Hardware & Technical HD screen micro-stutters

[Hellfire85]

Hello @all

I just bought a "new" display.
Had to change out my old one since I was getting heavy screen burns and blackish marks in the middle of the screen.
I found an interesting offer and since I don't earn much, I decided to get this sony bravia 40" full HD thingy.
For 100€, it's a bargain.
Very good shape, looks like new, the previous owner sold it because he got himself a 60" with integrated 3D and all the bells and whistles.

But now comes the interesting part.

Everything works fine, watching movies, YT vids and all the basic functionalities of a PC a working great, however, when playing ED for around 2 hours gets me micro stutters... is it my HD cable? my GPU dying on me? the screen that is not working as good as I thought or did I mess up the settings? Does ED not like 1080p on a full HD Sony TV?

I tried running it in lower res, tried running the game in all different graphics presets, tried different refresh rates (my old one ran fine on v-sync off, locked at 90FPS altho it was still a basic 60hz display)
updated the TV's firmware to no avail...

I am really starting lose patience as I have no clue what else to try....

Halp

 

[CMDR MAIN SEQUENCE]

What graphics card do you have (and how much VRAM)? How much system RAM?

- when you start getting the micro-stutters if you restart the game have they gone?
- try different versions of graphics drivers
- are you monitoring your temperatures?
- use MSI Afterburner graphs to see how much VRAM & RAM was being used when the stutters started
- do you have any recording software running in the background (Windows gaming etc.)?
- checked background processes?

 

[Hellfire85]

I have a 1050ti 4gb vram. 16GB RAM, i7 3770k @3.5ghz
It's not so much the processes or the game itself.
The FPS shown in game are fine.
No frame drops in game according to the counter, even in empty instances and with almost no bandwidth usage it stutters...

 

[CMDR MAIN SEQUENCE]

The FPS shown in game are fine.
No frame drops in game according to the counter, even in empty instances and with almost no bandwidth usage it stutters...

Most likely the FPS counter won't show micro-stutters as they don't last enough, it will be taking an average over the last X number of milliseconds and only updates every second. Best thing to do is in RTSS set Show own statistics to On and then in settings tick 'Enable frametime history overlay' - in game this will show you a small graph so you can see the spikes. However it won't really prove anything other than that you are experiencing stutters

 

[Jon flint]

Couple of things I'd try,

First, turn off any/all post processing settings on your tv (like motion smoothing etc) and if there's a game mode, enable it. Most modern TVs use some kind of motion interpolation which can cause all kinds of visual artifacts when it comes into contact with content it doesn't like, turning it off is always a good start.

Second, install something like msi afterburner with riva tuner, you can then enable an on screen display while the game is running showing graphs for fps and frame time, if the frametime graph is jumping all over the place, well then it is microstutter and your gpu is to blame and not the TV, if it's a smooth line, then it'll be something else. (You'll get an OSD that looks something like the ones at the top in this vid https://youtu.be/J-Tlv0fSvFQ you can see the graph in the top left is smooth vs the very "microstuttery" one on the right)

Thirdly, try switching elite to running fullscreen or windowed borderless, on my system, I get terrible microstutter in fullscreen mode but perfect flat frametimes in borderless.

Beyond that, and depending on your gpu, updating to newer drivers *may* help.

 

[Hellfire85]

Couple of things I'd try,

First, turn off any/all post processing settings on your tv (like motion smoothing etc) and if there's a game mode, enable it. Most modern TVs use some kind of motion interpolation which can cause all kinds of visual artifacts when it comes into contact with content it doesn't like, turning it off is always a good start.

Second, install something like msi afterburner with riva tuner, you can then enable an on screen display while the game is running showing graphs for fps and frame time, if the frametime graph is jumping all over the place, well then it is microstutter and your gpu is to blame and not the TV, if it's a smooth line, then it'll be something else. (You'll get an OSD that looks something like the ones at the top in this vid https://youtu.be/J-Tlv0fSvFQ you can see the graph in the top left is smooth vs the very "microstuttery" one on the right)

Thirdly, try switching elite to running fullscreen or windowed borderless, on my system, I get terrible microstutter in fullscreen mode but perfect flat frametimes in borderless.

Beyond that, and depending on your gpu, updating to newer drivers *may* help.

So I guess this doesn't look healthy?

Spoiler

Kinda weird since I am not even running the graphics on max...

 

[Chris Simon]

Well, those spikes in GPU usage look suspicious.

What card it is? How much memory it's got?

It could also be something different. Like HDD/SSD.


You could get the HWinfo64 program which lets you monitor ALL things in your PC. Including all temperatures, clocks, disc usage and throughput etc. Maybe it would be better at nailing the culprit down.