Is ETS2 V1.36 graphics occasionally stuttering?

[REEEEEEEEEEEEE!]

The game used to run really smoothly at 1080p 100% scaling on my admittedly old i5 4th gen, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GT750M 1GB. With recent updates the game began stuttering so I tried removing all mods, lowering settings so gpu % was around 50% and still the jarring slowdowns would keep occurring. Well I've managed to figure out in my case what was happening.

Turn off in steam settings in-game big picture overlay to stop graphics stuttering and launch the game from desktop mode. Graphics are buttery smooth at v-sync economic 30fps 1080p 100% scaling. Most other settings are on fairly low but importantly HDR, DOF, Sunshafts are on. Anti-aliasing is off - my 4K TV seems to process the image so I don't really notice. The steam mods aren't an issue.

Or
If you want steam big picture in-game overlay I had to turn off HDR and put many settings to low to stop graphics stuttering.

[mojo_musica]

I'm totally surprised it is running v1.36 at all on a seven year old laptop GFX chip. Are you sure you're running the latest v1.36 in DirectX 11.1? That Nvidia GT750M 1GB is normally too low on VRAM and processing power to run ETS2. Is it on DX 11 or running OpenGL?
You live and learn, I suppose.

[madman]

Don't forget the shadow, mirror, and rain reflection also FPS killer. You can disable these three, or fine tuning them through config.cfg file.

For shadow, you can disable cloud shadow, decrease fake shadow quality, and decrease sun shadow texture size below than 1024 and experiment with sun shadow quality. With sun shadow texture size 128 and sun shadow quality 3, you can get better dynamic shadow appearance without eating too much framerates. For example:

uset r_cloud_shadows "0"
uset r_fake_shadows "1"
uset r_sun_shadow_texture_size "128"
uset r_sun_shadow_quality "3"

For mirror, the distance eat framerates most. You can set a value below 100 to gain more framerates but beware, smaller the value you'll get more difficulty to predict high speed vehicles coming from behind. If you need acceptable distance without too much framerates drop, try experiment with mirror scaling. With scaling 1:1, mirror will rendered at the size of the game's current screen resolution. An example, if screen resolution is 1920x1080 (FHD) and you down scaling both width and height to 0.75, mirror will be rendered at 1440x810 surface resolution thus saving more rooms on VRAM and increase small framerates (less buffer reads from RAM). When setting the mirror scale, MAKE SURE the result size (from screen resolution) is a multiple of 8.The following example use acceptable distance 130 with 0.75 (both sides) down scale on mirror:

uset r_mirror_scale_y "0.75"
uset r_mirror_scale_x "0.75"
uset r_mirror_view_distance "130"

For rain reflection, you can minimize objects that reflected on the road surface. Because mainly objects over the road are vehicles, you only need to enable your truck and traffic to be rendered and leave other objects (fences, bridges, buildings, etc) hidden. Later you may play with the rain reflection quality staht suit your need (performance versus quality). The following example shows only vehicle reflection on road surface with rain reflection quality 2:

uset g_rain_reflect_hookups "0"
uset g_rain_reflect_actor "1"
uset g_rain_reflect_traffic "1"
uset g_rain_reflect_cache "0"
uset g_rain_reflection "2"

To gain more framerates, you can also play with LOD (level of details). The following example is some modified LODs that should be more friendly to low-end CPU:

uset g_lod_factor_pedestrian "0.6"
uset g_light_span_factor "0.6"
uset g_light_distance_factor "0.7"
uset g_lod_factor_parked "0.65"
uset g_lod_factor_traffic "0.75"

Also consider to disable grass density, or at least set to low for more framerates. You can also reduce the HDR bloom effect, though the framerates impact only noticeable on GPU that still using primitive shader. The following example reduce bloom effect on HDR:

uset g_bloom_standard_deviation "0.35"
uset g_bloom_filter_radius "3"
uset g_bloom_resizing_steps "2"
uset g_bloom_override "0"
uset g_bloom "0.5"

Hope all those tuning and tweaks help you with low-end PC to gain more framerates with better graphics experiences. Those values has been tested on Radeon HD 5850 1GB VRAM (released at 2009, one of the first GPU that support DX11 at that time), with (very old) AMD Catalyst 15.301.1901 (the last 2015 updated version that still support HD5850). With ETS2 v1.36, framerates can be achieved above 60 FPS outside cities, and may vary inside cities between 30-60 FPS especially when there's lot of traffic vehicles (i.e. in traffic light).

[REEEEEEEEEEEEE!]

Yes I tried running ETS2 64bit DX11 and OpenGL on Windows 10 v1909.It is kinda amazing that the game can run on older hardware as long as you tweak it. Thanks madman for the great tips - will give them a go.

[REEEEEEEEEEEEE!]

The link https://modding.scssoft.com/wiki/Documentation/Engine/Configuration_variables describes all the possible tweaks.

Well after playing with the console in-game I've got the game looking better than ever and running smoother than ever at 1080p 100% scaling. Definitely worth playing around with the settings.

https://modding.scssoft.com/wiki/Documentation/Engine/Configuration_variables

To enable the console and mini-console
g_console 1
g_developer 1
g_minicon 1
g_fps 1 (show fps in mini console)

My settings:
uset g_bloom_standard_deviation "0.35"
uset g_bloom_filter_radius "3"
uset g_bloom_resizing_steps "2"
uset g_bloom_override "0"
uset g_bloom "0.5"
uset r_mirror_scale_y "0.5"
uset r_mirror_scale_x "1"
uset r_scale_y "0.7"
uset r_scale_x "1"
uset r_normal_maps "0"
uset r_sunshafts "1"
uset r_color_correction "1"
uset r_cloud_shadows "0"
uset r_dof_filter_size "0.1"
uset r_dof_transition "400.0"
uset r_dof_start "200"
uset r_dof "1"
uset r_smaa "0"
uset r_hdr "1"
uset r_fake_shadows "2"
uset r_sun_shadow_texture_size "1024"
uset r_sun_shadow_quality "1"
uset r_mirror_group "3"
uset r_mirror_view_distance "100"
uset r_deferred_mirrors "1"
uset r_deferred "1"
uset r_gamma "1.0"
uset r_device "dx11"
uset g_lod_factor_pedestrian "0.6"
uset g_pedestrian "1"
uset g_light_span_factor "0.5"
uset g_light_distance_factor "0.5"
uset g_vehicle_flare_lights "1"
uset g_auto_traffic_headlights "1"
uset g_lod_factor_parked "0.65"
uset g_lod_factor_traffic "0.5"
uset g_traffic "1.0"
uset g_developer "1"
uset g_truck_light_quality "1"
uset g_truck_light_specular "1"
uset g_gfx_all_scales "0"
uset g_gfx_advanced "1"
uset g_gfx_quality "-1"
uset g_additional_water_fov "20.0f"
uset g_rain_reflect_hookups "0"
uset g_rain_reflect_actor "1"
uset g_rain_reflect_traffic "1"
uset g_rain_reflect_cache "0"
uset g_rain_reflection "2"
uset g_reflection "0"
uset g_grass_density "0"
uset g_veg_detail "0"
uset g_minicon "1"
uset g_console "1"
uset g_fps "1"
uset r_vsync "2"
uset r_color_mode "0"
uset r_anisotropy_factor "0"
uset r_texture_detail "2"

[metpei]

Drivers eat your cpu too.