Diagnose my stutter - GTX 1080, I5-6600K

[Gamer Sweat Cannery Ltd]

I have been getting some major stutter in Subnautica and also after trying the game Blackwake I noticed a bit of stutter there but not as bad. This happens when I am above 60 fps, almost like the game freezes for a fraction of a second.

I have tried updating drivers, increasing LOD with the mod guide, lowering resolution/graphics, running in exclusive with launch options etc... but can't seem to get this fixed.

Just returnd a G SYNC monitor because almost ALL of my games had a microstutter at high fps so I don't think it is just Subnautica but Subnautica is unplayable for me at this point.

I just finished driving around in the Seamoth and took a screenshot of my hardware monitor graphs. IT looks like at I have a lot of sudden GPU usage/power usage drops which I believe is the root cause.

Here is the graph: https://i.imgur.com/6FS1PKb.png

Can anyone give me advice on next things to try? I am thinking about upgrading motherboard and CPU because of the issues in other games but I am afraid it could be something else entirely.

SPECS:

EVGA GTX1080 SC
I5-6600k stock
16GB DDR4
MSI H170A PC MATE Motherboard
Corsair 650M 80+ Bronze PSU
SSD
1440p Monitor

[DeFragged]

Opprinnelig skrevet av eon:

What's your CPU temperature? Overheating may result in microstutter and similar issues. You can easily check your idle temp in BIOS but if you want to check your running temp you might need some additional software.

You can check out your optimal temperature range for your CPU at http://www.cpu-world.com/.

CPU-Z and GPU-Z are nice programs to use. Mine's water cooled so the temperature never rises to dangerous levels unless I let the ventilation get clogged with dust.

[Gamer Sweat Cannery Ltd]

Opprinnelig skrevet av DeFragged:

Opprinnelig skrevet av Warman:

I have tried the distance MOD but it makes the framerate and stutter way worse. Does help with the popin though. I gave a few of those FPS boosts a try last night but hesitate to unpark my cores or run that time resolution program. Might be a last resort for me though.

With your I5-6500 did you previously have really bad stutter?

Yeah, I had really bad stutter. Anytime I turned around fast enough my sound would stutter to the point I'd be hearing more static than game, and my game would turn into a temporary fast forward slideshow. If I got in a Seamoth or Cyclops and moved forward, I'd stutter tons every minute or so. It got better over time, but only so much.

After tons of tweaking to find the best settings for my computer, I've reduced stutter to an acceptable minimum - It'll still stutter now and then as it loads up something or I turn too fast, but it's absolutely fine otherwise. Performance still tanks when in my base, but yeah... that's my own doing since my base is crazy busy.

My game's installed on a regular hard disk, no SSD.

The distance 'mod' is meant to have the game load more of the world sooner, so when you've gone around the world a bit more most of it should be cached and load smoothly. My config for the distance mod is a compromise between LOD and performance. Modifying the clipmaps-high.json, I used:

For the initial settings:
"chunkMeshRes":16,
"numSlices":32,
"maxWorkspaces":16,
"maxMeshQueue":40,
"maxThreads":8,

Then for each of the chunk settings, I used the respective settings:
"chunksPerSide":9,
"chunksPerSide":9,
"chunksPerSide":9,
"chunksPerSide":10,

in that order.

There's no need to unpark cores if you only have 4 I think, I've never seen any being parked. Not sure about 6. Although I've tried it and there hasn't been any issue yet.

The Time resolution program doesn't create any appreciable improvement for me but results may vary.

With a 2 TB harddisk, it might be my virtual memory being a key factor in the performance improvement, or it might be the -nolog launch option. Or a combination of everything plus 16 GB RAM.

I just wish I had a better answer, but after tweaking settings here and there my experience is as good as it can get. I'm not sure what the deciding factor is really.

Edit: I've found a post that forces the system to allocate more resources to the game here:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/264710/discussions/0/350540973989239303/#c350540973990937837

The important bit is the Steam launch options for increasing Heap Size:

"If you want to use...
512MB Cache: -heapsize 524288
1GB Cache: -heapsize 1048576
2GB Cache: -heapsize 2097152
Most likely don't want to go over 4GB on a 64 bit system though."

