Really poor performance, why?

[Ste]

I've had Elite for many years, in the old days i used to crank the graphics preset to Ultra and never see a hint of a frame drop but for some reason as of right now I'm seeing god awful stutter in certain situations, if i planetary land and maybe fly close to the surface it's awful and yet my fps counter never moves far from 60, maybe 56 lowest but the drag stutter feels like 20-30fps....

I went to a guardian site with a friend and in the srv driving around the ruins was horrific stutter and yet i've been to them many many times in the past with no issues.

My pc has not changed and the specs are PLENTY comfortable to handle this game so i really don't understand why this is happening, all my other games don't act like this only Elite.

I find myself turning graphics settings to High or even Medium these days and still see this bad performance at particular sites. Has the game been updated graphically as of recent?

Pc specs are i5 7600k @ 4.5ghz, 16gb Corsair vengeance 3000mhz ddr4 ram, 1060 geforce 6gb version and windows 10 running off a hynix ssd. Only just formatted and reinstalled windows 10 about 3 weeks ago and spent a day popping back on latest drivers and all windows updates. Seriously i'm out of ideas and getting pretty frustrated that im having to lower my graphics so much in a game i should be fine playing on ultra.

[Komorebi]

The only thing I can think of is your resolution. I had the same problem where it would display regular frames but It felt very slow, I just had to up the resolution as I got a new monitor, maybe the preset isn't the right resolution for your monitor or something, especially with small updates to graphics - nothing that should be a performance changer though - it may have changed the graphics settings. Otherwise i'm not sure

[Dolphin Bottlenose]

Since the Horizons, there were updates to the graphical complexity of this game - it became more demanding in that department. Although, your card looks powerful enough to handle it well.

Maybe re-check the graphical settings of this game - something could have been changed by one of the game updates.

And check that your graphics card cooling is not clogged. It could have been thermal throttling at graphically intensive spots, like stations, planets, and especially planetary installations.

[Syad]

Originally posted by Foz:

reinstalled windows 10 about 3 weeks ago

Check if you are not running the game on an iGPU of that intel. A common issue apparently.

[Ste]

thanks for the replies, now here's something really weird.. I thought it might help if maybe i could record a little video clip with obs to show this drag stutter in action so... i loaded elite, got to the planet surface and flew close to the ground and the stutter was bad, alt tabbed out and loaded obs and hit record video and back to game and suddenly the drag is gone.... i flew around for a minute or so and could not replicate the issue until i tabbed out stopped recording and closed obs then back to game... and low and behold DRRrrraaagggggg stutter is back !?!?! is this game trolling me or something?

[Jambaali ☮]

Very interesting indeed. It seems to be game related ( must be game version related) and the same for the "stuttering".

I'm playing in a Gaming Laptop with 32gb ram an i7 and a 1050ti on Ultra and have no lag at all except for the stutter that happens at random ...

[Ste]

ok after a little more testing here's some info...

i installed some monitoring software to watch what load is on my pc during game play, i flew down to a planet surface and got close to the ground where the stutter seems to be worse, my frame rate (steam fps counter) never skipped from 60 all the time.

My pc load during this was cpu 25% elite - 41% overall load, ram 44% and gpu 50-75% - heat was 53 degrees and fans not spinning, i noticed the fans did kick in now and then to cool over 70.

I then upped all my graphics in game to Ultra everything and ... the load on the pc did not change, the fps in game never left 60 and yet still seeing stutter... i'm stumped. I have spent 20 mins changing random graphics settings to low or off and i see no change.

The best i can describe this stutter is that there is a de-sync somewhere like vsync is holding my fps at 60 but somewhere else something is attempting a higher frame rate which is causing a galloping effect on the game. This is very odd but after testing this i am confident this is a game issue within elite's current coding/design and certainly not my pc which is struggling.
Hope this gets fixed in the near future, i'll just have to cringe any time i fly down to a planet surface :(

[Dolphin Bottlenose]

Originally posted by Foz:

my frame rate (steam fps counter) never skipped from 60 all the time.

Just wondering, can you try the game's built-in frame rate counter? It's activated by Ctrl-F, and it will be visible at the bottom left.

[TheJebblue]

I bought it yesterday, playing on my faithful same system, GTX-660, 1.5 VRAM, 16 MB RAM, runs flawlessly. After 9 hours, it's not fun to me yet but it runs really well.

[Ste]

If anyone can test this out then, fly down to a planet surface, get pretty close to the ground (maybe pop your landing gear down for safety) and just try some hard banked turns and see if the game drags and stutters for you. As of right now i'm running everything on Ultra and one of the worst places i see this horrific stutter is as above. I have altered the quality of the terrain from amazing to very low and this doesn't affect how bad the stutter is at all.
Thanks.

[Planewalker]

Sounds like there's a bottleneck somewhere in your system.

The planet shaders have a spceific setting for "terrain work", might want to try fiddling w that.

[Harbinger]

If you've recently reinstalled Windows 10 make sure you disable Game Mode. It's known to cause FPS slowdowns and hitches.

https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/try-turning-off-windows-10s-game-mode-if-your-games-are-stuttering-or-freezing/

[slingshot5]

Make sure super sampling is on 1.0x Any higher will take a bigger toll on your GPU.

[Ste]

yep thanks for both replies but i've done both already :( the game seems to run fine on ultra anywhere except on a planet landing, like really really close to the floor to the point where the game is rendering all the textures on the floor, i guess its asking a lot of the pc at that point but my main annoyance is that after horizons launched i was perfectly able to do that same task and not see this horrific stutter that's happening today. something has changed and im really confident the problem doesnt lie on my pc but the game.

[Planewalker]

Like i said, there's a setting for "terrain work", you might wanna test that out.

[funkynutz]

I'm running at 2560x1440 on a 6GB 1060...

Disable the Steam overlay (and any other overlay software for now, EVGA precision, MSI afterburner, DXTory etc...).
Set the game to run in a borderless window.
Make sure supersampling is set to 1.
Don't use MSAA.
Don't have ambient occlusion on the highest setting.
Set the terrain work slider to around 25%.

Should be able to max out the rest of the settings.

Turn vsync off in game and the nvidia control panel through the 3d program settings dialogue for the game (nvcpl should be set to use the in game setting by default anyway).

While you're there, set low latency mode to on, and the power management mode to to max performance.

Use the in game settings to cap your framerate at 90 or 120 instead.

If that doesn't work, set the in game setting to unlimited, and use nvcpl to set a limit.