Micro-freezes & stutterings - Am I going crazy ?

[hardtopnet]

Ok guys big update.

I investigated a lot & noticed a single process causing network spikes happening every time a stutter occured.
I tracked down the issue to a Windows service called dasHost.exe or Device Association Framework Provider Host

Turns out that service is responsible for connecting to external devices on the network, things like printers or smart TV's I'd wager.

I found a russian forum where folks mentioned the EXACT same issue with DCS and they also noticed the same pattern I did with the dasHost.exe file.

As you can't stop the executable (it's being relaunched immediately) and you can't stop the service either (well I guess it could be done but I didn't want to push it too far) I had to find another solution to alleviate the issue.

I tried something else: I used the Windows firewall to basically prevent the .exe from accessing the network. Guess what ? No stutters anymore.

I have to conduct more thorough investigations but it seems it's not an unknown issue albeit quite tricky to pinpoint.

Those of you who experience such stutters, just try and add a rule in the firewall to disable network access for the file c:\windows\system32\dasHost.exe

Of course it might prevent some distant peripherals from working but we could always disable/enable the rule when playing E

Please, could commanders affected by the issue try this fix & leave a message here to indicate if that was effective for them ?


I don't know if I can post the link to the forum I mentioned earlier, I'll try in another post. If a moderator comes by, please advise ;-)

Cmdr HardTopNet, out.

 

[hardtopnet]

link to relevant forum post: https://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=212325

 

[[PS4] Filthymick420]

I have the op issue on console but only during take off and landing with ad dock cpu. I get it again going into and dropping from supercruise. I also get it during fsd jumps. but that's about it. I just thought it was lag.

 

[AntonKring]

I haven’t yet tried the solution involving dasHost.exe yet.

I tested on a Fer-de-Lance without a ship-launched fighter, About 30 minutes later frame rate started dropping again by freezing more and more often until it became unplayable. Same problem.

I will block the DAS executable and test again.

 

[AntonKring]

I tested the solution proposed by @hardtopnet and it didn’t fix the problem. I still get the degraded frame rate after half an hour of play time. Blocking %SystemRoot%\System32\dasHost.exe from performing outbound connections to any network using Windows Firewall doesn’t work.

Next I’ll test on a virtual gaming host using Parsec.

 

[AntonKring]

I couldn’t find a virtual host in Parsec that had performance good enough to play Elite Dangerous around planetary rings at all. Even in Low graphics I cannot get it to keep a consistent 60 FPS. I did not stay playing long enough to test if performance degraded further over time.

 

[Shir]

I've been getting these as well the last few months, has made FA off not fun..

 

[CMDR Reaper]

For me this stutter might be something VR related.

If this box (No VR) is unchecked in EDProfiler I get stutter even in when I play on my monitor. When checked I get no stutter:

My Spec:
Windows 10 Pro - 1903
i9 9900k
16GB DDR4 3200 GHz
GTX1080
Oculus Rift
Samsung 970 EVO Plus SSD M.2 2280 - 250GB (system drive and ED location)
+ a bunch of other ssd disks.

 

[AntonKring]

Today I tested with my Nvidia GeForce NOW beta testing account, and it displayed the same issues: stuttering while on a Resource Extraction Site [Hazardous]. It was somehow different in that the stuttering didn’t seem to be better or worse during the entire play run. Frame rate was usually 60 FPS unless there was one of these micro-freeze events. Sometimes it would stutter significantly for a few hundred milliseconds before returning to 60 FPS for a few seconds. I didn’t try Solo mode there.

I noticed that GeForce NOW was showing me warnings about the quality of my Internet connection. When testing my connection in the same city where I live everything is fine and my connection clocks at 3 ms ping / 950 mbps downlink / 250 mbps uplink consistently, so I suspect the problem may be congestion in some intermediate link in the pipeline that connects me with GeForce NOW servers. I wonder if similar issues affecting the connection to Frontier servers could cause the stuttering that I have observed thus far, although that doesn’t explain why it usually starts twenty minutes after I begin playing and not immediately, at least when testing from my own computer.

