A very rhythmic micro-stutter
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Most important tidbit: It seems to be in sync with heap stats in Console -> enter "showstats" -> go into Heap. This stutter is everpresent, from the beginning of the game and even during pause.
Is it fixable or is it a quirk of the engine?Win10, Intel i5-4590, AMD rx 560, latest drivers.
Recorded frametimes graph:
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Things I'd do in this order to find the issue:
- Reboot PC
- Try steam version
- Try FAF version without mods
- Update drivers, try rollback drivers (GPU at least), these preferrably with display driver uninstaller
- Update BIOS (or rollback if recently updated)
- Try fresh OS
- Try diff OS (e.g. if issues with Win 10, try Win 11 or 7)
- Start looking at potential HW issues
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I've also experienced this and the stutter originates from the garbage collection. We reduced it quite a bit in 2022 and 2023, but we're no where complete. The game creates a lot of garbage that it doesn't have to. And by far majority of it originates from Lua.
It is fixable, but it requires to make various changes that are incompatible with a lot of (UI) mods. And once you go down that route you'll alienate a large chunk of the community.
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Don't think it should be that obvious in frametimes as for the OP?
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@jip That sounds like a depressing situation.
But if faf continues to update and improve, perhaps more new mod creators will join in, creating more compatible ui mods, or improving old ui mods to make them compatible with new games. -
@giebmasse said in A very rhythmic micro-stutter:
Don't think it should be that obvious in frametimes as for the OP?
That depends on your processor. If it is fast, then you barely notice it and they turn into micro-stutters. A lot of YouTube videos of the game show these stutters.
@zhanghm18 said in A very rhythmic micro-stutter:
But if faf continues to update and improve, perhaps more new mod creators will join in, creating more compatible ui mods, or improving old ui mods to make them compatible with new games.
I'm afraid that we can not base a strategy like this on hope. By alienating the current player base we're guaranteed to lose players and the contributors responsible are also guaranteed to receive quite a bit of flak for it which doesn't quite boost the morale of said contributors.
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I had a 3570k few years back, any microstutters I had were due to SW or HW issues, IMO they shouldn't be that noticeable.
Hence my listed suggestions to test if they can be removed. -
Okay, for posterity sake, you were right.
The two fixes helped me:
-Debloating AMD driver with "Radeon Software Slimmer". In particular, removing the Recording module. It does not surprise me, as AMD Recording never worked properly on my machine and crashed games half of the times I've tried to use it.
-Setting FPS-cap back from 100fps to 75 fps. While game can maintain ~100fps, in many cases it also causes 100% utilization of one of the cores. And when it does hit 100% utilization, every micro-stutter hits x10 harder. Monitoring per-core utilization is a good way to ensure optimal FPS-cap.
After that, the micro-stutter from memory garbage collection is indeed not that noticeable, subjectively.
While its still far from being a butter-smooth experience, its very much good enough to be enjoyable
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@Jip Do we know what UI mods would be affected and how? Maybe we can pre-patch them or create new ones. Just a thought.
