Hey theres, I'm not sure where to post this, but since I see a lot of activity in this forum department and since I'm an ATi video card owner, I'll just post it here. I'm encountering an odd issue in several Unreal-Engine games that I cannot solve nor understand. Frontlines, Homefront, Lost Planet 3 and Bulletstorm have an annoying little issue where their graphics hitch every ~20 seconds. The hitches are evenly timed and very consistent - they occur exactly at predictable intervals (like stated before - one hitch every 20 secs or so). It almost looks like several missing frames, it looks worse than one missing frame, but still happens quite quickly and couldn't be called a mini-freeze according to my definitions. It certainly doesn't render the games unplayable, but certainly unenjoyable to me. The Alien Breed series exhibit the same issue, but do it every ~10 seconds instead. I also have Afterfall Insanity, Bioshock, Bioshock Infinite, Brothers, Dishonored, Epoch, Magrunner, Mass Effect 2, Mass Effect 3, Singularity and Spec Ops: The Line installed, which are all based on the Unreal-Engine and all perform near flawless. Most other games I have installed (not based on the Unreal-Engine) run without any issues as well (Bionic Commando, Gunslinger, Castlevania, Crysis 2, Dead Space 1-3, Devil May Cry 4, Deus Ex HR, Fear 3, Hard Reset, Kingdoms of Amalur, Mars War Logs, Payday 1 & 2, Rage, Resident Evil 5, 6 & Revelations, Risen, Strider, Syndicate, Terminator Salvation, Darkness 2, The fall, Trine 1 & 2, Two Worls 2 and Wolfenstein 2009). I'm used at gaming stutter-free. That means v-sync is enabled at 60fps/60Hz (or sometimes 50fps/50Hz if my pc can't keep up) all the time, with the only exception being a small load-stutter here and there. All mentioned games perform great with regards to framerate, yet I can't get Frontlines, Homefront, Lost Planet 3, Bulletstorm and the Alien Breed series to run acceptable. I'm really annoyed by this timed hitch. The issue becomes way less noticeable when v-sync is disabled (but is still there), but I find that unsatisfying. I want to play with v-sync on, fps capped, and with smooth mouse polling. I tried several drivers (8.97beta, 12.10, 13.4, 13.8beta2, 13.12, 14.4, 14.6 and 14.7beta). I tried capping the framerate slightly higher and slightly lower than my refreshrate. I tried adjusting the polling rate of my mouse. I tried disabling RadeonPro, tried running the games on less cores, tried them with and without triple buffering, tried using Dxtory fps cap instead of the Unreal smoothframerate setting or RadeonPro, played around with various internal timers (HPET, platformclock, TicBooster), set them to borderless fullscreen instead of regular, tried playing them on 50Hz, 59Hz, 60Hz, 64Hz & 75Hz, tried the old FPS_Limiter tool, tried running them in compatibility modes and via DisplayChanger, tried running the games with and without Steam, tried illegal cracked versions of the affected games, I tried enabling/disabling my second monitor, DX9 and DX10, disabling sound - nothing has any effect on the timed hitches. My pc is clean. I only have 35 programs running at most in Task Manager, including RadeonPro, Ati Tray Tools and my Logitech gaming Software. Everything is up to date. No services other than the bare essentials are running. Disabling RadeonPro, Ati Tray Tools and the Logitech Gaming Software does not make a difference. I have also checked GPU-Z, CPU-Z and Hardware Monitor while gaming - nothing out of the ordinary. The affected games seem so stubborn, nothing affects the hitch and nothing explains why it is happening. It's almost as if the games are polling once every x seconds, or maybe the driver is dumping shader caches and rebuilding, I dunno. I do know what the bulk of games I own run great, just these couple of rotten apples that I can't get to run right. The exact same issue occurs on my brother's pc with the Alien Breeds, Lost Planet 3 and Bulletstorm (have not tried Homefront nor Frontlines, but I'm sure it's the same). His PC is almost identical to mine, but slightly slower. The issue also occurs on my buddy's system with Bulletstorm, but is less noticeable because (I presume) his processors and RAM are faster and more plentiful than mine, so the hitch is of shorter duration. I have not tried the other games on his system (Intel i5, nVidia 560). I think if you would test this on an i7, the hitch might happen so quickly it will actually become unnoticeable, so preferably verify this on a comparable system. Does anybody have any idea what might be causing it? Or any suggestions on stuff I have yet to try?
