Repetitive micro stuttering

[Philly]

I have found out both here at Steam and on Google that some users have problems with a certain stuttering while playing, whereby this occurs mainly when saving the game or moving the camera.

I, on the other hand, have the problem that the game seems to pause very briefly every few seconds and then continues to "jump" as if it were reloading for a moment. Does anyone else have a similar problem or is there a known solution?

My system is not the best, but it should be able to run the game:
AMD FX 6300
GTX 1050 Ti
8 GB RAM

[Marlock]

microstuttering is frequently due to on-the-fly shader compilation taking a bit too long and causing noticeable delay during a scene

if you enable steam's precompiled shader cache (there is a way in steam settings), it might eliminate this (at the cost of extra downloaded files)... on Linux, with Vulkan, there are ways to enable local shader caching so the microstutter won't reappear for scenes that were already displayed once (they get compiled locally so no download, and stired for reuse between sessions), but I'm not sure if that's also an option for Windows and with DirectX.

[Philly]

Thank you very much for the hint. However, Shader Pre-Cahing was already enabled in my Steam settings.

I don't know if there is an option in Windows to enable local shader caching in connection with Vulkan. Unfortunately I am not familiar with it.

[Marlock]

try erasing the current shader pre-caching then... and maybe disabling it...

sometimes the cache is broken and makes things worse or needs recompiling on-the-fly...


as for vulkan caching, i don't know if TPH uses vulkan on windows... more likely directx, but maybe... even less likely opengl, but still possible... after figuring out which graphics tech is in use for thia game, then maybe some form of caching can be used, but it will depend on which

[gazzygamer]

Originally posted by Marlock:

try erasing the current shader pre-caching then... and maybe disabling it...

sometimes the cache is broken and makes things worse or needs recompiling on-the-fly...


as for vulkan caching, i don't know if TPH uses vulkan on windows... more likely directx, but maybe... even less likely opengl, but still possible... after figuring out which graphics tech is in use for thia game, then maybe some form of caching can be used, but it will depend on which

it uses directx 11

[Philly]

I have disabled shader pre-chaching on Steam - unfortunately without success.

How can I change the corresponding settings in DirectX?

[Marlock]

Sorry I can't be of more help but Microsoft licensed DirectX in a way that it can't be brought to Linux directly, so I don't use it... Well, sort of yes, via Wine or Steam's Proton compatibility layer which we use to run windows exclusive games on Linux now, but then everything is managed differently.

I don't even know if an option for caching exists for any version of DirectX, so you'll have to do some digging to find out if that is possible with DX11 and how to use it... I have little hope for such an option to exist on DX11 because it's an older tech than Vulkan and DX12, but maybe.

In any case I would recommend you to try reenabling Steam's pre-caching to see if a re-downloaded shader cache behaves any better...

...and you definitely should open a ticket with Sega user support for this issue, like this:
https://support.sega.co.uk/hc/en-us/articles/360000318858-Encountered-a-bug#text


Maybe having a look at their tech support topics will yield some useful hints to fix the issue too (I didn't look through the entire list but glancing at it some topics may be worth reading):
https://support.sega.co.uk/hc/en-us/sections/360000102378-Technical-Information


ps:
One other thing you can try is, of course, running linux on your machine to see if the game behaves better there on the same hardware... I'm always cautious not to bring this up as a first solution because people shouldn't need to change the entire OS they use to solve a specific issue with one software, but who knows, maybe it works better for this game and also fits well for your other uses.

In any case, it's entirely free of charge and you can install and run it from a separate disk so no need to loose what you already have. Only some patience is needed to learn how to get it going the first time, but it is now actually much easier than formatting the PC to reinstall windows from scratch if you've ever done that (I used to, until win7 started nagging me for win10 upgrades).

[Z.Ibrahimovic]

Can you reproduce that it get's more difficult late game to place items due to the stuttering?
That it get's more easy to place them when you pause or slow down gamespeed?
That the stutters occur uppon ingame daychange?

This is already an issue since gamelaunch and is due to the chosen gameengine and it's settings done by the team. You cannot solve this. The only thing that helps calculations being done in a more efficient way is to make sure that you RAM runs on the correct timings and speed. Check if you can enable XMP matching your RAM or find out yours and force it in the BIOS.

[-TcR-darkpatate]

Hey. I had this too. I resolved it by changing the frequency of the save in the settings menu.
And now it's a real pleasure to play!

[NihlusGreen]

Do you get this stuttering when the game is calculating the monthly profit / loss statement? Despite a fairly decent PC, Unity seems to do this quite often.

[IndianaJones]

Originally posted by Philly:

I have found out both here at Steam and on Google that some users have problems with a certain stuttering while playing, whereby this occurs mainly when saving the game or moving the camera.

I, on the other hand, have the problem that the game seems to pause very briefly every few seconds and then continues to "jump" as if it were reloading for a moment. Does anyone else have a similar problem or is there a known solution?

My system is not the best, but it should be able to run the game:
AMD FX 6300
GTX 1050 Ti
8 GB RAM

I was going to ask if they fixed the performance issues, I guess not, noone cares. :D

In my case I noticed significant stuttering around patch 1.16 and 1.17. It seems they changed something in the game engine / main game loop during the 'optimization' process.
I stopped playing since then. I played in this game around 80 hours before, and it did not stutter, apart the obvious 'pause' when saving game progress (due to game being mainly single threaded).

If this $hit would happen right away I would refund the game, that's all. I guess Devs don't care about it since there is no making money in fixing performance bugs. Also I read somewhere they were taken over by bigger company, probably to work on diffrent project.

The take away from this is to avoid Unity Engine based games. I guess they could easily use Unreal Engine, but they decided to go with this Unity crap.

Fool me once...

[Marlock]

They weren't "taken over" exactly...

SEGA was a partner since before the game was released, so much so that SEGA's website is used for support services.

What changed midway was SEGA purchasing the rights over the game entirely, so it's their decision to make TPH2 or any spin-offsn etc.

Unity can be used for heavier games if the devs are careful, but it seems like what hits TPH performance-wise isn't all too rare with this game engine and fixing it *might* require huge reworks...

I'm not saying this isn't dissapointing or that they're not responsible for it, but it might have understandable reasons and might be an unreasonable effort to actually fix some of it.

The saving pause looks like a plain ludicrous issue though... there's gotta be a way to make saving assync with the main loop, or to do part of the process in advance and keep it cached, ...