What have YOU done that reduced stutter?

I've been playing since PB. With virtually every release and supposed optimization my stutter has increased. I think I've tried pretty much everything I've read about on the forum, and I'm at my wits end. While the game was super smooth for me at the very beginning - even the beginning of formal launch - it's gotten to the point where I am periodically reducing graphics settings to be able to play somewhat smoothly in my Rift. I just came from a session with stutter so intense I felt ill afterwards, which is a first for me. I'm playing on a decent system - 4.5ghz over clocked quad core CPU and a Titan, all running the game from a SSD. I really don't think it's a hardware issue. It's gotta be software or perhaps network-related (though other online games play just fine and very smoothly).

So.... Back to the question. For those of you who have had success in reducing or eliminating stutter, what did you do?

Any and all suggestions would be appreciated. I've of course seen many of the threads posted already (over the years!) - but I suspect I've missed some tips and tricks along the way, and that some have not been posted previously at all.

Thanks in advance!
 
I feel you, OP. The game ran like butter during beta and at launch, but sometime around 1.2/1.3, something broke. Game began stuttering incredibly bad and for around 5 months I just quit playing. Had a 780ti too, so I knew for a fact that it wasn't on my end. Upgraded to a 980ti and installed ED only to find that 30+fps drops were still waiting for me when I came back. Finally figured out that the built in frame limiter was majorly ****ing up my performance, so I turned it off and used an external program to limit my game to 60fps. The game more or less runs at a very stable 60fps after doing that. However, there's about 20 seconds or so after the game loads up into open play where the game will just have huge FPS drops and then after those 20 seconds are over the game is fine.
 
It's interesting, as I've had the game for just 2 weeks or so. It ran perfectly fine at first. But I'm gradually getting more and more stuttering. Kind of a bummer, but I'm wondering what could be going on over time to make this happen.
 
What is meant buy stutter? Is it the half second pause that happens in 1 to 2 second intervals. I only get that on the xbox.

I get it when I hyperspace on the pc but only a bit at the beggining. I run this game on a 1gb gtx460 and 16gb of 1333 ram, pent i7 2.9 so mabe a down grade will help you guys out lol? Or mabe its internet connection? Its so odd that I have almoste never had stutter (if it is what I thibk it is any way) and so many people with superior machines seem to suffer from it. Though i will say when i put super sampling abouve 1.5 the whole game goes into slomo melt down lol

mabe there is a graphics bottlenec in high performance settings that makes it stutter? Does it stutter when you turn every thing all down to the lowest?
 
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I watched ''The Kings speech'', found it quite inspirational.
I had to rep this!
In fact I really liked the movie ;-)

As for graphics stuttering - it improved (ne0rly vanished) for me with the last game update.
NVIDIA Drivers might play a role, too - I keep them up to date.
And I am on Windows 10 now - but stuttering got better before that...
 
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I did a fresh install into another windows account.
There are lots of options in the graphical settings, no idea what they do, no idea why I felt informed enough to play with them. New account run the hardware detect, set res, set to high preset good to go.

New account and last update client has sorted it to me to much better than bearable. I get the very occasional stutter or audio stuttering in conflict zones or SC near rings now, no where near the every trip to a ring (and sometimes non ring), and almost constant audio breakup in conflict zones.

Some of my stutter was game related (hence improvements in last patch), and the rest my own ignorance.

Simon

Simon
 
What I would have done from the devs side:
- make the game more multi-threaded. Stutter is often an issue because the main thread does "too much", so it saturates one core (often for minutes) while the rest of the CPU is idling.
- load all assets in RAM (at least, provide the option). The whole installation is only 5.6GB, that would even fit together with windows and the application memory in very old computers that have only 8GB..
- in future: use vulcan or DX12.

Overall, the stutter is not an hardware issue as the game has very, very low requirements.

What I've done:
Put the game on an SSD, that helps. Also, with current patchlevel, it isn't bad anymore.

Often people misconfigure their systems, e.g. have a too high memory load with a pagefile enabled.
 