 

[TonytotheB]

Thanks for this thread OP. These microstutters have been driving my crazy. At first I considered it a texture loading issue in VR. My rig is a 2080Ti+delidded 8700K+32GB 3200 DDR4+Pimax 5K+. I tried lots of effort to remove it using Dr. Kaii's profiler. I went deep into changing nebula and star numbers. Then weirdly I thought to try max'd settings on a desktop version. I play at 3400x1400. I get constant 120fps (limited) or 200-300 not limited with max'd and 1.25SS. But I also get these microstutters.

I am currently at Sag A. It seems to happen on planet surfaces and at 'Event Horizon' station in a system near Sag A. Incredibly frustrating. I've done everything you have also: overlays, drivers, changes to graphics settings.

Annoying!!!!

I'll try your networking trick above and see if that works.

I am also flying away from Sag A now to see if that fixes it.

Only happens since the new patch

 

[AntonKring]

Today I played for an hour in Solo mode at an asteroid belt using Nvidia GeForce Now service. There was only minimal stuttering, and I suspect it was because the game was loading assets or something. The frame rate would recover immediately and not do any of the micro freezes I am used to get when playing on my own computer. I guess my report of stuttering when using GeForce Now a few days ago was probably a network issue as the service warned me constantly. This time around I didn’t get network quality warnings.

 

[B.Roberts]

Dudes & dudettes, just tell me I haven't lost it (yet).
Since april patch, I experience lots of micro-freezes during flight.
What I mean is I notice the screen (not audio) freezing for a couple hundred milliseconds every 5 to 30 seconds or so.
At times it's a tad less intrusive but most of the time it's very annoying. Happens in supercruise or normal flight, during takeoff animations, ...
It's quite problematic as it's a huge disadvantage with PvP as it's much more difficult to accurately shoot at the opponent, when the display freezes just as you're lining up your shot.
PLEASE tell me some of you noticed that behaviour as well...

I tried disabling some background-running applications, updated my nVidia drivers to 430.64 (GeForce 1070 notebook), Windows 10 64-bit is up to date, ...
Before patch it was running quite flawlessly and I only noticed that after the recent big update.

I've noticed something similar when playing in Open and even if no other people around. Also the other day while docking at the station hologram of my ship appeared backwards and on takeoff my ship got thrown off the landing pad sideways. Never seen any issues in Solo. Possible server issue perhaps?

 

[AntonKring]

Update:

Today I reinstalled Windows 10 Home on my gaming PC from freshly-created installation media to start from a blank slate. I didn't download any drivers, not even those for my Radeon RX 580 graphics card. The system is running stock Windows 10 downloaded directly from the Microsoft website.

Immediately upon installing Windows I downloaded the Chrome browser, connected my secondary solid state drive, installed Steam and Discord. I used Steam to install Elite Dangerous on the second drive, and started the game to test.

The first thing I noticed was that my XBox One Elite gamepad wasn't synced to the computer. I paired it against its USB wireless dongle by pressing the pairing buttons on both devices. Then I setup my custom bindings in Elite Dangerous.

Before starting to play I did not alter any graphics settings. Even when I have a monitor that has a native resolution of 1920x1200, I left the game at factory settings, which meant that it ran at a resolution of 1280x720 which made things look a bit stretched vertically on my 16:10 monitor and of course blurrier. I wanted to test the game with minimal changes from factory configuration.

Even running the game at 1280x800 resolution (I didn't test specifically 1280x720) in my previous Windows installation I used to have the stuttering behavior described in this thread.

Prior to running the game I did not disable the game bar that comes with Windows, nor the Steam overlay. I didn't do anything in Discord besides logging in. I did not enable the Discord overlay in game. I did not install the recommended Logitech Options software for my mouse when prompted. I noticed that none of the RealTek audio software icons that usually showed up in my notification area were there, although I could see that these programs were setup to run at startup, so they must be included with the default Windows drivers for my computer's audio chip, which I do not use. Instead I use a Logitech G533 wireless gaming headset which works out-of-the-box on Windows without having to install drivers.

