Hi everyone,
So I have a pretty strong PC,
And I run most of my games at well above 100 FPS, but lately, especialy after the 2.2 update I've been having these annoying microstutters in Elite Dangerous, along side with all the weird slowdown that now happens when entering instances after hyperspace / supercruise.
So for the last week I've been monitoring my PC for any clues why this keeps happening, I've tried overclocking, underclocking, watching my temperatures, reinstalling drivers, reinstalling windows, blaming various softwares, blaming my PC, looking through ton's of stutter fixing guides on Youtube, changing thermal paste on my CPU, core-unparking, but seemingly no matter what I've tried the symptoms stayed the same.
Game starts well, plays at full FPS for a bit, then starts microstuttering here and there, alt tabing to the desktop seems to fix it temporaraly, but eventually symptoms come back, while no other game on the machine experiences any.
This was baffling to me, I spent hours reviewing my logs, checking processes and I stimply couldn't understand why ED was behaving the way it was.
Which kinda suck, since it's my main game + my YT channel is focused on ED, so you know.... Priorities.
Pri.... Priorities?
Hold on a second, *he thought to himself* , as I opened windows task manager, I thought you know whatever, I've tried everything else but throwing the kitchen sink at it, might as well try this silly method of giving more priority to EliteDangerous64.exe, so I set it to "High" instead of "Normal"
And to my surpise, when I alt tabed back to the game, it was BUTTER, just sooo smooth, extra FPS and everything, but then original symptoms came back.
So I checked windows processes again, and saw that EliteDangerous64.exe went back to being at "Normal" priority, so I set it at "High" again, alt-tabed back into the game, and again it was just SmOOoOOoooOOoth, and then bam, very distinct microstutter which after few more times of repeating this I realized was the exact moment when EliteDangerous64.exe reverted back to "Normal" priority.
Now, pretty confident that I was onto something, I've downlaoded a few third party process management utilities, and very surprisingly. none of them worked.
No matter what, EliteDangerous64.exe would just not stay set as "High" priority.
However, one of the process management utilities showed me something interesting, a process called "WatchDog64.exe" lumped into the EliteDangerous.exe process.
It dawned on me, apart from being a reference to the most overrated game in history, this process is an anti-cheat thingy, that's probably preventing EliteDangerous.exe from being tinkered with, which makes sense, but windows priority management? Come on, lol.
That or EliteDangerous64.exe is infused with marvelous British engineering and is programmed to set itself back to Normal priority, but that's an extremaly specific thing to be codded in, in my opinion, as it serves no apparent functionality.
So at this point I was pretty much steaming.
No more mister nice guy *he, said in a dramatic fashion", and opened up a notepad.txt file.
I typed in:
:loop
wmic process where name="EliteDangerous64.exe" CALL setpriority "high priority"
goto loop
Which is a basic code telling the computer to :
:loop -
repeat
wmic process where name="EliteDangerous64.exe" CALL setpriority "high priority" -
force set EliteDangerou64.exe to High Priority
goto loop -
go back to the first line of code, and the process repeats itself.
A few times per second, preventing Elitedangerous64.exe to go back to "Normal" priority,
I saved this as ED.BAT
and ran it.
AND OH SWEET LORD HAVE MERCY, like a magic wand waved over, the game is SMOOOoOOooOOother than ever, no more loading lag, no more after hyperspace / supercruise lag, this little script fixed all my frame drops, jutters, stutters and Imperial Cutters.
View attachment 113027
Now, I'm not gonna share the script itself, since I don't want to be accused of virus spreading or whatever
But, if you are experiencing the same problems that I have, you can simply make your own by copying the text in bold, pasting it into a simple .txt file, saving it as <name>.bat , and running it.
And see if this also fix performance problems for you!
EDIT: After player feedback, and more testing, I noticed that killing WatchDogds64.exe has dramaticaly improved my performance even further, so I am currently using the Version 2 of this script which is :
Taskkill /IM WatchDog64.exe /F
:loop
wmic process where name="EliteDangerous64.exe" CALL setpriority "high priority"
goto loop
Now with video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzgq-sCSqYc&feature=youtu.be
