NVIDIA Users, I Figured Out How To Fix The Graphical Stalls Problem!

zamalek

zamalek
Caveat: This works for the stalls, i.e. graphical lockups for more than 1 second. PG/Stellarforge in SC will still cause micro-stutters and slight drops in FPS.

TLDR; in the NVIDIA control panel change "Virtual Reality Pre-rendered frames" to "Use the 3D application setting".

Steps

  1. Make sure you have the latest drivers (at least the ones released 2014-11-04, 344.60).
  2. Close Elite Dangerous and the launcher.
  3. Right click on an empty location on your desktop.
  4. From the menu select "NVIDIA Control Panel".
  5. On the left side of the window, click the blue text labelled "Manage 3D Settings". You may have to expand "3D Settings" in order to see it.
  6. Under the bold text labelled "I would like to use the following 3D settings" select "Program Settings".
  7. Click the "Add" button.
  8. Click the "Browse" button.
  9. Locate elitedangerous32.exe in your Elite Dangerous folder and double click it. Make sure you don't select edlauncher.exe
  10. To the left of the "Add" button select "Elite Dangerous (elitedangerous32.exe)" from the drop down list. Once again, watch out for edlauncher.exe that may be lurking in there.
  11. Use the following settings for the program (you may only have to change the red ones):

  • Anisotropic filtering: Application-controlled
  • Antialiasing - Gamma Correction: On
  • Antialiasing - Mode: Application-controlled
  • Antialiasing - Transparency: Off
  • CUDA - GPUs: All
  • Maximum pre-rendered frames: Use the 3D application setting
  • Multi-display/mixed-GPU acceleration: Multiple display performance
  • Power management mode: Prefer maximum performance
  • Shader Cache: On
  • Texture filtering - Anistropic sample optimization: On
  • Texture filtering - Negative LOD bias: Allow
  • Texture filtering - Quality: Quality
  • Texture filtering - Trilinear optimization: On
  • Thread optimization: Auto
  • Triple buffering: Off
  • Vertical sync: Use the 3D application setting
  • Virtual Reality pre-rendered frames: Use the 3D application setting

Close NVIDIA Control Panel (seriously).

Not sure if this is necessary. I did this so you may want to as well (I was doing more experimentation):

  1. Open up Elite and load into a game.
  2. Press Escape.
  3. Click "Options".
  4. Click "Graphics".
  5. Change Anti-Aliasing to anything but what it is set to.
  6. You may also want to turn off VSync.
  7. Click "Apply".
  8. Click "Graphics".
  9. Restore the Anti-Aliasing value back to what it was set to.

It looks like PG is somehow being submitted to the GPU in a way that the GPU drivers think it's an actual rendering frame. The two red/important settings above effectively limit how often the game is allowed to do this and hence delay the "real frames" from being rendered. If you place ED in control the drivers won't get in the way and cause the stalls.

AMD cards may have a similar setting in Catalyst that AMD users might want to look for.

Hope it works for you. Please confirm if this does work for you, so that other users know whether it's a dead-end or not.

@Devs, for your testing purposes, ticket 41461 contains the details for an extremely "stally" planet.
 
Last edited:

scoochy

scoochy
Not sure why this would work considering these settings haven't changed between B2 and B3 but I guess it's worth a shot....
 

zamalek

zamalek
scoochy said:
Not sure why this would work considering these settings haven't changed between B2 and B3 but I guess it's worth a shot....
Click to expand...

By default the setting for the VR frames in the NVIDIA control panel is "1". I think it might be the combination of the drivers that introduced this "feature" and some subtle change to ED in the way it submits these jobs to the GPU.
 

Aewarin Jameson

Aewarin Jameson
It did not help me sorry - mind you 675M might not be up to the job anyway. Had no issues in B2 but I have also upgraded the drivers somewhat.

Any idea when the VR frames setting was introduced as I could perhaps roll back and test it ?
 

Redstorm

Redstorm
This may be why people are seeing an improvement with 344.60

Code: 
Improve the handling of Out Of Order Map calls with the 
D3D11_MAP_FLAG_DO_NOT_WAIT flag on staging buffers to prevent stalls when the 
server thread is busy. [1524767]
 

sbdags

sbdags
zamalek said:
Caveat: This works for the stalls, i.e. graphical lockups for more than 1 second. PG/Stellarforge in SC will still cause micro-stutters and slight drops in FPS.

TLDR; in the NVIDIA control panel change "Virtual Reality Pre-rendered frames" to "Use the 3D application setting".

