Weird game performance behavior noticed (frametime / fps)

[DEFAULT99]

After a long time i tried squad again to see how the game improved, i noticed that the game gets noticeably better frame pacing when squad is installed on my nvme 4.0 ssd instead of the old crucial mx500 sata ssd. After the game force cleared the directx shader cache (yes i have manually deleted the folder too so i don't get weird graphical bugs), the game micro stutters a bit when a new map loads and after 5 or so minutes (i assume when the shaders are cashed) the game runs remarkably smooth.

I cant believe im the only one getting better performance, nearly everyone i ask complains about bad performance, and i have also observed weird graphical artifacting on nvidia GPUs when dx12 is used ( the graphical artifacts look like when the vram chips are damaged / fried and you get random purple and green huge pixel patterns all over the screen).

Did the last update only benefit AMD builds or is it more luck based like in every OWI game update ?

My PC specs are:

5800x with the PBO 2 auto oc (4,85 Ghz on a single core and 4,6Ghz on all core load)
asus 6700xt dual oc something (an average dual fan card)
32gb 3600MT/s kingston fury renegade dual rank, running in dual chanel
and the game is currently installed on a Kingston KC3000 that gets 7,4-ish GB/s sequential read in crystaldiskmark).
Also AMD SAM ( rebar ) is also enabled.

If anyone else can see a pattern that might be causing all the issues post your ideas here so the devs can finally start fixing the game.

And yes i know they will fix it in 3 weeks, i play the game since alpha v10.

Hope i could help :)

[Bait]

The stutters at the start may be either the game still loading assets (textures, parts of the map etc.) or compiling and writing shaders, not sure. You'll feel it more on an HDD because it's not only slower, Windows is still terrible at managing I/O waiting times, e.g. during HDD seek.

I've noticed a slight improvement in many games when I disabled shader caching altogether in the driver, back in the day. Not sure how's Squad because I've never ran it with shader caching enabled, so I can't be of help. You could try and see if that helps.

Performance in this release is a mixed bag, tho... I myself haven't tried the final release but the PTE ran noticeably better in my rig, both in FPS and frametimes (reflected in Afterburner charts, compared to previous saved monitoring runs). It's not a general rule, tho, and I'm not sure if we've found the issue (OWI surely haven't, they're useless).

The video artifacts in DX12 are a known issue... I mean, known to everyone but OWI, it will take them another 7 years to find out. It has happened since always, but as DX12 is now the default mode more people see it. I'm not sure if we've found the reason either.

My system is nothing similar to yours: i7-11800H, 3070 Mobile, 48GB (16+32) DDR4-3200 dual-channel interleaved, can't remember timings now but it's neither slowest nor fastest, games + Swap file on a 980 Pro, system on a 970 Evo Plus. I've uninstalled the game long ago and only reinstalled for the PTE test months ago, never played the final release.

v3.x to 4.2 PTE was night and day, I easily gained 20-25% performance in most maps, sometimes even reaching my default cap at 90FPS. Artifacts still happened, though not often. Some people reported similar gains, others saw much worse performance.

I have to say, though, that both machine and OS are fine-tuned to the ground, including a full pre-install customization of Windows' install image to remove most of the bloatware.