PSA: Fix for Periodic Freezing

[Mystry]

If you are like me and have had problems with the game CONSTANTLY freezing randomly for anywhere between 2 to 10 seconds, then here is a fix.

This is caused by the game (or more likely, the cancerous invasive DRM) tying up 100% of CPU resources in a short 'burst'. This can be solved by using a CPU limiter.

Step One: Download the program found here: http://mion.faireal.net/BES/
Step Two: Launch Yakuza 0. Good luck with that, by the way.
Step Three: Launch BES. It does not need admin rights.
Step Four: Click the Target button, select Yakuza in the list of processes, then click Limit This in the upper right hand corner. A confirmation box will come up. Click Yes.
Step Five: At the bottom, drag the slider to the LEFT so that the number is -2%. This will force the program to never go above 98% CPU usage, preventing the freeze that happens when it spikes to 100%.
Optional Step Six: Doing this can cause microstutter on older machines. To fix this, close the process selection box, and in the main screen hit Control. Go down to Target Sleep/Awake Cycle, and set it to Awake once in every 40 milliseconds. This will fix microstutter, unless your machine is REALLY old in which case you're screwed.
Step Seven: Tab back into Yakuza and play the game. You must leave BES open and limiting the Yakuza process. Simply close BES when you're done playing.

If this fix worked for you, then please recommend this be stickied until SEGA patches the game so as to not require such workarounds.

[Erebus]

Originally posted by Mystry:

(or more likely, the cancerous invasive DRM)

It's neither invasive nor is it responsible here. The engine is doing all kinds of screwy things in the background, especially the audio middleware.

Don't spread more idiotic rumors if you don't know. For one it just gets more people ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ about things they're not fully informed on, and for two it diverts attention away from the actual culprit and responsible party.

[Mystry]

Originally posted by Erebus:

Originally posted by Mystry:

(or more likely, the cancerous invasive DRM)

It's neither invasive nor is it responsible here. The engine is doing all kinds of screwy things in the background, especially the audio middleware.

Don't spread more idiotic rumors if you don't know. For one it just gets more people ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ about things they're not fully informed on, and for two it diverts attention away from the actual culprit and responsible party.

I've seen this type of freezing MULTIPLE times in other games. In all cases, the only common thing between those games is Denuvo. Denuvo hogs CPU, and if you have an older CPU without much GHz to spare then it causes these freezes.

[Denyal]

hope you don't mind, I added a redirection link to this thread on a bigger thread I made yesterday listing this and other multiple bugs Sega should look to after fixing the hard crashes for some users. https://steamcommunity.com/app/638970/discussions/0/1739964947822856946/

[Erebus]

Originally posted by Mystry:

Originally posted by Erebus:

It's neither invasive nor is it responsible here. The engine is doing all kinds of screwy things in the background, especially the audio middleware.

Don't spread more idiotic rumors if you don't know. For one it just gets more people ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ about things they're not fully informed on, and for two it diverts attention away from the actual culprit and responsible party.

I've seen this type of freezing MULTIPLE times in other games. In all cases, the only common thing between those games is Denuvo. Denuvo hogs CPU, and if you have an older CPU without much GHz to spare then it causes these freezes.

Denuvo barely touches the CPU most the time. You know what does though? Improperly implemented middleware. Improperly implemented SteamAPI. Wonky coding on the base engine. Etc.

[Carl Brutananadilewski]

I would like to know if this helps anyone. I don't get it much at all but get a very occasional hang for about 5-7 seconds, just long enough to make me think the game has crashed but the audio continues while the gameplay halts so it's more like pausing the game than anything else. It seems much more frequent if the game's CPU usage is set above normal. And the only game I've played where Denuvo seemed to be a problem was Assassin's Creed: Origins and even then it was mostly just a bit ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ performance and not debilitating. Honestly, my bigger irritation with the port is not being able to turn off DoF. I have always hated DoF effects.

[Erebus]

Originally posted by Unknown Hinson:

I would like to know if this helps anyone. I don't get it much at all but get a very occasional hang for about 5-7 seconds, just long enough to make me think the game has crashed but the audio continues while the gameplay halts so it's more like pausing the game than anything else. It seems much more frequent if the game's CPU usage is set above normal. And the only game I've played where Denuvo seemed to be a problem was Assassin's Creed: Origins and even then it was mostly just a bit ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ performance and not debilitating. Honestly, my bigger irritation with the port is not being able to turn off DoF. I have always hated DoF effects.

I'm not even sure Origin's is Denuvo's fault. I forget exactly but it's like running 8 compute shader threads or something. If memory serves the engine there is requesting more threads than most people have, much of the time.

I'm not a fan of Denuvo, but most the time it's everything except Denuvo being broken which causes the weird as hell issues. Like FFXV, it's SteamAPI being hammered constantly. Some games also do weird things with input devices polling for gamepads constantly. Don't remember which game but there was one where like having a gamepad vs. no gamepad could massively alter the performance.

Originally posted by Unknown Hinson:

It seems much more frequent if the game's CPU usage is set above normal.

