed along with a few plugins at the time I made the original post. I have since uninstalled Decky Loader and tried the demo again, but am still getting the same problem.

The demo is (and was) installed on the internal SSD so that would not be the cause.

I am currently on the Steam Deck beta branch, so I will try switching to stable and see if that changes anything,

I have also tried using the in-game 60 FPS cap (my Steam Deck is the 90Hz OLED version) and also used the Deck's built-in FPS/refresh rate cap, but neither of those made a difference.

Assuming that switching to the stable update branch doesn't fix it, I will take a short video tomorrow morning and post it in a reply here so you can get a good look at it, even if it may ultimately be unsolvable.

[ThreeSon]

Alright so, right after making my last post, I installed and ran the demo on my Windows 10 desktop PC, and the problem is identical there, so we can rule out it being any Steam Deck-related issue.

Since no one else is reporting the same problem, I think it is likely to be caused by the way the demo is interacting with my Steam account. Specifically, it may be that I have an excess number of people in my Steam friends list (currently 471), because it would not be the first time a game has had problems where that was the cause.

I switched Steam accounts on my Windows 10 PC to my alternate account, which has only a single Steam friend, and sure enough the lag spikes are almost completely eliminated: At my monitors default 120 FPS rate, they are still present, but far less frequent (once every 5-10 seconds) and also less impactful. When using the in-game 60 FPS cap, everything is perfectly smooth.

I can upload some video if it would help. But I guess my question is: Does this game interact with Steam users' friends list in a way that Unepic and Unmetal do not? Like maybe persistently scanning for invites to play? If so then that may be the cause.

[franfistro]

Hello,

Yes, that's the reason: the number of friends.
The game refreshes your friends every second to show them on the Multiplayer Pannel. That causes that delay you're experiencing. As we haven't such amount of friends, we didn't experience thist problem.

Now that I know the problem, I will fix it.

[franfistro]

Done.
I sent you a friend request so we can check if the fix works before making it public.