Solution to Stuttering on Radeon GPUs

[drtodd13]

If you have an AMD GPU and are experiencing persistent stutter in Trine 4, I may have discovered a solution for you. I was noticing some stutter that led me to do a CapFrameX analysis of various settings. We're not talking giant, long stutters here, but they are large and frequent enough to be annoying. The stutters are present regardless of what is happening in-game, and seem to be connected to the SSAA setting; the higher SSAA is set to, the more stutters.

The solution? Uncap your framerate and turn on AMD Anti-Lag in Adrenalin.

I came across a comment on a forum suggesting that Anti-Lag fixes the random frametime spikes in this game. I was skeptical since Anti-Lag is not a feature known to fix frametime instability. However, for me, it happens to eliminate 95% of stutters in this case. I don't know how to explain it except as a weird driver quirk.

Most other setting combinations do not resolve the issue. VSync didn't seem to help for me although I didn't exhaustively test it. Regular uncapped (GPU-bound) doesn't work. Framerate limiting with Chill or RTSS doesn't work, even if RTSS is combined with Anti-Lag. The in-game framerate limiter actually does get rid of the big frametime spikes, but its framepacing appears to be poor so you get constant +-1 ms microstutter instead. So if you want smooth gameplay with SSAA enabled, uncapped + Anti-Lag is the way to go. Interested in hearing if this works for someone else.