Yeah don't mess with that, it won't help most the time and can just break things more.

[Mystry]

Originally posted by Denyal:

hope you don't mind, I added a redirection link to this thread on a bigger thread I made yesterday listing this and other multiple bugs Sega should look to after fixing the hard crashes for some users. https://steamcommunity.com/app/638970/discussions/0/1739964947822856946/

Sure thing

Originally posted by Unknown Hinson:

I don't get it much at all but get a very occasional hang for about 5-7 seconds, just long enough to make me think the game has crashed but the audio continues while the gameplay halts so it's more like pausing the game than anything else.

That sounds EXACTLY like the type of freeze I experienced which I fixed with this method.

[DeadScreenSky]

Originally posted by Erebus:

I'm not a fan of Denuvo, but most the time it's everything except Denuvo being broken which causes the weird as hell issues. Like FFXV, it's SteamAPI being hammered constantly. Some games also do weird things with input devices polling for gamepads constantly. Don't remember which game but there was one where like having a gamepad vs. no gamepad could massively alter the performance.

You might be thinking of Final Fantasy 13. If I remember correctly a lot of people had to use a fake gamepad driver to get okay performance? (Was never enough for me, unfortunately. What a waste of money.) Funny to hear that even the latest FF has dumb programmer issues.

The only performance issue I've ever personally seen with Denuvo is the occasional long loading when first opening a game. Not an issue with Y0 though. Like you say, it's doing plenty of weird non-Denuvo stuff all by itself.

[Hirate Yurina]

Originally posted by Mystry:

Originally posted by Erebus:

It's neither invasive nor is it responsible here. The engine is doing all kinds of screwy things in the background, especially the audio middleware.

Don't spread more idiotic rumors if you don't know. For one it just gets more people ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ about things they're not fully informed on, and for two it diverts attention away from the actual culprit and responsible party.

I've seen this type of freezing MULTIPLE times in other games. In all cases, the only common thing between those games is Denuvo. Denuvo hogs CPU, and if you have an older CPU without much GHz to spare then it causes these freezes.

same, also the devs actually testing Denuvo hotfixes makes me think it's almost 100% at fault here.

[Carl Brutananadilewski]

I'll have to try it later.

[Johnnie Rico]

IT's odd but Yakuza0.exe isn't appearing in BES' list of running processess for me.

[Kaldaien]

Originally posted by Mystry:

Originally posted by Erebus:

It's neither invasive nor is it responsible here. The engine is doing all kinds of screwy things in the background, especially the audio middleware.

Don't spread more idiotic rumors if you don't know. For one it just gets more people ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ about things they're not fully informed on, and for two it diverts attention away from the actual culprit and responsible party.

I've seen this type of freezing MULTIPLE times in other games. In all cases, the only common thing between those games is Denuvo. Denuvo hogs CPU, and if you have an older CPU without much GHz to spare then it causes these freezes.

No, this is wrong.

Let's start listing the common things in all games, shall we? They all send data from CPU->GPU with a driver in the middle -- a driver, whose overhead is less predictable than Denuvo. They've all got a dedicated thread (sometimes two or three) to buffering audio, this thread has to run at very high priority because it only feeds the sound card a couple of milliseconds worth of data and if the thread is interrupted, BAM, audio stutter.

Most Steam games also have a dedicated connection between the game and the Steam client, sort of like a network link between two running programs on the same computer. If the Steam client goes tits up for some reason, your game also slows down because at least once per-frame the two things are synchronized. Really stupid games on Steam will synchronize themselves with the Steam client 36,000 times a second -- these games have @#$%ing horrible performance characteristics.

[Mystry]

Nothing in this thread is about audio stutter. Try reading next time.

[Kaldaien]

Originally posted by Mystry:

Nothing in this thread is about audio stutter. Try reading next time.

Try to comprehend the discussion you're having next time.

I covered all the bases, audio is just a really good example of why a thread can be up at 99% load and be operating as intended. Any thread that must bias responsiveness over number crunching actually tends to be the thread that gets all available CPU time in a properly operating program. Windows will lower the priority of any CPU-intensive thread relative to I/O threads if they are causing priority inversion.


And you're totally using this software the wrong way. You are supposed to throttle background services whose priority level is high enough to pre-empt the game. You're done the exact opposite of what you need to do to fix any priority issues -- you're basically just creating bottlenecks where none existed.

Don't mind me though, I'm just shilling for Denuvo ... somehow.

[Mystry]

The freezing symptom does not have halted audio. In fact, the audio continues while the rest of the game freezes for several seconds. Audio has -NOTHING- to do with it. I've observed the CPU usage of this and other games, and when they spike to 100% they freeze. The only common element between all of those games is that they had Denuvo.

Frankly I couldn't care less what the specific mechanics of how it froze was, I am only concerned in the fact that it appears to be Denuvo causing it, and that this is how I was able to fix it.

In fact, ALL of you have misread the entire point of this thread. It is not to argue about Denuvo. It's to share a way to fix the intermittant freezing that occurs in the game for many people.