This seems to have made my game even better. :D

Thanks, I will give those settings a shot and see how it goes.

[FirstandLastBAC]

Okay so your worrying me with this, im about to buy the game and I see this convo. Your having lag issues with a gtx 1080 and I have a gtx 1060 3gb with a ryzen 3. Am I ♥♥♥♥♥♥ if I buy this game?

[MJ Ski]

Could be a misbehaving driver or other programm. Use "DPC Latency Checker" to find the culprit. Close or disable one program after another and see whether spikes in DPC Latency Checker disappear.
I had an overclocker tuning program that caused such brief stutter every couple of seconds. Had to uninstall it to make it go away.

[margalus]

Opprinnelig skrevet av BACWRDS:

Okay so your worrying me with this, im about to buy the game and I see this convo. Your having lag issues with a gtx 1080 and I have a gtx 1060 3gb with a ryzen 3. Am I ♥♥♥♥♥♥ if I buy this game?

Saying you are ♥♥♥♥♥♥ is a bit melodramatic. This game has more bugs than any other game released, performance bugs included. But it's a good game nonetheless. With your 1060 you may play smoothly at 120fps for an hour, then hit a stuttering mess for a minute where the fps are down into the teens or lower. Then right back up to a nice smooth 120fps again... You can never tell when or where it will happen, but it's not enough to ruin the game, just gets annoying.

[Bimdur]

Opprinnelig skrevet av margalus:

Opprinnelig skrevet av BACWRDS:

Okay so your worrying me with this, im about to buy the game and I see this convo. Your having lag issues with a gtx 1080 and I have a gtx 1060 3gb with a ryzen 3. Am I ♥♥♥♥♥♥ if I buy this game?

Saying you are ♥♥♥♥♥♥ is a bit melodramatic. This game has more bugs than any other game released, performance bugs included. But it's a good game nonetheless. With your 1060 you may play smoothly at 120fps for an hour, then hit a stuttering mess for a minute where the fps are down into the teens or lower. Then right back up to a nice smooth 120fps again... You can never tell when or where it will happen, but it's not enough to ruin the game, just gets annoying.

Thing it that this is a normal behaviour from a Unity engine game and not a Subnautica problem so you can't blame Subnautica for bugs.

I'm on a Ryzen 7 1800X with a TGX 1080 Ti with fresh installed Windows 10. Not a single program except the game, not even anti virus soft ware and have the exact same problem with with several Unity games. I don't have the same problem when in VR witch point even more to the graphics engine rather then the game it self.

[margalus]

Opprinnelig skrevet av Bimdurian:

Opprinnelig skrevet av margalus:

Saying you are ♥♥♥♥♥♥ is a bit melodramatic. This game has more bugs than any other game released, performance bugs included. But it's a good game nonetheless. With your 1060 you may play smoothly at 120fps for an hour, then hit a stuttering mess for a minute where the fps are down into the teens or lower. Then right back up to a nice smooth 120fps again... You can never tell when or where it will happen, but it's not enough to ruin the game, just gets annoying.

Thing it that this is a normal behaviour from a Unity engine game and not a Subnautica problem so you can't blame Subnautica for bugs.

I'm on a Ryzen 7 1800X with a TGX 1080 Ti with fresh installed Windows 10. Not a single program except the game, not even anti virus soft ware and have the exact same problem with with several Unity games. I don't have the same problem when in VR witch point even more to the graphics engine rather then the game it self.

There are hundreds of game breaking bugs that exist that we can blame subnautica for, these performance isssue are just one of them. So we can blame Subnautica. Plus I play other games that use Unity that do not turn into stuttering messes periodically, so again I can blame subnautica.

[Bimdur]

Opprinnelig skrevet av margalus:

Opprinnelig skrevet av Bimdurian:

Thing it that this is a normal behaviour from a Unity engine game and not a Subnautica problem so you can't blame Subnautica for bugs.

I'm on a Ryzen 7 1800X with a TGX 1080 Ti with fresh installed Windows 10. Not a single program except the game, not even anti virus soft ware and have the exact same problem with with several Unity games. I don't have the same problem when in VR witch point even more to the graphics engine rather then the game it self.

