The gumbo of stutters, pauses, freeze and other ingredients

[Drano]

If you turn shadows off the flickers go away. I have been able to minimize their appearance by minimizing processes, turning AV off, and overclocking the GPU and VRAM. That does not fix it, but minimizes the flicker.

It seems the flickery flashes, in my experience, seem to be terrain specific. I've seen them on certain terrains or in certain areas of terrains and not others. I've flown over areas that were not flashing but could see a set of hills in a certain direction flashing like crazy. I seem to recall each time it's happened there were multiple cloud layers in the area and it was middle day. Not late or early day, dawn or dusk.

I already overclock my 6950 which gives a solid FR generally. This isn't a problem as it happens for example in last night's FSO I was just flying straight and level, a little after 1 in the afternoon, away from a lower cloud patch with the sun at my 4:00 high diffused thru a high cloud layer. Nothing going on. FR fine. Stuff just flashes. I was over water but I don't think the water was flashing, just my plane and the cockpit.

I haven't looked at what video I had from last night but I'm sure I have other examples of the flashyflashy.

It's SOP before flying that I turn off all crap unrelated to the game that I can. Every clock cycle counts!

Of course I just realized after writing this is probably unrelated to the micro stutter and lockup problem. Don't let me derail the thread.

Sent from my XT1585 using Tapatalk

[Pudgie]

This one:

http://us.creative.com/p/sound-cards/sound-blaster-x-fi-surround-5-1-pro

Skuzzy had mentioned that they do 3D positioning on the video card, and some other users had said they get sound from vehicles spot on even when not using a 3D positioning card. So, either one of these will work from what I can tell. The one I pointed to does have lower SNR (more noise), so something to be aware of. The audio sounds identical to the ZxR and I think I have fairly discerning ears.

Hi Chalenge,

Didn't sink in until now..........

So FMOD is actually processing 3D positional sound at the software level. Good to know.

Before I finally went on and pulled the trigger on the X7 I was also looking hard at the Omni myself but I just didn't think that the USB clusters on my mobo could provide enough power to drive it like I wanted, especially the 600ohm headphone amp that is in it.
In hindsight I coulda used either a powered USB hub or a USB\PCI-E add-in card (like I'm doing now w\ my CH HOTAS) w\ aux 12v power to drive it, but it's moot now cause I got ole Big Daddy X7 handling it now.

Glad you got it sorted out.

 

[MADe]

If its been mentioned, sorry.

Graphics options> terrain detail slider
I have been running it maxed. When in low to ground, with a side look at trees, I got little hitches. I moved that back to about 75%-80%. No more hitching and when at alt since trees not rendered all the scintillating stop around towns and trees.......
Terrain detail no likey maxxxxxed...........
fyi
 

[Chalenge]

Hi Chalenge,

Didn't sink in until now..........

So FMOD is actually processing 3D positional sound at the software level. Good to know.

Before I finally went on and pulled the trigger on the X7 I was also looking hard at the Omni myself but I just didn't think that the USB clusters on my mobo could provide enough power to drive it like I wanted, especially the 600ohm headphone amp that is in it.
In hindsight I coulda used either a powered USB hub or a USB\PCI-E add-in card (like I'm doing now w\ my CH HOTAS) w\ aux 12v power to drive it, but it's moot now cause I got ole Big Daddy X7 handling it now.

Glad you got it sorted out.

 

I'm not sure it has anything to do with FMOD, and won't until someone at HTC comments about it.

[Pudgie]

Hi All,

So far, since I went into the UEFI, reset CEIST & TB back to Auto then went into Windows Power plan, reset the plan from High Performance back to Balanced (which enables Windows to control CPU power management) then went into the advanced Balanced settings and set the processor power minimum setting from the default of 5% to 75% (so when the CPU sees low CPU loads Windows will limit the CPU power cut to 25% of 100% instead of 95% of 100% when CEIST lowers the CPU power\clock speeds due to low CPU loading....used to use this setup back in my Intel C2D E8600 days running MS Vista......). This will help the CPU to clock back up on demand under load w\o stumbling.......and the install of AMD Crimson ReLive 16.12.1 drivers which brought AMD's new WattMan GPU clock\power control for PowerTune 2.0 to use instead of AMD's outdated OverDrive (which made a big improvement w\ the Fury X's performance), as well as some FreeSynch improvements...........

To date I haven't witnessed a single screen pause\freeze or petite stutter\freeze on my box since I did all this late Thursday evening. FR has been very steady maintaining in the 78-80 FPS range and game play has been beautiful. MSI graphs show a near perfectly clean GPU frametiming graph line................

Now the only things I see are the occasional Internet warp\stutter as my connection at hop #4 but especially at hops #5 & #6 experience near 100% packet loss most of the time as measured using PingPlotter (somewhere between Denver, CO and Dallas, TX.......must be at a transition point from CenturyLink's system to another) but the ping times are never over 100ms regardless so I'm being rerouted causing minor streaming issues.

Finally believe this is behind me now.

 

Due to the timing of these changes I don't have a clear idea of which 1 really made the difference (I made the changes to the UEFI and Windows 1st but a few hours later d'ld the new AMD Crimson drivers and installed them after checking out the tech sites in between game testing sessions (I do this regularly as well as check the AH BBS) and read up on the new changes at WCCFtech that were packaged w\ the new Crimson 16.12.1 drivers. I didn't witness any screen pauses\freezes or petite freezes after making the 1st change but I hadn't put enough testing time before making the driver change to effectively state so I'm attributing my success at this time to both changes.

