The gumbo of stutters, pauses, freeze and other ingredients

[JimmyD3]

Here is acreen shot of the Net spikes Offline when keying the Vox.....

[SKOzone]

I had the same experience during last Friday's FSO as described by Morfiend. Until the bandits showed up and started shooting, everything was smooth as silk. Suddenly, the mini-freezes became so rampant that I couldn't really defend myself.

SKOzone.

[SKOzone]

DXDIAG attached....

[Bizman]

DXDIAG attached....

You might want to disable the Intel video chip in Bios, if possible.

[Skuzzy]

I am wondering if this has something to do with background services or processes running.  It's very strange because back in early September, when I first purchased the new PC for AH3, I had zero problems with stutters and I am only now getting them after several update roll-outs.  The stutters are reminiscent of back when I used to play MS Flight Simulator and automatic updates were on scanning for updates, Windows Defender was scanning in the background, and Windows was sending/receiving information in the background.  Even thought I have all of these things turned off along with unnecessary services and background processes.  I am going to do a fresh installation of Windows 10 and see what happens.  If almost everyone is experiencing these issues it is most likely the game, but there are members of my squad with graphics maxxed our who are not experiencing these problems.  I'll let you know my findings, and please share anything new you all uncover.  <S> 

That has been the biggest problem for us.  We cannot duplicate it on any of our computer systems.  I cannot duplicate these issue on my home system either.  HiTech has played several hours in events and online as well as Waffle and cannot duplicate the stutters.

That is why we have been asking for so films.  To date, there has not been anything in common with any of the films we have gotten.  It is perplexing.

Now, with Windows 10, I have found numerous complaints, all over the Internet, concerning stutters in many games.  With the way Microsoft does updates, we cannot pin that one down either.

It is a frustrating issue, for everyone.

[Randy1]

I experimented with the AMD HDMI scaling.  When I slide the slider all the way to the right, my best guess is it reduced the length of the stutters.  This is so subjective, I cannot be sure of the test results. 

That has been the biggest problem for us.  We cannot duplicate it on any of our computer systems.  I cannot duplicate these issue on my home system either.  HiTech has played several hours in events and online as well as Waffle and cannot duplicate the stutters.

That is why we have been asking for so films.  To date, there has not been anything in common with any of the films we have gotten.  It is perplexing.

Now, with Windows 10, I have found numerous complaints, all over the Internet, concerning stutters in many games.  With the way Microsoft does updates, we cannot pin that one down either.

It is a frustrating issue, for everyone.

Skuzzy, does anyone at HTC run W10?

[popeye]

Seeing freezes in DX9 today.  When releasing ord from aircraft and at random times driving cross country in M3.

[Pudgie]

That has been the biggest problem for us.  We cannot duplicate it on any of our computer systems.  I cannot duplicate these issue on my home system either.  HiTech has played several hours in events and online as well as Waffle and cannot duplicate the stutters.

That is why we have been asking for so films.  To date, there has not been anything in common with any of the films we have gotten.  It is perplexing.

Now, with Windows 10, I have found numerous complaints, all over the Internet, concerning stutters in many games.  With the way Microsoft does updates, we cannot pin that one down either.

It is a frustrating issue, for everyone.

Hi Skuzzy,

After reading your post I just got a thought...................... .......

Since on the systems that y'all are running y'all can't duplicate what the rest of us are seeing it may be a help to us if y'all could post the pertinent configuration settings of these computers so that they can be used as a baseline reference for the rest of us to use to check our configurations against to see if we're missing something on our end.....like the processes and services side for starters but other items as well (w\o putting out anything proprietary to HTC's business, of course). I know I've gone thru my box SEVERAL times checking\looking for anything that could be lending to this issue but can't find anything out of place to date.

Just to share, while playing Friday night I had the game suddenly stop on me but I also got a dialog box stating that the host connection was lost then shutdown. Got to checking and noticed that my box had lost connection w\ the Internet, then saw it trying to reconnect, then lose it again, then try to reconnect, etc (have been seeing this behavior off & on for the last month). Was gonna call Centurylink to inquire but thought to check my Zoom X7N ADSL modem\router\WAP 1st and found that it had dropped the service. Went to cycle power to restart modem and found that the power switch itself & the switch latch on the X7N had burnt out of it so the modem powered off and shut down, then suddenly power back up & attempt to reconnect then once I pushed the power button to cycle power the button wouldn't latch anymore to hold the switch in to provide power. Went to Best Buy Sat morning & got a Netgear Nighthawk AC1900 D7000 WiFi ADSL\VDSL modem\router to replace the Zoom unit. Got all up and running....now I've got true 1000M LAN speed vs 100M but the weather wasn't helping (raining so warping was present) but from all this I'm not seeing the total freeze ups now....back to the occasional .5 sec freeze then resume pattern I was reporting earlier............ On 1 occasion a freeze came in conjunction w\ a player keying a mic, 1 freeze came out of nowhere and the last 1 came w\ a bunch of players massed @ A37.....this was 3 freezes within 2 1\2 hrs of gameplay all from running AHIII Patch 9 Dx11 version.

So part of my freeze\pause issue was coming from my Zoom X7N ADSL modem\router breaking down\going out on me along w\ the USB power management issue............
Now w\ this Netgear Nighthawk AC1900 I have a lot of options at my disposal to tune\tweak the LAN that I didn't have w\ the Zoom X7N so I'll be doing some more tweaking to see if I can tune the Internet side a little better.

