Unplayable Stuttering, Maxed out cpu usage.

[nanivision]

I just purchased no mans sky, and the game is pretty unplayable. It's constantly stuttering, huge frame drops, which I'm guessing is related to the 100% CPU usage. It will hover around 30-50% then constantly spike to 100% causing the game to freeze for a second or two before resuming. I've read for hours and hours on what I can do to fix this. I've tried about every combination of the cpu thread limit fixes, reinstalling multiple times, running everything on minimum, Vysnc on/off. I have a gsync monitor as well. I've tried the background process fix that was posted here. All my temps are icy as i have full water cooling for my cpu and my gpu. My drivers are all updated. Windows and NVIDIA. Latest DirectX. Also no mods installed. Full vanilla base game. How has this not been addressed. I've seen so many posts about this. The game is completely unplayable.
My Specs:
Evo 980 M.2
32gb ddr4
i5 8600k coffee lake
GIGABYTE 2080ti Watercooled
1000W Evga gold cert PSU

I have no issues running any game but this one. Its been extremely frustrating.

[Aranea]

bigbadbedwetter eredeti hozzászólása:

What are your system specs? Good to hear that Fidelityfx helped. As Musashi mentions, you may be better off using DLSS if your card supports it. GTX cards like my GTX 1060 6GB do not support DLSS. It looks like only RTX cards support DLSS.

DLSS was never an option for me, I play with a GTX 750 Ti and an i5 3570 processor.
But even if it's not a 'good' system, it's still above minimum requirements for NMS and the game was smooth for me before (one of the last patches).

FidelityFX helps, but is a rather bad compromise. It causes flickering and as my monitor got an unusual resolution (16:10) I can't really find a lower resolution in the game settings, that doesn't distort the image -.-.

[Alcantara_81]

Teo eredeti hozzászólása:

@zyom
You also have a 4 thread CPU unfortunately.

I managed to get the game to run and it is running very smoothly on my i7-7500U notebook, I was running Windows 10 LTSB (v.2016), sometimes the lack of an update for both software and hardware may have been the cause of this "problem", now it is running smooth on Windows 11, with all drivers and updates up to date.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/7XqnTY9ipm591wkq7

[Malferellon]

Teo eredeti hozzászólása:

Hello again.
So I have been debugging the issue and it seems like I have found an explanation that is very likely.
The issue is that the game needs 8 threads to operate properly. The I5 I am using and other people reporting the same issue has only 6 threads.

Nope. My system has 12 physical cores, Hyper-Threaded, so 24 vCPU's. If the game isn't allocating threads to these cores, that's on them, but the presence of 8+ cores doesn't affect the stuttering issue. However, when I play, I do see activity on all vCPU's, about 40% peak, usually around the 30% avg. 48 GB system RAM, GTX 1660 Ti video board w/ 6GB VRAM. There's plenty of resources available. And it still occasionally stutters, very badly. I've watched CPU/RAM usage while it's stuttering so badly, and they don't differ from when it's running smoothly. One very confounding variable is that I'm playing on Linux, so some Windows system calls have to be translated (with Proton). When it's good, it plays better than Windows, but when it's not good, it's hard to pin down why.

Other Things I've Noticed:
A. When I can trigger the stuttering with an alt-tab, or sometimes when I launch the game from scratch, the amount of stutter can vary. Sometimes it's around 2 FPS, which is playable enough that I can find my ship, save, and then exit the game without dying. (Very valuable in Permadeath). Sometimes, it's more like 1 second per frame, which is god-awfully difficult.
2. When it's stuttering, it's not just video. Input is lagged, all my life support features drain slower, interactions with NPC's are slower, etc.
IV. Sometimes, changing graphics settings initiates the stutter too, but only UP. I've never reduced my graphics settings and initiated a stutter. However, before these issues started, I was able to play with all settings at their highest (Ultra, 16, etc) with an adequate 40 -50 FPS. (Not great, but not horrible). The point is that my system is fully capable of handling this level of performance.

