Micro Stuttering

[Mogsworth]

So thankfully this game has a nice frame-graph in the options menu. I'm running a 1800X@ 4.0GHz and a GTX 1080 OC. This game runs at max settings averages of 34fps @ 4K, 48FPS @ 1800p, and 59FPS @ 1440p. So the framerates are pretty great considering the hardware and the game.

However no matter what resolution I play it at, and regardless of the settings (even at 1440p with a High of 78FPS) I have these concurrent downward spikes of massive lows: 2FPS @ 4K, 18FPS @ 1800p, and 29FPS @ 1440p.

It's clearly Microstuttering, and it's happening ever other 2-3 seconds whenever the camera is moving. It's very jarring, and ruins the gameplay experience for me, as I'm extremely sensative to uneven frametimes and microstutter.

Final Fantasy XV has this issue too, but thankfully there is a fan-made hack that fixes it.

[UbiBaron]

I'm sorry to hear that this is occurring for you.

Would you be able to provide us with a screenshot of the Graph? This will help us to look into this.

I assume you've been through the steps in our PC troubleshooting guide? This can be seen in the guide here[support.ubi.com]

- Ubisoft Support

[Mogsworth]

Originally posted by UbiBaron:

I'm sorry to hear that this is occurring for you.

Would you be able to provide us with a screenshot of the Graph? This will help us to look into this.

I assume you've been through the steps in our PC troubleshooting guide? This can be seen in the guide here[support.ubi.com]

- Ubisoft Support

Yes, I've been tried many of these steps.

Today's session the lows where not nearly as frequent or uniform as yesterdays. That said however: the stuttering was much more erratic (nearly constant) and the frame stability was nearly non existent whenever I panning the camera 360 around my character in a sparsely populated farm area. As the photos show, it was bad on all all resolutions except 1080p (which plays fairly smoothly).


I have taken and uploaded four photos of the game running at 4K, 1880P, 1440P, and 1080P. They are here:

https://steamcommunity.com/id/Fragtaster/screenshots/

As you can see it's suddenly stops at 1080p (or even though it does show the odd drop), but is pretty bad at higher resolutions. The drops are not nearly as low as they where yesterday, but I think you can tell by the graph how bad the frame times are still.

Please look at all four images, and understand that the only thing I was doing at the time was rotating the camera around my character (again, in a sparsely populated area at the begging of the game).

Also, there appears to be no microstuttering during cutscenes just during gameplay.

[Mogsworth]

I've added a 5th screenshot. This one is also the game running at 1080p, however this time I left the game mostly idol with me waling around slowly. I did not rotate the camera the whole time. It felt smooth, but the frame graph clearly shows even some activity when I'm at 1080p and not pushing the camera around.

[UbiBaron]

Thanks for clarifying that and providing the screenshots.

We'll take a look into those and get back to you here.

How long have you had this issue for, you mention it happening with FFXV too and was that before this?

Have you tried any previous driver versions for your GPU?

- Ubisoft Support

[Mogsworth]

Yes, with Final Fantasy XV, Square Enix did a patch in Q3 of 2018 that introduced the microstuttering. They have yet to address the seriousness of the issue, and pretty much everyone who has the steam version of the game has the issue in their game - which is why fans had to devise a work around.

As for AC Odyssey. I've had this issue since I bought the game several weeks ago. I got it during the Steam Summer sale because I love the franchise and had been waiting for all the DLC to release before buying it.

I havent tried any previous version of my video driver yet, although I have played the game with two newer driver revisions thus far.

So far I'm not having stuttering in other games.

[76561198885856812]

Originally posted by Fragtaster:

Yes, with Final Fantasy XV, Square Enix did a patch in Q3 of 2018 that introduced the microstuttering. They have yet to address the seriousness of the issue, and pretty much everyone who has the steam version of the game has the issue in their game - which is why fans had to devise a work around.

As for AC Odyssey. I've had this issue since I bought the game several weeks ago. I got it during the Steam Summer sale because I love the franchise and had been waiting for all the DLC to release before buying it.

I havent tried any previous version of my video driver yet, although I have played the game with two newer driver revisions thus far.

So far I'm not having stuttering in other games.

Ah, I see. It would be worth trying to run the game with the previous GPU driver versions, just for testing purposes. Could you please check if it helps?

- Ubisoft Support

[helldweller]

The game, as great as it is, does suffer from uneven frame-pacing on many systems. I fought with it early on until finding the right combination of settings to deliver a mostly smooth experience. What follows works on both of my gaming rigs so maybe give it a shot.

Set your display to the same refresh-rate as your desired in-game frame-rate. A GTX1080 at 1440p should be able to hold 60fps with some of the more expensive settings turned down a bit, so let’s say 60Hz. Do this in the NV control panel so that your desktop is running at 60Hz. You are going to configure in-games settings to match.

Force vsync on using NVinspector or the NV control panel (you are going to disable it in-game).

Now for the in-game stuff. One thing that’s absolutely critical is to reduce graphics settings enough that your frame-rate does not dip below your refresh rate (excluding the stutters).