Thanks, did not think of disc access. I'll monitor those later tonight. I have a Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 7200 RPM by the way, nothing fancy and certainly no SSD, but I read good things about its speed and quality.
U3E has some ****ty texture streaming, it could be just that in those games. You can try this tweak if it lowers it. http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=389072 Sometimes higher pagepool fixes it too, but you need to tweak game cfg.ini files.
@op sorry I do not have this problem on the games you mentioned.HDD or SSD runs pretty much the same. But one I do. Not trying to go off topic way too much Tell me your secrets on Bioshock infinite. Kills me with hitching and bad shading,I can not play the game yet. Tried on 780TI SLI and R9 290 crossfire. @Tj Thanks for the tips ,but for me I just can not get it to work.Such a shame on a good game. Again sorry for going OT but if anyone has a solution for stuff like this in Bioshock infinite and hitching fix.Thanks. Redline shows where shading fails its a big square.I was able to fix this on other games.
Monitored quite extensively, the issue is unrelated to disc access. Already tried all the Unreal Engine tweaks as well and then some. Literally tried changing most of them one by one in many games. although some of them have really helped with improving the load stutters, none of them help with the timed hitches. Gerard, you have tested frontlines, homefront, bulletstorm, Lost Planet 3 and the Alien Breeds? Or just one of them? You can confirm you have no slight hitch every x seconds when panning the view? I cannot really help with the shadow line in Infinite. Many games have similar shadow cut off lines (for lack of a better term). You can make it less obvious though, I prefer setting those shadows to high instead of very high or ultra, since on high the issue becomes less noticeable and I also like the crispier look better. I still havent progressed far in the game yet, despite owning it for quite some time. I would like to finish BioShock 1 first. I did take a quick tour, went up the clouds, got baptised, took a short stroll, saw the parade. There were still some very slight load stutters (when passing the last column near the preacher before turning to the right to open the door to the city, and when passing the mechanical horse just before the parade), but nothing worse than what I would expect, nothing worse than in other games. The stutters were a lot worse when I just got the game, but this is what helped me: To make Bioshock Infinite run as stutter free as possible, make sure you're at least on the 13.12 drivers. Later is okey too if it works (I get a blackscreen with Infinite using anything after 13.12). All drivers before 13.12 lack a fix that takes care of loadtimes, at least on my card (13.12 really improved loadtimes in a lot of games on my 6950, including all Unreal Engine games). Make sure Infinite is fully updated - one of the later patches offers an important fix that took care of many stutter issues. None of those poolsize tweaks ever worked for me in any Unreal Engine game, only made things worse. I did find some lines that do consistently provide a benefit on my system however. Check XEngine.ini (Documents\My Games\BioShock Infinite\XGame\Config), find the following lines and make sure they look like this (copied from mine): MipFadeInSpeed0=0.0 MipFadeOutSpeed0=0.0 MipFadeInSpeed1=0.0 MipFadeOutSpeed1=0.0 DisableATITextureFilterOptimizationChecks=False UseMinimalNVIDIADriverShaderOptimization=False bInitializeShadersOnDemand=TRUE UseTextureFileCache=TRUE bAllowMultiThreadedShaderCompile=True OnlyStreamInTextures=False OneFrameThreadLag=True bSmoothFrameRate=TRUE MaxSmoothedFrameRate=60 [or whatever your refreshrate is] I'm not sure anymore what the defaults are, so make a backup first. I'm also not sure why some are in caps and some aren't, I guess it won't make a difference, but that's how it looks for me. I use the above lines in every Unreal Engine game and they work wonders, especially OneFrameThreadLag and bInitializeShadersOnDemand can notably influence stuttering (entering the main menu in Dishonored is hitch free now!!). Most should be at the correct value by default, but not all values are and not in all games. You can also try adjusting MaxDeltaTime=x to MaxDeltaTime=0.016666 (when playing at 60fps) or MaxDeltaTime=0.02 (when playing at 50fps). I think it's 0.008333 for 120fps, but havent tested that yet due to lack of a capable monitor. This setting will time engine and game events at the same interval as your framerate (might help with timing stutters, but stuff will go in slowmo if you do not meet the target frame rate). If you use an external program to cap your fps, don't. The one that comes with Unreal is the best. How is the performance in the beginning for you? If I get some slight but noticeable quick skips when I pass the mechanical horse to see the parade, will I get worse stutters at other spots? Or is that as bad as it's gonna get?