Unrelated Odd Things about Playing on Linux:
1. With an nvidia video board, Intel Xeon CPU's, and no AMD hardware anywhere, I can still enable the AMD FidelityFX. It slows the game down.
2. Without any RTX support, I can still enable DLSS/DLAA. It slows the game down.
3. Linux/KDE customizations allow windows to "wobble" and have all kinds of 3D effects that were popular in the early 2000's (and I still like them). This DOESN'T slow the game down (much). Running NMS in a window (vs. full screen) slows the game down a little bit, but making it "wobble" and do all kinds of eye-candy tricks doesn't seem to have any additional effect.

In THAT vein, I may configure NMS to run in a window to see if I get any different behavior out of it. Either way, it's looking a LOT like there is just a bug in the game that is either using drivers incorrectly or is not optimizing itself properly. If that's the case, there's no amount of tinkering with thread priorities, swap management, or tuning that we players can do to help to resolve this issue.

[Teo]

Malferellon eredeti hozzászólása:

Teo eredeti hozzászólása:

Hello again.
So I have been debugging the issue and it seems like I have found an explanation that is very likely.
The issue is that the game needs 8 threads to operate properly. The I5 I am using and other people reporting the same issue has only 6 threads.

Nope. My system has 12 physical cores, Hyper-Threaded, so 24 vCPU's. If the game isn't allocating threads to these cores, that's on them, but the presence of 8+ cores doesn't affect the stuttering issue. However, when I play, I do see activity on all vCPU's, about 40% peak, usually around the 30% avg. 48 GB system RAM, GTX 1660 Ti video board w/ 6GB VRAM. There's plenty of resources available. And it still occasionally stutters, very badly. I've watched CPU/RAM usage while it's stuttering so badly, and they don't differ from when it's running smoothly. One very confounding variable is that I'm playing on Linux, so some Windows system calls have to be translated (with Proton). When it's good, it plays better than Windows, but when it's not good, it's hard to pin down why.

Other Things I've Noticed:
A. When I can trigger the stuttering with an alt-tab, or sometimes when I launch the game from scratch, the amount of stutter can vary. Sometimes it's around 2 FPS, which is playable enough that I can find my ship, save, and then exit the game without dying. (Very valuable in Permadeath). Sometimes, it's more like 1 second per frame, which is god-awfully difficult.
2. When it's stuttering, it's not just video. Input is lagged, all my life support features drain slower, interactions with NPC's are slower, etc.
IV. Sometimes, changing graphics settings initiates the stutter too, but only UP. I've never reduced my graphics settings and initiated a stutter. However, before these issues started, I was able to play with all settings at their highest (Ultra, 16, etc) with an adequate 40 -50 FPS. (Not great, but not horrible). The point is that my system is fully capable of handling this level of performance.

Unrelated Odd Things about Playing on Linux:
1. With an nvidia video board, Intel Xeon CPU's, and no AMD hardware anywhere, I can still enable the AMD FidelityFX. It slows the game down.
2. Without any RTX support, I can still enable DLSS/DLAA. It slows the game down.
3. Linux/KDE customizations allow windows to "wobble" and have all kinds of 3D effects that were popular in the early 2000's (and I still like them). This DOESN'T slow the game down (much). Running NMS in a window (vs. full screen) slows the game down a little bit, but making it "wobble" and do all kinds of eye-candy tricks doesn't seem to have any additional effect.

In THAT vein, I may configure NMS to run in a window to see if I get any different behavior out of it. Either way, it's looking a LOT like there is just a bug in the game that is either using drivers incorrectly or is not optimizing itself properly. If that's the case, there's no amount of tinkering with thread priorities, swap management, or tuning that we players can do to help to resolve this issue.

I would suggest trying the drivers that were mentioned in this thread.
I ran into people reporting problems with stuttering despite having beefy enough CPUs and apparently the "Drivers" resolved the issue.

