Stutter after upgrade to NV 970 from AMD HD 5830, even on low settings at 200FPS+

[Maiakaat]

I Just tried the 1.1 update after a GPU upgrade from an AMD HD 5830 to a NV 970

While I saw (with unreal performance cost) FXAA 2.0x fix the non-anti-aliasing of the AMD card - I have no idea how DSR could be used on a 1920x1200 resolution screen.

The big issue is a (micro) stutter, this happens with everything on low in an empty system in hyperspace getting 200-300 FPS (about every 2 seconds - a loss of smoothness), and in a busy system I get about half the frame rate in general flight, but the problem is still there.

I've seen other comments, and have noticed the performance drop with 1.07 and 1.1, but on the AMD card I could play at 30-45 FPS, yet on the mid-high end NVIDIA card I can barely turn the settings up, and have a stutter introduced which is resident no matter what settings I use in the drivers or game.

I am reading back through the forums now, and am aware that the 970 may have some issues with memory allocation over 3.x GB, but this seems to be an Elite Issue. Does anybody have any more information on possible causes of this? If they are experiencing it still, on specific platforms or settings?

Its a big downer, I can live without the dramatic performance increase in Elite, but the stutter is a big issue (I have 32GB ram and 16 CPU cores as I use a workstation outside of gaming so it is not likely to be the system as this is new)

 

[Maiakaat]

I'll just add to this I also see the massive stutter while loading planet resources. After 1.1 and the upgrade Elite is now unplayable for me, its performance without this is lower than that of Far Cry 4, with much less geometry most of the time, I hope they can get this sorted out eventually, I'm sure they are working hard at it.

 

[RipperJack]

I've been having a similair thing patch to patch for ages and trying to raise awareness is a wall of people who cant accept theres a problem because its small and not common i doubt it'll ever get fixed tbh.

i'll link the post where i wrote all the junk out, combat is an example i've seen it in loads of things but combat was my main personal annoyance.

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=111288

 

[AdamBell]

I get this too - and I have an N970 too. In all honesty, I think it might have something to do with the Nvidia drivers - the most recent ones reduce the instance of it happening significantly, but it still happens from time to time. I find alt-tabbing out and in fixes any particular instance of the stutter, but doesn't prevent it coming back. I've tried monitoring it using MSI Afterburner, and it looks like some sort of limit is being tripped every time it happens. I also saw it happen in Far Cry 4, albeit considerably more rarely.

Frontier might want to have a chat with Nvidia.

 

[knoppaz]

Certain cards have problems since patch. I had a Club3D Radeon HD6670 1GB and since patch I got graphics stuttering and some sound dropouts, but with every hotfix it became worse and lastly nearly unplayable with completely freezing the PC. I found a thread about that problem somewhere on the forum and installed an old Nvidia GTS250 with a fan as load as an airplane. The noise from the card is brutal, but ED runs like a charm again
The biggest problem I now have is the need to upgrade sooner or later without knowing which card will truely work with ED *sigh*

Hope that helped a little..

 

[marsha11]

Up until this week i was running SLI 970s at 110fps on a 2560x1440 monitor..smooth as, except for high traffic extraction sites.

Then i ran one card at lower frames....still smooth as. Obviously occasional stutter round planets etc.

Now ive got a 980 on a wide screen 2560x1080 monitor at 60fps...again really smooth no stutters.

Its deffo not the 970s memory issue. Elite prob hit about 2.5g vram. It could be worth trying older drivers on nvidias website.

Is the card overclocked? I found when i increased the power limit (think thats what its called, under voltage on after burner) above 100 (base setting) it would stutter a little.

Is the card getting high temps? How does it perform on other titles? Other than the un-optimized mess of farcry 4.

It should not be as your describing though. Could be faulty.

 

[blacky75]

I run at 5760x1080 all different hungry games....farcry4, dying light, asseto corsa, DA inquisition..... all on my black titan.
I do not know what FD is doing wrong with ED.... but there's definitely something they are programming wrong somewhere.
I m sure it s one of their main concern right now...

 

[Maiakaat]

The stuttering seems too widespread to be a faulty card, I also tested some demo's to make sure the card was near where it was supposed to be.

This seems like the same issues that cause the hyperspace stutter, the resource/planet loading stutter, and other general microstutters, and it seems to be worse on new GPU's.

I feel the problems are in the game loop on the CPU prior to it going to the GPU, lowering settings doesn't solve it, and this is the common theme for those experiencing the issue, there doesn't even have to be anything loading, anything visible or nearby in hyperspace much of the time.

I'm not putting an old card back in just for Elite, they hopefully will catch these issues with the new data they are collecting, but by adding my voice at least I am one more statistic raising this issues prominence, and as more new cards are used more people will see the issues I expect.