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What I would have done from the devs side:
- make the game more multi-threaded. Stutter is often an issue because the main thread does "too much", so it saturates one core (often for minutes) while the rest of the CPU is idling.
- load all assets in RAM (at least, provide the option). The whole installation is only 5.6GB, that would even fit together with windows and the application memory in very old computers that have only 8GB..
- in future: use vulcan or DX12.

Overall, the stutter is not an hardware issue as the game has very, very low requirements.

What I've done:
Put the game on an SSD, that helps. Also, with current patchlevel, it isn't bad anymore.

Often people misconfigure their systems, e.g. have a too high memory load with a pagefile enabled.

Mine's on a SSD too, never had many problems with stutter, so I reckon you're probably onto something with that.

As to 8GB RAM being 'very old'... That's still the recommended amount for most games currently released.
 
- make the game more multi-threaded. Stutter is often an issue because the main thread does "too much", so it saturates one core (often for minutes) while the rest of the CPU is idling.

You can influence this, to a modest degree.

Open AppConfig.xml and increase the "NumWorkerThreads". You can also increase the stack sizes, which helps performance on some setups.

- load all assets in RAM (at least, provide the option). The whole installation is only 5.6GB, that would even fit together with windows and the application memory in very old computers that have only 8GB.

A lot of assets are generated on the fly and I've noticed very little difference between running the game off an SSD or a RAMdrive...though an SSD is noticeably better than a mechanical drive.

I switched off hyper threading in BIOS.

If disabling hyperthreading noticeably improved anything, chances are that something else was misconfigured. I'd take a look at your power profiles and core parking settings.
 
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What I would have done from the devs side:...

With all due respect there, it is not as simple as that.

Firstly the 'assets' do not exist in the traditional sense, they are created procedurally as needed, so that can't be simply 'loaded into RAM'
Also the engine is currently heavily multi-threaded and can use DX12 features, these are not the causes of the problem

The problems that the core team face are very complex and will require many fixes to work on the wide range of PC hardware.
This will take time to find and resolve but I have faith that the team are on the right path :)
 
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Before Windows 10, the game was, outside of a community goal, always on Ultra. the CG when there was 10 or more people in SC at one time, could not handle it. Normal space has always been fine. Windows 7 was fine. Windows 8.1 was fine. Windows 10 was a bad idea this early into release, should have waited till Xmas. Supercruise is an abominable slideshow now, even on Low.

EDIT: Confirmed the driver rollback to 14.12 definitely made things much better.

One other thing is that I've re-enabled the shader warming again, it was disabled on windows for AMD for some reason a few patches ago, but I was getting hitches of 1-2 seconds coming close to planets again, so the shader warming def helped me.

It's a setting in the \Frontier\EDLaunch\Products\FORC-FDEV-D-1000\AppConfig.xml file:

ShaderWarmingEnabled="1"


The other thing that helped a bit was that the refresh rate defaulted to 50Hz in 1920x1080, whereas the monitor's actual hard refresh is 60Hz, so I set it back to 60Hz and that helped reduce some remaining lagginess after the driver downgrade.
 
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Biggest improvement in game by far was to turn down the SSAA multiplier below 1. Mine's on 0.75, GTX 980, oculus DK2 in 4k res with NVidia's DSR, graphics settings on med. Only drop I get in framerates is HUD screens, but still getting above 20fps even then. Is everyone running fullscreen, or borderless? Borderless doesn't dedicate the screen to graphics and causes massive stutter.
 
I bought a Titan-X and I run the game with AA off in downscaled (1920 x 1200) 4K mode (NVidia powered not ED powered) and it's very smooth on the whole.
 
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I too noticed a considerable increase in frame rate drop appearing as stuttering after the PP update. I formerly played in windowed mode so that I could use the overlay for sidewinder radio. I've made the below listed changes, I now have a tolerable problem, occasional drop with out much impact to game play.
*most impactful change: no longer play in windowed mode, in full screen the frame rates drop is much less.
*updated graphics card drivers
*windows 10, this resulted in a frame rate boost as much as +\- 10fps
*updated all applicable hardware drivers, after the W10 update I experienced a few hardware conflicts. The most significant was with my keyboard and mouse - resolved by updating the drivers.
 
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