I am not asking you to run them to play the game constantly, but at least try and report back so we can narrow down the issue.

Also what system are you currently using? Are you playing on Linux only?
If so, then it is very difficult to correlate the issues that you have with the issues that we have.

There is already a report above you running Windows 11 with completely different results.

It is very hard to speculate at this point without concrete data.

[Malferellon]

Teo eredeti hozzászólása:

I would suggest trying the drivers that were mentioned in this thread.
I ran into people reporting problems with stuttering despite having beefy enough CPUs and apparently the "Drivers" resolved the issue.

Easier said than done. In Windows, you can download the specific driver you want to use from nvidia, remove the existing one, install the one you want to use, and Bob's your uncle. Linux is a different animal though. Graphics drivers, especially nvidia drivers, are a little more complicated. If I start having more serious problems, I may switch to the older driver mentioned in earlier responses, but FOR NOW, it's more trouble to switch the drivers than it is to just live with the bugginess of the existing one. And if I do, I'll reply with my results. :)

Teo eredeti hozzászólása:

Also what system are you currently using? Are you playing on Linux only?
If so, then it is very difficult to correlate the issues that you have with the issues that we have.

A very foolish person once said, "Stand back; I built this $#!t myself!" Right before he said, "Hold my beer, and watch this!"
Hardware:

• CPU - 2x Xeon E5-2440 (6x2 physical cores, Hyper-Threading = 24 vCPU's)
  
• 48 GB system RAM
  
• Asus-made GTX 1660 Ti, driver 470.103.1
  
• Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, KDE 5.18, kernel 5.4.0

Teo eredeti hozzászólása:

There is already a report above you running Windows 11 with completely different results.

It is very hard to speculate at this point without concrete data.

You're absolutely right, running it in Linux definitely is different from what most people are doing, but more information is more gooder. Sometimes, edge-case information is what turns a hunch into certainty.

[Isthatyoudave?]

Its all just the game engine incorrectly using and detecting hardware. They still havn't even bothered looking into it. The game runs the same stuttery mess on every system that I have seen it run on. Although they add filler content to make it look like they are still working on the game it basically has been dumped years ago. The texture system is broken still, the lod system is broken still and the render engine is broken still.

Yet this game is still on sale to fund their next broken games.

[ceruleanix]

On the same boat here. This has been driving insane for almost a year now.
The countless times i had to restart my game because it would decide to make my GPU commit sudoku, and get my frames to a painstakingly slow 20 (or less) FPS...
I have a Ryzen 5600G and a RX 580 4GB. All graphical settings suffer from this problem, ESPECIALLY on planets. Although, to be fair, at lower ones the game becomes slightly more playable.

[Teo]

ceruleanix eredeti hozzászólása:

On the same boat here. This has been driving insane for almost a year now.
The countless times i had to restart my game because it would decide to make my GPU commit sudoku, and get my frames to a painstakingly slow 20 (or less) FPS...
I have a Ryzen 5600G and a RX 580 4GB. All graphical settings suffer from this problem, ESPECIALLY on planets. Although, to be fair, at lower ones the game becomes slightly more playable.

Hi.
Thanks for chipping in. Hopefully this thread will become large enough that Hello Games will pay attention to this problem.

I gave up all hopes of making sense of this as none of the theories made by me or others seem to apply to all cases, they are just inconsistent.

What I would like to ask everyone involved in this thread, who is still subscribed and reads this, or is a newcomer that has just read it and wants it resolved, to write a ticket to hello games support.

I prepared a template for you, that you can copy and edit appropriately to make the process as fast as possible.
The more reports, the higher the chance this will get fixed

You can submit a ticket here:
https://hellogames.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/requests/new?ticket_form_id=167605

Paste the text and edit it, then quickly fill out the combo fields:

How has this issue affected your gameplay?
It is very hard to play with this issue present

Issue type
Low Performance

What were you doing?
On foot

Are files needed by Hello Games?
No

Fill out the rest based on you specific use case.