At least I got an improvement to my total system out of all this.......can't be all bad.........

 

 

[N95KF]

What I have found to help (not fix) is using the NVidia control panel (possibly likewise for AMD) to set AA and AF.  I set the anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering, and maximum pre-rendered frames to = 1.  This helps not only stutters a bit, but also improved input lag for me. 

[Pudgie]

What I have found to help (not fix) is using the NVidia control panel (possibly likewise for AMD) to set AA and AF.  I set the anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering, and maximum pre-rendered frames to = 1.  This helps not only stutters a bit, but also improved input lag for me. 

Hi N95KF,

I also have had AF set up in Crimson drivers @ 16x for quite some time as from testing w\ it enabled vs disabled it seems to give a little better depth perception at distance thus better gunnery at distance out to a point for me & since AF doesn't provide any FPS performance hit to use so I use it. Don't really know for sure if AHIII is providing AF or not in it's code..........

As for AA I have experimented w\ using the Crimson driver side AA (GPU applied) recently which gave markedly improved graphics imagery vs the in-game FXAA (post-process AA applied thru shaders...GPU offloaded) but at this time would work only w\ the AHIII Dx11 version as when driver side AA is used w\ the AHIII Dx9 version the game becomes unplayable due to the excessive overhead derived from Dx9, FPS down less than 10 w\ macro stuttering....w\ AHIII Dx11 I saw virtually no FPS performance hit using driver side AA vs in-game post processed FXAA. I've got MSI AB graphs to verify what I have posted here as well.

As for max pre-rendered frames set @ 1, this is called Flip Quere in Radeon land & since Crimson 15.12 series AMD has changed this to be set from the old setting of 3 to 1 (don't have access to this setting from Radeon Settings....wish we did) so this has already been done to improve control input lag...if you're using an AMD graphics card that these Crimson drivers will work with. The absolute best GPU tweaking utility ever made for Radeon cards was Radeon Pro by John Maturi but can't be used now since AMD rewrote Radeon Settings in MS QT Framework (Radeon Pro was written in MS .NET Framework which was used for AMD Catalyst Control Center so it could hook into the Catalyst drivers and open up all the very same settings and more in Radeon drivers that are\were accessible to Nvidia owners thru NVCP and Nvidia Inspector utility back in the day). Since Crimson 16 series AMD has added Shader Cache and just recently w\ Crimson 16.11.2 drivers AMD has increased the Shader Cache cache size limit to improve on this even more. Slowly AMD is getting there..............

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

 

 

[Pudgie]

Just got done tweaking my Bigfoot Killer NIC since replacing my Zoom X7N w\ the Netgear Nighthawk AC1900 by enabling Jumbo packet & set for 9K (max size) and upped the receive & transmit buffers to the max size (2048 for receive from 512, 1024 for transmit from 256) since I now have Gigabit LAN speeds and this Killer NIC is a Gigabit capable NIC and has handshook w\ the Nighthawk at 1 Gigabit...........

Vast performance improvement across the LAN now.............getting all this across 70' of Cat 5e cable to boot!

Glad I ran it under the house instead of in the attic......have 0 electrical interference as there are no AC electrical circuits nowhere near the cable.

Will test later to see if this helps AHIII Dx11 out w\ the freezes\pauses if Internet-related........

Gonna go reset the NIC on the wife's box now..........

 

[SKOzone]

The only consistent thing I've noticed is when I experience a "mini freeze" (1/2 second or so), my FPS drops from 60 to 40 or less, and then pops back up. When I check NET STATUS, I always see a corresponding spike in the "Variance Delay" window, but I have no idea what "variance delay" means.

SKOzone

[Chalenge]

It's normal for your fps to drop for a moment when you encounter things like this.

Today I started playing with the Nvidia Control Panel settings and the biggest improvement has come from the setting "Maximum Pre-Rendered Frames." This option has five settings. You can set it to "Use the application setting," or choose from 1 to 4 frames. The higher the setting the smoother the result, except there may be some input lag that develops (although it will never be as bad as the input lag I get when I encounter a freeze). This may be intended to help with frame stuttering, but seems to help here too. When I had my NVCP set to application setting I was getting freezes up to 50 frames, or 50/60th of a second. At a setting of 4 I got what I think was input lag, but it was hardly noticeable, so I went with 3 and it seems to be working well.

I may put up a video explaining all of those settings now that we are out of beta.

[Pudgie]

It is just amazing at how many of these old graphics driver tweaks are still relevant even w\ today's hardware.
I remember back in the ATI days you could set the Flip Quere size thru the ATI control panel just as Nvidia has allowed the pre-rendered frames to be set thru the NVCP since the ForceWare driver era back during the 6000 series & up cards.......

Why AMD decided to remove this type of access to the drivers code to allow consumers to adjust stuff to better enhance GPU performance thru the graphics card's CP is beyond me and IMHO is 1 of the main reasons why AMD is in the position it's in today concerning graphics card performance as the actual hardware isn't bad at all but the choices made to set settings at the driver level to the levels that were chosen caused a fair amount of unwarranted GPU performance loss....especially w\ game titles that weren't developed w\ usage on an AMD graphics card and the nuances of it's driver stack in mind.

Sometimes trying to be different isn't the best way forward...............

 

 

[Dobs]

Just flew for 25 minutes offline DX11....no screen freezes.

Can someone else validate that please.