Fortnite stuttering - fixed

I noticed while running on a fresh install of Windows 10 1803 and just the game / drivers, it starts hitching after about 30 minutes of play. Friends reported the same thing, so I spent last weekend testing some bits and I found the problem.

Drivers from 387.92+ cause the graphics card to have clear and consistent frame drops after the game has been running longer than about 30 minutes. If you look at your GPU on task manager while on the mission select / map screen, you can see the hitching every few seconds.



My framerate drops from 144 with gSync down to 20 at these moments, resulting in hitching / stuttering. It does this in game too, but more randomly than the mission select screen.

I have tried: 387.92, 388.13, 388.43, 388.71, 390.65, 390.77 and 397.31. And a fresh build of windows twice. It seems that drivers from 387.xx upwards contribute to this strange issue where the game gradually degrades in performance the longer you play.

To fix it, I have to use 385.69. Using that driver with the current build of Fortnite doesn't produce stuttering. My framerate stays at 144 on the mission select screen, and it varies up and down smoothly while playing the game. I played 5 hours straight last Sunday, no problems.

I also tested this theory on my Alienware laptop (build 1709 ) to rule out my desktop hardware being the cause, and I get identical results. 385.69 is the newest (older) driver I can use that doesn't cause constant stuttering / hitching.
I didn't bother testing any drivers older than 385.69, because I would like to have the most up-to-date driver possible... Unfortunately this is it!

I forgot to save the GPU screenshots in between Windows reloads on my desktop.. the shot above is from my laptop to show the constant frequency of hitching, and here it is fixed with 385.69 on desktop.



The hitching "V" on the task manager was a lot deeper on the 1080Ti, dropping to around 60% I think because the framerate was much higher than the laptop (144 vs about 75). Both drop to around 20 when this hitching starts to happen.

Hardware:
Desktop i7 5820K, GeForce 1080Ti, 16GB RAM
Alienware i7 4710MQ, Geforce 860M SLi, 8GB RAM

 

Only happening on the newest windows build or you try another version already? I was thinking about it too, after some times the games seems to sttuter without a reason just like that, but im in Windows 8.1 with a GTX 650.

 

The version on my Alienware is 1709, I haven't pressed the button to upgrade it yet. Should have mentioned it I'll edit to acknowledge that.

 

I already downloaded 385.69, gonna do some tests today and come back here to post my results, im currently in 388.84.

 

Im testing at this moment, seems ok with The Evil Within 2 (the king of optimization xD), playing WoW right now, all seems very smooth, gonna test others games in a while.

 

Nice I'm mostly playing coop games at the moment - Dying Light runs perfect, Killing Floor 2 as well. I need to reinstall the rest of my steam library at some point, however I'm mostly playing Fortnite (save the world) so I'm in no rush to do this right now.

I don't remember seeing any problems in other games with latest drivers, but since 90% of my game time is Fortnite this stuttering really started to bug me! I thought it must be the game engine or my O/S or something, because the Nvidia drivers 390.65 specifically said "provides the optimal gaming experience for Fortnite". I have to wonder what optimal experience they refer to, since this bug pre-dates that driver, and continues to the latest one...?

Anyway, my coop buddies on team Nvidia have made this change and reported that all is well. The one person who uses Ryzen and a Vega64 said there was zero stuttering for him, and that's what got me thinking.. maybe it's not the game or Windows, it must be something else.

Windows 10 has a habit of updating Nvidia drivers if you use older ones, maybe Windows 8.1 does too? I use a WSUS box on an old server, so I can prevent this easily but if you have problems with automatic updates undoing all your work this will solve it https://www.howtogeek.com/263851/ho...from-automatically-updating-specific-drivers/

 

Interesting... I'll give this a spin when time permits, thanks!

 

What's most annoying is the fact that pre 4.0 patch there was zero blurry textures; now it looks like they reduced MIPs so we get more pop-in and lower LOD

VRAM usage is <3GB on a 11GB card.

 

I tested last night the new ones and got more sttuters and TDR's randomly. Reverted back to 385.69 and all games runs better, even FFXV Benchmark runs flawless compared to previous drivers, 390 drivers are not so good in my case at least xD i always deactivate Windows Update, only using it to manually update Windows or something else so i dont get any surprise xD

 

lol snap! I had a go of the new drivers this morning and found the same thing as you, more stuttering / hitching. I'll stick with 385.69 and get some Fortnite in this weekend. Friends should be online any minute now, time to get a cold beer! Enjoy the weekend *runs to fridge*

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/FortNiteBR...oure_getting_tired_of_your_game_looking_like/

 

Title says fixed but all I see is a workaround by downgrading drivers. Am I missing something?

This looks a lot like the stuttering bugs many have been reporting in recent drivers (although it's hard to say without frametime graphs and without comparing the performance with power monitoring disabled). I've been discussing it in the new driver threads and nvidia are aware of it, have replicated it and are working on it (although there's no mention of it in the driver notes)

 

to make the game look a lot sharper I disable in game aa looks like crap and use NVidia control panel aa not the fxaa option though you still have jaggies but a lot more tolerable than blurro vision.

 

I'm not referring to post processing.

I mean low LOD popin, where textures in building look like crap when you zoom in on them with a sniper or sometimes even when you're walking up to them.

LOD on xbone X is better likely due to allocating more resources to VRAM.

No option on PC, you only see mid 2GB usage

 

What about other games then ? there are stuttering there also ? does this driver fix the issue ?

 

Thanks, i'll give this a try!

 

Can confirm that going to this older driver works.

Can also confirm that it's not a Driver issue, as this issue started during Fortnite Patch 4.0/4.1 and i used a newer driver than 385.69 before that.

They changed something around Patch 4.0/4.1 that caused this to happen.

 

On the latest patch with latest driver no problems with fortnite

 

My GTX680m 4GB laptop was crashing within a few minutes of getting in-game in Fortnite.

I finally found the solution to fix this problem on a Ruclip video.

Craig Lister found his fix to be to run Fortnite without running the Epic Launcher at all. Instead, close Epic Launcher (or don't run it at all) and run the Fortnite Launcher instead found here; C:\EpicGames\Fortnite\FortniteGames\Binaries\Win64\FortniteLauncher

Now my laptop can play Fortnite without crashing.

 

You sure you have the game open for 2 hours or more, because only then you will start to notice the hiccups, and they get worse the longer the game is running.