The message content:

Hello.
After trying all the options mentioned in:
https://hellogames.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002807229-My-frame-rate-is-bad-on-PC

and going through numerous forum threads, reporting performance problems, mainly on Reddit and Steam, I found no solution to the problem I am encountering and from my observation and the threads I have read, the the game seems to be suffering from some kind of optimization problem related to certain types of CPUs.

To describe the problem further:
The game is stuttering and freezing on planets, whenever I am moving or looking around (Whenever new assets are being loaded in) causing a massive divergence between the min / max frame time, making the game almost unplayable.
When no assets are loaded in, the frame rate is stable and I encounter no lag. This is especially noticeable on planets. Sometimes this also happens in space.
I tried all the possible combinations of graphics settings and appropriately benchmarked every option. The settings did not seem to affect this problem.

There is a collection of people suffering from the same problem. The largest thread can be found on the following link:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/275850/discussions/1/3279194170708092573/?tscn=1654613682
(There are many threads such as this one, but this currently has the largest collection of different reports)

The most notable victims are people who own the i5 8000s (8th gen) CPU series
We also managed to benchmark the game on less powerful hardware, some which is years older,(Like the i7 4000s (4th gen CPUs)) on which this problem wasn't observed, despite the hardware according to the benchmarks being weaker.

Some people report better framerate when they change windows CPU scheduling to prefer background processes.

Some people claim they don't suffer from this problem on a very specific set of Nvidia drivers: 446.14

Some people report they started having this issues ever since the Vulcan update.

What is causing these issues and how to resolve them is still up to speculation, therefore we would like to ask for support and to analyze this problem some of us are experiencing.

Thanks in advance.
Best regards.

[Aranea]

Funnily enough I can meanwhile only play the game if I have FidelityFX enabled. Even though I use an Nvidia graphics card.
After the last patch settings were reset and I immediately had very low fps again.
Only enabling FidelityFX again resolved the problem.
I really hope getting new rig soon solves the problem!

Edit: as far as I can tell only people using Nvidia cards are affected?!

[アスリ]

I submitted a ticket. This game started out fun but eventually became annoying now with how much I have to restart the game just to make it playable once it stutters, but lately it still persists especially in Leviathan Expedition where it almost killed me several times, and restarting the game won't fix it.

I've heard this problem started out since expedition 7 update or since they've switch out graphics API according to some other post I've seen. Do they even care? I don't know how they've handled performance issues before, if they did, how long it took them to do so, etc.

It's probably better to let people know about the ticket submission page in general discussions since there's more people there and it'll have better chances of having more tickets submitted.

[ceruleanix]

Teo eredeti hozzászólása:

ceruleanix eredeti hozzászólása:

On the same boat here. This has been driving insane for almost a year now.
The countless times i had to restart my game because it would decide to make my GPU commit sudoku, and get my frames to a painstakingly slow 20 (or less) FPS...
I have a Ryzen 5600G and a RX 580 4GB. All graphical settings suffer from this problem, ESPECIALLY on planets. Although, to be fair, at lower ones the game becomes slightly more playable.

Hi.
Thanks for chipping in. Hopefully this thread will become large enough that Hello Games will pay attention to this problem.

I gave up all hopes of making sense of this as none of the theories made by me or others seem to apply to all cases, they are just inconsistent.

What I would like to ask everyone involved in this thread, who is still subscribed and reads this, or is a newcomer that has just read it and wants it resolved, to write a ticket to hello games support.

I prepared a template for you, that you can copy and edit appropriately to make the process as fast as possible.
The more reports, the higher the chance this will get fixed

You can submit a ticket here:
https://hellogames.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/requests/new?ticket_form_id=167605

Paste the text and edit it, then quickly fill out the combo fields:

How has this issue affected your gameplay?
It is very hard to play with this issue present

Issue type
Low Performance

What were you doing?
On foot

Are files needed by Hello Games?
No

Fill out the rest based on you specific use case.