I did not install Elite Dangerous Market Connector, or modify the Elite Dangerous configuration files, nor did I install any other Elite Dangerous third party tool.

I played for two hours, one hour in a hazardous resource extraction site in solo mode, and another hour in the same type of site in open mode. I would have usually experienced stuttering about ten minutes after starting the instance, which would worsen over time. This time I didn't experience stuttering but very brief occasional tolerable frame rate drops that would recover after a couple of seconds. The game ran smoothly otherwise and during the whole play time I allowed myself get lost in combat flow. I play without flight assist and with fixed weapons which requires stable frame rates without stuttering in order for me to remain accurate.

I don't know yet what is the cause of the issue but it seems to be gone from my system at the moment. Tomorrow I will test the game at my display's native resolution with the rest of the settings left as they are. I don't expect the issue to reappear, although I know that running at high quality graphics on my RX 580 could lead to some frame rate drops that should be qualitatively different from the dreaded stuttering, and not cause the game to become unplayable after awhile.

I hope this information can help to eventually solve the stuttering issue for others as it appears to have been solved for me.

My computer (general information):

Model: Inspiron 5675
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 1400 Quad-Core Processor, 3200 MHz, 4 Cores, 8 Logical Processors
Memory: 16 GB
Graphics: AMD Radeon RX 580, 8 GB
Display: Dell UltraSharp, 1920 x 1200 x 60 hertz
Network: gigabit ethernet connection to router, fibre-to-the-home Internet connection
Controller: Xbox Elite connected via wireless USB dongle

 

[AntonKring]

Another update:

After a fresh installation of Windows 10 as stated in the previous post and using only the drivers provided with the OS, the game still runs smoothly. I did thargoids with a wing in a private group and with another wing in open for a few hours yesterday. I did a hazardous resource extraction site in open until running out of ammo. All of this while the game ran at my display's native resolution of 1920x1200 instead of leaving it at default 720p settings as I had tested during my previous post. It still ran smoothly at 60 fps without stuttering or noticeable frame drops.

At least if your setup is similar to mine, it is possible that you'll have the same success as I did by installing Windows 10 from scratch and letting it use the stock drivers for all your hardware.

If I manage to get the stuttering back I will post again. For the time being I consider this issue solved on my system.

 

[Amanojaku]

On the PS4, but I've been experiencing the same thing. The stuttering is hard to spot, but becomes more noticeable when first jumping into a new system, scooping, etc.

It's like my CMDR is on some awesome drug that makes you black in and out for a few seconds. It usually stabilizes but can start in again out of nowhere.

Like you people on PC, this wasn't happening before the April update. And since I'm on PS4, I guess I'm fragged.

 

[moonsword]

I had the same issue you described.
So I tried to turn off my Windows firewall and this helped. Therefore I turned the firewall back on and configured a new rule in the firewall for outgoing and incoming traffic for the Elite dangerous launcher.
The launcher on my system is located at: %ProgramFiles% (x86)\Frontier\EDLaunch\EDLaunch.exe

Please try it out and let me know if it helped you.

 

[AntonKring]

This problem is back. I started experiencing it again some time ago. AMD drivers do not seem to be causing it.

 

[AntonKring]

I quit Discord completely (not even in the notification area), closed the game launcher window after the game was running, and went bounty hunting in Solo mode with graphics set to High. Not once did the frame rate drop. One of these things did it for me. I'll try to narrow it down tomorrow.

 

[AntonKring]

I went to haz res in Open with no Discord but the game launcher window open. I started experiencing stuttering after ten minutes on so in the instance. Apparently Discord is off the hook. I haven't tried Solo yet.

 

[Riverside]

I went to haz res in Open with no Discord but the game launcher window open. I started experiencing stuttering after ten minutes on so in the instance. Apparently Discord is off the hook. I haven't tried Solo yet.

The stutter got worse for me too, but I switched off the framerate cap (something I previously only did when using the FSS Scanner Screen to speed up resolving geo POI count) and it went back to pre-September update levels of irritation.

The latest Nvidia drivers have a 'smoothing' option (probably just renamed frame buffering) that I have disabled though, you could give that a try.