There are hundreds of game breaking bugs that exist that we can blame subnautica for, these performance isssue are just one of them. So we can blame Subnautica. Plus I play other games that use Unity that do not turn into stuttering messes periodically, so again I can blame subnautica.

Pleas can you mention one game on Unity that haven't rewritten part on the engine and don't shutter? The shutter is a well known Unity problem and there is guides out there how to avoid some and what's needed to be rewritten. But in the end the engine have problem.

To be 100% clear I mean games with proper graphics and not some converted mobile game.

But yes, you are right there is some bug in the game that Subnautica devs can't blame the engine for.

[DeFragged]

Opprinnelig skrevet av BACWRDS:

Okay so your worrying me with this, im about to buy the game and I see this convo. Your having lag issues with a gtx 1080 and I have a gtx 1060 3gb with a ryzen 3. Am I ♥♥♥♥♥♥ if I buy this game?

My computer is a 3-year old frankenbuild that I haven't formatted in ages because it's also my work computer and I CBA to reinstall and log in to my 2 dozen different work tool accounts again. It could be just my system. But it IS possible to get it running smoothly (mostly).

Besides the 2 hour refund window, you can always come here if you find the game starting to lose performance.

I can tell you one thing: I'm glad I started playing on a friday evening. I literally couldn't stop until Sunday. It had me by the goonies, and I haven't played a game that captivated me so much since my first Elder Scrolls game.

[Redscale83]

If you have Windows 10 and a G-Sync monitor make sure you have not enabled G-Sync in Windowed mode.

Apparently the last Windows 10 update forces triple buffering on desktop and this causes stuttering if G-Sync is used in windowed/borderless window games.

[Gamer Sweat Cannery Ltd]

Opprinnelig skrevet av MJ Ski:

Could be a misbehaving driver or other programm. Use "DPC Latency Checker" to find the culprit. Close or disable one program after another and see whether spikes in DPC Latency Checker disappear.
I had an overclocker tuning program that caused such brief stutter every couple of seconds. Had to uninstall it to make it go away.

Giving this a go. I normally don't have too many programs running but will see what helps. What is a good latency to shoot for?

EDIT: Okay just ran this, although my stutter was still there and most of the time my latency was very low but it did jump up to 1000-2000 a couple times and it was the graphics driver. However, generally it was pretty low.

Going to try turning Turbo State from CPU off and see what happens, I read somewhere that this can cause stutter in some games.

EDIT 2: Turning off Turbo state and EIST in BIOS didn't seem to help :'(

[FirstandLastBAC]

Opprinnelig skrevet av margalus:

Opprinnelig skrevet av BACWRDS:

Okay so your worrying me with this, im about to buy the game and I see this convo. Your having lag issues with a gtx 1080 and I have a gtx 1060 3gb with a ryzen 3. Am I ♥♥♥♥♥♥ if I buy this game?

Saying you are ♥♥♥♥♥♥ is a bit melodramatic. This game has more bugs than any other game released, performance bugs included. But it's a good game nonetheless. With your 1060 you may play smoothly at 120fps for an hour, then hit a stuttering mess for a minute where the fps are down into the teens or lower. Then right back up to a nice smooth 120fps again... You can never tell when or where it will happen, but it's not enough to ruin the game, just gets annoying.

okay so I have the game now and... its stuttering like crazy, its running at 60fps, but as soon as I start moving it freezes for like 3secs. So now I feel his pain

[Wylie28]

Warman please tell me you had vsync on with that gsync monitor too? I see so many people think g-sync replaces it. It doesnt they are supposed to both be on.

[Ancient]

Opprinnelig skrevet av Wylie28:

Warman please tell me you had vsync on with that gsync monitor too? I see so many people think g-sync replaces it. It doesnt they are supposed to both be on.

This is correct. To properly benefit from a Gsync monitor, users should understand how it works so they know what settings to use. Not understanding the settings or how they work together and just expecting it to always work flawlessly is PEBCAK because the reality is that it can introduce a lot more issues than just sticking with a standard monitor and Vsync (like the Gsync + Fast Vsync microstutter).

I suggest that any Gsync monitor owners read and understand this: https://forums.blurbusters.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=3073