The message content:

Hello.
After trying all the options mentioned in:
https://hellogames.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002807229-My-frame-rate-is-bad-on-PC

and going through numerous forum threads, reporting performance problems, mainly on Reddit and Steam, I found no solution to the problem I am encountering and from my observation and the threads I have read, the the game seems to be suffering from some kind of optimization problem related to certain types of CPUs.

To describe the problem further:
The game is stuttering and freezing on planets, whenever I am moving or looking around (Whenever new assets are being loaded in) causing a massive divergence between the min / max frame time, making the game almost unplayable.
When no assets are loaded in, the frame rate is stable and I encounter no lag. This is especially noticeable on planets. Sometimes this also happens in space.
I tried all the possible combinations of graphics settings and appropriately benchmarked every option. The settings did not seem to affect this problem.

There is a collection of people suffering from the same problem. The largest thread can be found on the following link:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/275850/discussions/1/3279194170708092573/?tscn=1654613682
(There are many threads such as this one, but this currently has the largest collection of different reports)

The most notable victims are people who own the i5 8000s (8th gen) CPU series
We also managed to benchmark the game on less powerful hardware, some which is years older,(Like the i7 4000s (4th gen CPUs)) on which this problem wasn't observed, despite the hardware according to the benchmarks being weaker.

Some people report better framerate when they change windows CPU scheduling to prefer background processes.

Some people claim they don't suffer from this problem on a very specific set of Nvidia drivers: 446.14

Some people report they started having this issues ever since the Vulcan update.

What is causing these issues and how to resolve them is still up to speculation, therefore we would like to ask for support and to analyze this problem some of us are experiencing.

Thanks in advance.
Best regards.

Thank you so much for the response, but i should have specified that this was MOSTLY (there is still some stuttering, sometimes framerate goes to 20 until i turn off and on my monitor) a proton issue. (I also had already reported this issue on the HG zendesk)
protondb.com suggest setting the windows version to 7 through winecfg, to make multiplayer work.
But i found out that:
A) HG quietly fixed this issue in the past, now Multiplayer works of the win setting
B) Newer proton releases, especially experimental, have fixed this long ago.
Or maybe just both.
How is this relevant?
Well the win7 setting absolutely DECIMATES your performance, especially on planets.
I also found out that installing a bunch of vulkan/mesa (the linux FOSS AMD driver) helped quite a bit, like vulkan-validation-layers and some *devel stuff.

So, please, if you're on linux, stop torturing yourself; use proton experimental with win10 in winecfg.

[dj2max]

Bought the game 3 days ago just to find out it stutters.1060 6gb i5 7400 tried everything.
Thank you everyone for sharing informations i reported my problem to hg .Dont give up let them hear us.

[abruzzi8383]

Teo eredeti hozzászólása:

bigbadbedwetter eredeti hozzászólása:

Of course. I did say "used to do..."

IIRC, editing numhigh/lowthreads stopped working early 2021 with one of the updates as far as what I remember seeing in NMS comments on Reddit and Steam forums when researching who was the first to post something about the processor scheduling fix. So, it looks like it has been more than a year since that old fix stopped reducing stutters.

Either ways, some of us are colossally screwed.
I used to play this on launch on my old computer that had an FX 6300 and a Gtx 760 with 2GB of VRAM and I did not experience any of these issues.

Considering I have a system right now that is arguably more than twice as fast and the performance is even worse, then I have a feeling that waiting for a patch is just overly optimistic.

I will have to shelve this and buy a new hardware as soon as it comes out. I am starting to regret that I haven't bought this on PS5.

My Desktop :
AMD Ryzen 9 5900X 12-Core Processo, 3.70 GHz
32.0 GB
Nvidia RTX 3070ti ... latest driver version
2TB SSD
Win11 Home 64 bit
Last edited by Musashi; 2 minute

You have a Zen 3 CPU and a pretty beefy one. The fact that you don't have issues seems to be consistent with some of the benchmarks I watched.
Your CPU is just "Brute forcing" through the optimization.

