The gumbo of stutters, pauses, freeze and other ingredients

[Skuzzy]

Thank you.  Good information.

[Pudgie]

Since I upgraded to this AMD Ryzen 7 1800X\Gigabyte AX370 Gaming K5 mobo using Win 10 Home I still get the screen pauses, but they are even more remote and infrequent than they were occuring on my Intel I7 5820K\Gigabyte X99M Gaming 5 mobo using Win 7 HP SP1 but I was thinking that this was mostly due to the Dx11 graphics adjustment y'all made to the AHIII client.

It's down to the point that now I may see 1 instance occur every 2 or 3 days of game play instead of 1-2 instances every gaming session.

FYI.

 

[ccvi]

If anyone runs into other things which seems to have cured the stutters, please post them in this thread, and I will incorporate them into this post.  Be sure to state the game version you are running (DX9, DX11 and version/patch level).

I've had had short freezes on releasing the radio transmit button. Cheap USB device, QX1002USB. Ever since, I've simply been running the windows7 audio recorder (SoundRecorder.exe) in the background, and the freezes are gone. Just made it a habbit of launching it together with stick mapping tool before running AH.

Since it's been a while now, just retried without running it, and stutters can still be reproduced like on day 1.

[Skuzzy]

I've had had short freezes on releasing the radio transmit button. Cheap USB device, QX1002USB. Ever since, I've simply been running the windows7 audio recorder (SoundRecorder.exe) in the background, and the freezes are gone. Just made it a habbit of launching it together with stick mapping tool before running AH.

Since it's been a while now, just retried without running it, and stutters can still be reproduced like on day 1.

There is not anything we can about that.  Have you made sure the USB port is powered all the time in Windows power management?

[ccvi]

There is not anything we can about that.  Have you made sure the USB port is powered all the time in Windows power management?

At least disallowed disabling to save power, and disabled selective power management.

I'm not expecting a solution (can never lose hope though), but just posted what has worked for me to solve the freezes I was seeing, because you were asking for anything that has helped. Running the recorder (recording not necessary) has worked perfectly reliably for me. Having the "recording" tab of the "sound" devices list open works, too. Just thought you might want to include it in your summarized list.

[JimmyC]

Dx11 still getting off stutter

[Pudgie]

Ran updater & updated to AHIII 3.01 Patch 3 then ran the game..............

Screen pauses are still showing up on my box.

Using the Dx11 version.

FYI

 

[JimmyD3]

Same here Pudgie, but the pauses are not as frequent.

[Wiley]

Ran DX11 for a bit last night, I only ran into one pause.  I saw no stutter but I happened not to spend much time near enemy bases.

Wiley.

[Bruv119]

Dx11 still getting off stutter

+1 when i read the notes I got a little excited that it may have been cured, worked ok for all of 5 minutes then a couple of pauses.   

[NatCigg]

Dx9 I'm getting freezes with a recovery frame rate at 30+ quickly improving to 59.

I can not pin to anything but seems to be with graphics loading.  I've got a slow gc so that could fit in the picture some how.

[Skuzzy]

Dx9 I'm getting freezes with a recovery frame rate at 30+ quickly improving to 59.

I can not pin to anything but seems to be with graphics loading.  I've got a slow gc so that could fit in the picture some how.

If it is in DX(, there is not much we can do about it as it usually means something is taking the CPU away from running the game.  A DXDIAG output might show something.

[RedBeard]

I have been doing some flight testing using DX9 version and had a major (multi-second) pause flying offline in the training arena.  The scenario was a spiral down from altitude and the pause occurred quite low the ground.  I was recording at the time, so you can see the pause in the instrument freeze.

[Pudgie]

Update:

Messing around this afternoon I got to thinking about this screen pausing\freezing issue some more then went back thru the saved MSI AB graphs that I had captured showing these screen freezes & I finally noticed that the CPU was also showing to slow down as well as the GPU when these would occur.

So I started AHIII Dx11 but instead of going online I went offline (to eliminate the Internet\Nighthawk\Intel LAN) and flew around for a while shooting at the drones trying to push my box as hard as I could then shut down & pulled up my MSI AB graphs of my box running and quickly noticed that the GPU frametime, FPS, CPU core usage graphs were showing the game to run extraordinarily smooth & very steady......when I compared these against the graphs that I snipped after online sessions this indicated to me that my CPU was getting hammered thru the connection which would be directly related to the setup of my Intel NIC so I went into the NIC settings & started making some setting changes then would go online, run the game from the same place on the map to try to maintain some semblance of consistency.

What I've found out is that I had made some setting changes that I thought were helping my connection get better but in the process actually had increased the amount of CPU utilization by a LOT & this excessively high CPU utilization just may have been the culprit that was causing the screen freezes. I'll continue to test after this but so far so good.

The LAN settings that I made corrections to are as follows:

Jumbo Packet Size---this setting will allow a packet to become larger than the std MTU packet size in order to reduce the amount of CPU utilization IF the routing equipment along the way supports this. I had set this to the max size of 9K thinking this would help since I have this Netgear Nighthawk AC1900 ADSL modem\router running 1Gb link speed....but found that this was actually hurting my connection by excessive packet fragmentation causing the CPU to waste cycles sorting all this out. I have now disabled this setting so that the packets will return back to the set MTU size of 1.5K or 1500. This made a BIG difference.

Packet Priority & VLAN--this setting enables priority sending & receiving of certain types of packets that are tagged for priority (QoS) or are tagged for use across a VLAN. I found this setting enabled to provide both priority & VLAN tagging.....so I disabled this as I don't operate a data center network that could use this & upon testing in-game noted my CPU utilization drop some more. Made more of a difference.

Transmit & Receive Buffers--these settings set the buffer size in system mem for the NIC to use when writing packet data that is to be transmitted out across the Internet (so the NIC can continue to process outgoing packet data w\o a buffer overrun) or storing data received from the Internet to allow the NIC to continue to receive incoming packet data while processing packet data that the CPU can then fetch the stored sequential packet data from this buffer w\o overrun. Typically I have set these to the largest buffer size allowed by the NIC driver...which was 2048 for both transmit & receive buffers but I reset these back to the default size of 256 for the receive buffer & 512 for the transmit buffer which seemed to help the CPU even more but it also showed to be a little too small as I started seeing warping show up on my end so I reset these buffers as follows: transmit buffer @ 1024 & receive buffer @ 512. After doing this my connection calmed down & all was smooth & steady w\ the running CPU thread usage hardly going over 55% & the GPU frametime graph line was showing the cleanest, smoothest graph line I have witnessed to date from my Team Red box & all was just beautiful..........so far I haven't witnessed a screen freeze\pause since doing all this.

Yep, we've been here before on other occasions so I will run this for some time to see if this was really the cause of this issue on my box. Can't explain why AHIII Dx9 client would run using my Intel LAN set up the way it was prior w\o screen pauses\freezes.........

If this does pan out to be true then I will be kicking myself for not checking this out earlier...................

FYI.......................... .

 

[Skuzzy]

I have been doing some flight testing using DX9 version and had a major (multi-second) pause flying offline in the training arena.  The scenario was a spiral down from altitude and the pause occurred quite low the ground.  I was recording at the time, so you can see the pause in the instrument freeze.

DX9 does not have the long pause issue we have had reports of in DX11.  If you are getting it in the DX9 version, then it is more than likely something else, which can be corrected.

Just need to start with a DXDIAG output and we can go from there.