Now configure display settings as follows…

Window Mode: Fullscreen
Refresh Rate: 60Hz
VSync: Off
FPS Limit: On
FPS LImit Value: 60

Hope this helps.

[IchigoMait]

All games suffer from this, normally you got the awkward frame pacing (motion jitter) when you had vsync enabled and the fps went below refresh rate, that was around 2013 or something and before.

But later and in most games nowadays, I get it with when I have vsync disabled, especially noticeable in isometric games when the character is moving around as the camera is also moving around. Exclusive or non exclusive mode doesn't fix it. Only standard vsync on fixes it, as you can get it even at 250 fps or at 60fps, lower than 60fps, then you get the obvious stuttering from auto frame skipping that is built into the OS. (tripple buffering on of course, unless you like 2x fps cut from refresh rate)

Mind that you can enable vsync in borderless mode from the game ini files and put it readme only, and if you never go into the game settings, as it will instantly turn vsync off again, and the game would need to be restarted for the vsync to work in borderless/window mode.

Also about nvidia vsync settings, anything related to vsync in nvidia inspector or whatever do not work when using exclusive mode, exclusive mode is apparent when you have long delays when alt+tabbing out of the game and into the game, instead of the instant alt+tabbing when in non exclusive mode.

(no idea if amd has such an issue overall)

If you want a motion jitter free gameplay, turn standard vsync with tripple buffering on at all times. (plus keeping in mind nvidia settings do not apply it on non exclusive game modes, they disabled that on purpose, plus the change they introduced where you have to now keep vsync on.)

Long time ago when I was testing witcher 2 to get rid of tearing, and have instant alt tabbing, and no motion jitter, my fix was to play in window/borderless mode, as windows aero uses frame dropping for any frames that goes above refresh rate, so that fixed the stuttering, aka there was no need for vsync, and not using vsync also fixed the micro stutter when the camera was in motion (different from frame skip stutter), and to boot that I use window/borderless I could now instant tab. But then later a weird motion jitter start cropping up in different games, maybe it was how directx works nowadays or maybe it's because of nvidias new hardware or drivers. And found that by enabling vsync standard, I got my smoothness back, sadly enabling from nvidia drivers vsync didn't do ♥♥♥♥. And I would trade my instant alttab just so I could force from nvidia vsync, and plus then it wouldn't be even needed as the game would have it's own vsync that could be turned on.
The only annoying thing is when Ubisoft decides that they can disable from ingame settings vsync option when not using exclusive fullscreen, even though it works in window/borderless mode, via the game files.

[TitusTurk]

Ohh Mann! I'm not alone. I get the micro stuttering for FFXV I finished the game because FFXV has really little micro stuttering but ac odyssey... I will cry man I have rx 5600xt r5 3600x 16 GB ram but every 20-25 Second I'm getting micro stuttering I tried everything but still no solving... Did u solve this problem?

[IchigoMait]

Originally posted by TitusTurk:

Ohh Mann! I'm not alone. I get the micro stuttering for FFXV I finished the game because FFXV has really little micro stuttering but ac odyssey... I will cry man I have rx 5600xt r5 3600x 16 GB ram but every 20-25 Second I'm getting micro stuttering I tried everything but still no solving... Did u solve this problem?

Try vsync on or off, try any of those with borderless or fullscreen, if those 4 combinations don't change anything, try lowering cpu priority for the game exe, permanently you can do that with processlasso.

Before trying any of those try seeing if even at minimum settings that sort of stutter persists, could be maybe just running out of video memory, just ram is fine what you have.

[Mogsworth]

Originally posted by TitusTurk:

Ohh Mann! I'm not alone. I get the micro stuttering for FFXV I finished the game because FFXV has really little micro stuttering but ac odyssey... I will cry man I have rx 5600xt r5 3600x 16 GB ram but every 20-25 Second I'm getting micro stuttering I tried everything but still no solving... Did u solve this problem?

Yeah, I think the micro-stuttering in some games (especially AC Odyssey) was especially bad on some of the last few generations of higher core-count Ryzen processors. I recently upgraded to a Ryzen 5950x, and the stuttering isn't nearly as bad now. I think the stuttering might be worsened as a result of the older Ryzen processors having a latency penalty as a result of it having to communicate between the separate CPU chiplets over the Infinity Fabric.

Ryzen 5xxx cpus by contrast have a newer unified architecture where all the cores are grouped together (instead of two groups). This eliminates most the latency because the Infinity Fabric isn't needed to communicate between the cores the same way, and as a result I've noticed some games that had alot of stuttering on my old 1800x and 3900x, run alot smoother.

A few games that had stuttering because of bad coding (like FFXV) still don't run perfectly - but many titles such as The Evil Within 2 and AC Odyssey run great now for me! :)

[Ubi-Borealis]

Hey there guys! Thanks for continuing to update this thread with your suggestions.

TitusTurk - Did any of IchigoMait's suggestions help at all? If not, please don't hesitate to update this thread.

- Ubisoft Support