Seems like the only fix is having an overspecced build...

And I have similiar experience about hardwares. Because my brother have I5 3400, 8gb RAM and Geforce 770 GTX 2 GB (60 FPS in NMS without any FPS scratches), I bought this game. I have the same processor, but 16 GB RAM and 980GTX TI 4 GB. So I have about 50% better machine. And have FPS scratches. So I don't know where exactly is the problem. For sure game is not good optimize like other, but...

Someone told that it's old processors problem. But my brother still play without any problems (same proccessor, less RAM and oldest graphic card).

My procesor running 40% when I am playing and have 40 degrees temperature...

[bigbadbedwetter]

Since your cpu is only at 40% it sounds like NMS may not be using your GTX 980, but rather your cpu's integrated graphics. Post the contents of TKGRAPHICSSETTINGS in your NMS game folder which will be something like, but maybe not the C:...

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\No Man's Sky\Binaries\SETTINGS

It should say in that file what NMS is using for graphics. If NMS is using integrated graphics instead of your 980, the following post might help.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/275850/discussions/1/1696040635908768557/#c1696043806559140863

[recurvedshedua]

Same issue here, while I haven't checked the performance monitor, this stuttering is absolutely maddening. About to wrap it up now that expedition is finished which is sad because I'm new to the game. Game is fun but stuttering is headache inducing. Run locked at 60fps then freeze up when the camera is turned. It is like being a gamer in the 90's and loading game assets from a 5400 RPM 5.25 inch platter disk.

9700K / RTX 3070 / 2x 16GB DDR4 / 2x M2 drives (1 = OS / 1 = games) / Windows 11

If I land on a planet and start a fight with sentinels, games turns into a slideshow. Playing at 4k resolution DLSS to ultra performance which I believe downscales to 1080. New to 3000 series nvidia but as I understand it DLSS uses RTX cores and should be faster running DLSS to 1080 than running without DLSS at 1080 res instead of 4k. Plus the interface looks clearer at native res.

A 6 year old game at 1080 shouldn't be running this way on this hardware. Dropped from ULTRA to HIGH, now dropped to ENHANCED preset and the HUD has potato vibes now. Game's own notes says ENHANCED textures uses 4GB VRAM. Apparently RTX 3070 8GB VRAM not enough? Are we talking memory leaks? Are we talking bugged loading / unloading of game assets? Still stuttering, or better described as micro-freezes. The game totally freezes up and then un-freezes.

Never seen this kind of stuttering on any other game in my library. Since I have a fresh install of the game all I did thus far is delete the NMS shadercache per a HG zendesk article about severe graphical issues. NMS seems to use it's own shader caching instead of the nvidia driver cache folders, because I cannot find any sizable shader files in the nvidia dirs after playing. Also using updated 516 nvidia driver and went through the trouble of updating to a slightly newer 516 version with no change. Let's be honest this is a 6 years old game I highly doubt a magic fix is going to show up in a changelog to an nvidia driver. The industry has moved on.

Appreciate the thread details and investigations, but as another user mentioned, it makes no sense in that one case of changing an OS processor scheduler to background tasks will do anything. That is setting typically for Server OS since server runs many background services, AD, DNS, DHCP, RRAS, IIS, SQL, etc, and no foreground activity. (typically nobody is logged in to a server during production hours) The setting itself (in my opinion) is for servers that are running too much load for their resources. It will set preference to the background task and anyone doing maintenance, reporting, troubleshooting will have to wait for free resources to do their business. I've been in the field long enough to eat my words every week seeing the unbelievable though.

In the meantime I'll try to set planet details to low which was mentioned in this thread as a notable setting. (thanks for that research!) The most disheartening piece is the issue appears to be ignored and not acknowledged at all and therefore will probably go unnoticed. (seems to be an issue from at least 6 months ago according to some folks) Saying potato PC to any PC that is post-2016 when the game was launched is a worthless response.