 

[Maiakaat]

I took a screenshot of GPU-Z while in supercruise with settings for the game on low and NV settings on defaults.

The GPU certainly has little to do with the stutters in terms of limitations, load, memory use, power consumption or anything else (and I don't overclock systems, there seems to be little point as I don't game that much)

In supercruise the framerate does actually momentarily drop, (a full stutter) rather than a micro-stutter as others will have noticed, planets I think are documented as resource issues already.

Screenshot of settings a few seconds after losing game window focus.



Note: indicators were slightly higher prior to jumping to this screen to screenshot, but still well under-utilized on the low defaults game settings.

I've tested the card using Uniqine demos prior to playing with consistent performance

 

[Maiakaat]

This is the same location in supercruise in "ultra" game settings again at 1680x1065v

Again without AA the system is running at well over 100 FPS.

Power usage is nearly maxed out at times, but generally the card is running comfortably.

The power use drops on the stutters, which are much more prominent with planets in or near the viewport (a long way away) so again this seems to be a delay to the card rather than a power limitation, which is probably also what causes the microstutters which cause the odd frame to take 2-3 times longer to render under normal conditions.



This image clearly shows the load/demand on the GPU dropping -almost certainly due to some delay/blocking/other issue

 

[Maiakaat]

For completeness I have provided the Heaven benchmark 4.0 which ran at between 55 and 120 FPS at 1920x1200 with medium/high settings.

It had some tearing when near 60fps but not synced properly, but it was largely exceptional compared to the issues in ED.

The load dips you can see are not stutters, but camera switches in the autopilot demo mode in this instance, AA is on in this demo.

 

[Maiakaat]

I've monitored the CPU load, and the issue seems to be either sudden spikes in CPU load on one thread and/or synchronisation across threads, it doesn't matter how many cores are running, clamping to 30 fps reduces the threads to a trickle but this still happens, especially near planets, but it does help, as does turning off NVIDIAs thread assistance feature.

It looks like synchronisation issues, or something happening specifically with one or two worker threads causing sudden delays, sometimes causing a dip in work on the main thread, at other times just a massive spike where for some reason the whole program flow is disrupted

 

[Phier]

Here are my specs...

OCed 980 GTX x2 in SLI
i5-4670k oced to 4.2gh
16 gig ram
win 7
500 gb SSD (game on SSD)

I still jutter in super cruise with the 1.1 update even in solo mode.

There isn't a game on the planet I can't run in maximum everything. This is worse because I also use the oculus rift dk2 and those pauses are REALLY bad on the head at times. I never had a major pause until the 1.1 update.

So basically they screwed something up in their coding here. I do hope they take the time to find out what and why.

 

[Maiakaat]

Its definitely not the cards from provisional investigation, something is going on on the CPU side or how it interacts with some hardware. Thanks for adding your information, I changed hardware at the same time as switching to 1.1.

 

[nimh]

Have you tried limiting your frame rate? Either with locking it to your panel refresh (120hz or 144hz) with vsync, or using the in-game fps limiter?

 

[marsha11]

Ive just gone back to the last drivers before the new ones as i was getting crashes and stutters. Things seem better.

Im running an overclocked i5 3570k @ 4.5

 

[Maiakaat]

Have you tried limiting your frame rate? Either with locking it to your panel refresh (120hz or 144hz) with vsync, or using the in-game fps limiter?

It can improve things, but this just lowers thread CPU load, the stutters happen with low GPU load and often don't even max out the CPU threads they happen on, like a wait delay/sync delay/blocking issue of some sort. It has no impact on the underlying causes of the most serious stutters just lowers the CPU work threshold so they are slightly less apparent when they happen - making SC on its own just about playable until you get closer to civilization. The issue is with the code in the 1.1 patch on some (quite a few) faster systems, but may have been a problem as far back as 1.07 according to the forums.

The AMD card I was using struggled quite often so it may have masked the issues somewhat on 1.07. But the problems are happening on both brands of higher end cards, more frequently since 1.1, this is an issue that should be right behind game crashing bugs in the priority list, otherwise as they add features it will get worse and get harder to address.

 

[Maiakaat]

Ive just gone back to the last drivers before the new ones as i was getting crashes and stutters. Things seem better.

Im running an overclocked i5 3570k @ 4.5

Hi, which drivers? I rolled 2 versions back from the NV drivers with some minimal improvement.

 

[marsha11]

If you check the driver list on nvidias website the top one being the current latest driver. The one under that. Sorry can confirm the number at the moment.

 

[CmdrSimonsen]

I noticed some stutters using the in-game supersampling (x1.5 or x2.0), so reverted to Nvidia DSR resolution. It still looks ok to me with SMAA, and gives clearer text, compared to just running 1920x1080.
(On a GTX 980)