AMD's new Radeon WattMan is a big deal for older Radeon GCN GPU's to provide much better, finer grained GPU power\clock speed control over OverDrive which isn't NEAR as refined & is somewhat responsible for Radeon GPU temps getting out of hand in the past unless you used a 3rd party software to make up for some of it's shortcomings. I'm using WattMan in full AMD default settings (auto mode) w\o any assistance from Afterburner (AB vers 4.2 can't hook into WattMan...) and it's working perfectly w\ my Fury X running AHIII under Dx11 maintaining GPU clock speeds constant at full 1050MHz w\ GPU max temps in the 62*C-65*C range at fan speeds between 1024-1204 RPM's on the AIO.....right in the sweet spot for AMD's PowerTune 2.0 to maintain at\near full power to the GPU (GPU TDP is 75*C) so this Fury X is powering thru the game easily now.

So in conclusion this showed that the screen pausing was being caused by issues on my end that were being exposed by the AHIII game client operation after the VR coding was included to the game client Dx11 port.

Now I'm digging into other venues to explore full CPU optimization efforts w\ AHIII........................ ..

So far I have learned some pretty neat stuff on how all this works together and some "tweaks" that show to be promising w\ the AHIII game client running on a Windows OS w\ a multi-core CPU..................

All geek stuff........................ ..................

 

[Chalenge]

Five days stutter free, and then they returned on SFMA, and now NDisles.

[N95KF]

Hoping not to jinx myself here, but I have been stutter-free as well.  Have flown high, low, into airfields with a lot of activity and ground fire, into engagements with multiple aircraft both friendly and enemy with different skins, flew FSO last night, etc.  Has been good.  I think I may have notived one last week quickly when someone keyed up on vox.  But other than that, all is well. 

Just out of curiosity, what was changed to get rid of the micro-stutter?  What was the issue causing it?

[Chalenge]

I think in my case it was caused by the Windows 10 update that came through about the same time. I discovered that the majority of USB ports had returned to the power-down setting "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power." Also, the optional settings of Anti-Beacon had been unblocked, so I reset them to blocked.

Even after doing that I find that the scheduled tasks of Office 15 and Office 16 are unblocked, which is odd because I use neither one.

[Condor]

I've been petite freeze free for 3 days but haven't changed a thing.

[popeye]

Seeing petite freezes on DX9, not so much on DX11.  (Which is opposite of what I have seen in the past.)   

[VoX]

OK, the time that the stutters happen for me are directly related to how close to a CV I am, if I am within a 10 mile radius the game is unplayable, with a 60FPS, outside the CV radius the game is fine. Not sure if it is the same if the CV is lit I will test.

[Ack-Ack]

OK, the time that the stutters happen for me are directly related to how close to a CV I am, if I am within a 10 mile radius the game is unplayable, with a 60FPS, outside the CV radius the game is fine. Not sure if it is the same if the CV is lit I will test.

I have the same problem around CVs and the stutters also appear randomly at other areas like inland bases (such as the one I posted in this thread) but it is worse around CVs.

[VoX]

OK after testing, flying off a CV that has taken no damage, there are no stutters, getting near a CV fleet that has been damaged or the CV has been sunk I get the stutters.

[Chalenge]

Petite Freeze is back, but this time all of the usual suspects are not a factor.

[Pudgie]

Update:

All was good until I switched vid card drivers (Crimson 16.12.1-------->Crimson 16.12.2) to get fixes for ReLive installed.

Was playing last night and suddenly I got the std .5 sec screen pause then resume issue again.........never saw this again after installing the 16.12.1 drivers until now.

From looking at the Radeon WattMan GPU graphs I saw that the GPU activity% line was cycling back and forth between 0% to 100% activity w\ all other graph lines being straight but my MSI AB GPU usage% graph line didn't show any of this...........until I remembered that I had set MSI AB to use unified GPU usage monitoring (this cuts an average of the real time GPU usage%.....gives cleaner graph lines).
So I reset this in MSI AB then restarted MSI AB for it to take effect then ran AHIII Dx11 again, captured another screen freeze in the process then looked at the graph and now the cause is clear to see......the AMD driver is allowing the GPU to stop being used (but not stop running as the GPU clocks never slow down).....most likely due to the shaders doing most of the graphics rendering\AA work so the GPU activity will go to 0% until the GPU is needed to do some work, which is fine as long as the graphics frame buffer has enough finished frames left to flip to allow this GPU activity to get started back up and going to provide more frames before the last frame is displayed.

But this doesn't always happen in time...................so the screen will pause until the frames are provided in sequence again to be displayed....or lock down if the GPU never starts back up.

This appears to be a timing issue created within the AMD driver stack.....guessing this probably has something to do w\ power saving.

Gonna go into MSI AB and check the box to disable ULPS in AMD driver and see if this stops then (Fiji GPU's support ULPS).....................

Here is a graph that I ran thru MS Paint to highlight what I'm talking bout running AHIII Dx11 provided below.
Here is another graph that I ran running AHIII Dx9 for comparison........you can see that the GPU usage% on average stays much higher than it does under Dx11 and is main reason why I don't see screen pauses under Dx9 vs Dx11..................