Steps

  1. Make sure you have the latest drivers (at least the ones released 2014-11-04, 344.60).
  2. Close Elite Dangerous and the launcher.
  3. Right click on an empty location on your desktop.
  4. From the menu select "NVIDIA Control Panel".
  5. On the left side of the window, click the blue text labelled "Manage 3D Settings". You may have to expand "3D Settings" in order to see it.
  6. Under the bold text labelled "I would like to use the following 3D settings" select "Program Settings".
  7. Click the "Add" button.
  8. Click the "Browse" button.
  9. Locate elitedangerous32.exe in your Elite Dangerous folder and double click it. Make sure you don't select edlauncher.exe
  10. To the left of the "Add" button select "Elite Dangerous (elitedangerous32.exe)" from the drop down list. Once again, watch out for edlauncher.exe that may be lurking in there.
  11. Use the following settings for the program (you may only have to change the red ones):

  • Anisotropic filtering: Application-controlled
  • Antialiasing - Gamma Correction: On
  • Antialiasing - Mode: Application-controlled
  • Antialiasing - Transparency: Off
  • CUDA - GPUs: All
  • Maximum pre-rendered frames: Use the 3D application setting
  • Multi-display/mixed-GPU acceleration: Multiple display performance
  • Power management mode: Prefer maximum performance
  • Shader Cache: On
  • Texture filtering - Anistropic sample optimization: On
  • Texture filtering - Negative LOD bias: Allow
  • Texture filtering - Quality: Quality
  • Texture filtering - Trilinear optimization: On
  • Thread optimization: Auto
  • Triple buffering: Off
  • Vertical sync: Use the 3D application setting
  • Virtual Reality pre-rendered frames: Use the 3D application setting

Close NVIDIA Control Panel (seriously).

Not sure if this is necessary. I did this so you may want to as well (I was doing more experimentation):

  1. Open up Elite and load into a game.
  2. Press Escape.
  3. Click "Options".
  4. Click "Graphics".
  5. Change Anti-Aliasing to anything but what it is set to.
  6. Click "Apply".
  7. Click "Graphics".
  8. Restore the Anti-Aliasing value back to what it was set to.

It looks like PG is somehow being submitted to the GPU in a way that the GPU drivers think it's an actual rendering frame. The two red/important settings above effectively limit how often the game is allowed to do this and hence delay the "real frames" from being rendered. If you place ED in control the drivers won't get in the way and cause the stalls.

AMD cards may have a similar setting in Catalyst that AMD users might want to look for.

Hope it works for you.
Click to expand...

Well this worked for me - thanks! Stuttering is still bloody awful entering hypersapce though!
 

GrimPanda

G
As a PSA for Rift users, if this works for you on monitors (did for me), make sure you experiment with Vsync and Triple Buffering. You may need to keep those on/application controlled for the times you are using the Rift.
 

Lange_666

Lange_666
zamalek said:
Caveat:Hope it works for you. Please confirm if this does work for you, so that other users know whether it's a dead-end or not.
Click to expand...

Does NOT work for me. Game still stutters a lot justa fter entering Hyperspace and en route to a space station, mostly when "new" graphics are loaded. Once these are loaded, the stutter is gone too.
Another example i noticed moments ago. Got launched on the pad when suddely in the corner of my eye another landing pad was activated (lit). The game just stuttered briefly when this happened.
Also having stutter when approaching a ringed planet. At first there is only a little white stripe to show the rings but as you get closer, more and more rings show. Well, on every new ring drawn there's a stutter... Another proof that loading graphics causes stutter. And they are not kept into memory because if you jump out of the system and back in, it happens all over again.
 
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Trader Pat

Trader Pat
It mostly works for me (NVIDIA GTX 760, I5-4690K plain vanilla). There is still some stutter near planets, a bit of mini-freeze, but overall it is quite better.
It will keep me waiting for the FDev optimisation.

Great job and thanks!
 

akaliel

A
The only stutter I had was entering hyperspace in Beta 2. But with Beta 3 I now get stutters in supercruise, especially when I get close to planets. I'll try this tonight and see if it fixes my issues. The NV driver before 344.60 messed up Alien Isolation so I had to go back to a previous.
 

woodhouse

woodhouse
Elite Dangerous is the only 3D game I play.
Is it possible to apply the proposed changes to the general NVIDIA settings or does it need to be applied specifically to EliteDangerous.exe?
I had problems in the past getting NVIDIA to recognize per-application settings.
 
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