Stutter during gaming on Samsung 960 Pro or other NVMe drives

Discussion in 'Games, Gaming & Game-demos' started by Carfax, Aug 21, 2017.

  1. Carfax

    Carfax Ancient Guru

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    OK, where to begin. I recently bought a Samsung 960 Pro 1TB model to replace my 850 Pro 1TB that I've been using for the past few years. Everything went smooth during the installation, and Samsung Magician recognized that my 960 Pro was connected using PCIe 3.0 4x like it's supposed to. I also have the latest Samsung NVMe drivers, 2.2 installed. Regular day to day performance as far as boot up time and loading applications is faster than it's ever been thanks to the new SSD, and my synthetic benchmarks are all in order and appear normal.

    [​IMG]

    Anyway, I've noticed that I'm getting a lot of stuttering in certain games, much more than I was previously. For instance, Witcher 3 is no longer a smooth game, and the storage access light on my case lights up like a fricking Christmas tree when Geralt is moving, especially in highly populated areas like Novigrad. Batman Arkham Knight is the same thing, though not as bad as the Witcher 3.

    I know it has something to do with the drive, as I still have my old 850 Pro with a full Windows 10 install plus all the games. So I reinstalled the 850 pro, keeping the same UEFI settings and confirmed that everything was back to normal ie no stuttering.

    My question is, have any other NVMe owners noticed this? Or have I made some mistake with the setup as this is my first NVMe drive?

    Another possibility that I've thought of is that it's possible that since NVMe is a relatively new I/O protocol, the vast majority of games' asset loading is probably still optimized for slower protocols like SATA.

    Any help or advice would be much appreciated thanks!
     
  2. Carfax

    Carfax Ancient Guru

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    I did some further testing, and Doom and Mass Effect Andromeda are both normal. I also checked Batman Arkham Knight on my old 850 Pro, and the stuttering was there as well so I'm pretty sure it's just the game. The only abnormality is the Witcher 3.

    I'm going to request that the mods move this thread to the storage sub forums. The only reason I posted it here was because it had more to do with gaming I thought. Oh well.
     
  3. Carfax

    Carfax Ancient Guru

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    Problem solved. It was the indexing service that was causing the problem. :) Thank God I figured it out, as it was driving me nuts!
     
  4. jbmcmillan

    jbmcmillan Guest

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    Did it get enabled on it's own because I thought that was disabled by default with ssd's?
     

  5. Carfax

    Carfax Ancient Guru

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    No it's not disabled by default with SSDs, so you have to turn it off manually. At any rate, it wasn't a solution to the problem. I still get micro stuttering when the Witcher 3 is installed on my 960 Pro. I conferred with kx11 who was kind enough to test the Witcher 3 on his Samsung 950 Pro, and he said he gets stuttering as well.

    At this point, I'm certain it's just the engine that's causing this problem. The Witcher 3 engine (Red Engine 3) is already prone to stuttering because of how it deals with assets. Shaders for example, are compiled in game (which is the number one cause of stuttering) unlike most other engines which do shader compilation during loading screens. Some game engines that do shader compiling during game time typically are well threaded and so they can use additional CPU cycles to do it without impacting performance. With the Red Engine 3 though, the game is limited to four threads only, so shader compilation has to be shared with other threads which are already tasked with doing something else. And then to pile on even more, the engine's streaming is single threaded and very slow, both of which play havoc with the NVMe protocol which loads data in larger chunks but at a lower pace compared to SATA, and loves parallel reads which can saturate its bandwidth.

    So basically I'm very disappointed right now with the Witcher 3 engine. The game is fantastic, but the engine itself is pure garbage and not worthy of being used for a AAA title. :mad:
     
  6. sverek

    sverek Guest

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    You seem not to be alone:
    https://forums.cdprojektred.com/for...ech-support/9357411-witcher-3-and-nvme-drives

    Try sharing your issue on official forums, maybe devs notice and address this issue or at least you get help from fellow members.
     
  7. Agent-A01

    Agent-A01 Ancient Guru

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  8. Carfax

    Carfax Ancient Guru

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    LOL, I was the one that posted that :D And sure enough, nobody has replied to that topic yet. There aren't too many gamers with NVMe drives around, as they are still costly.
     
  9. Carfax

    Carfax Ancient Guru

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    Oh great, you're the perfect person to talk to then since if I recall properly, you have an X99 motherboard as well. Is there any special thing you can recommend to me as far as UEFI BIOS config, or in Windows?

    Also, regarding the stuttering issue in Witcher 3, most people might confuse it with the shader compilation issue I referred to earlier. If you have shader cache enabled though, that solves that problem very well. But the stuttering I was suffering from was a very subtle micro stutter, that would just not fricking go away!! :mad:

    If you don't have it, I'm wondering if my SSD is defective or something, or maybe I don't have the right settings enabled in the UEFI. Samsung magician shows that it's connected to PCIe 3.0 4x, and that I'm running the latest firmware. I really didn't see any particular setting in my Asus X99 A II motherboard for NVMe in particular though.
     
  10. Agent-A01

    Agent-A01 Ancient Guru

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    Carfax likes this.

  11. BuildeR2

    BuildeR2 Ancient Guru

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    If your "old" SATA SSD is still installed somewhere in you current system, just install and play the game from that drive? If not, look at that W3 tweaker and work with Agent-A01 to figure out some NVME settings.
     
  12. Martigen

    Martigen Master Guru

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    Long shot, but does the NVME interface use Message Signaled Interrupts? You can force MSI mode on PCI-E devices with a little program.
     
  13. Carfax

    Carfax Ancient Guru

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    Every time I disabled CSM, it caused instability on my machine. For instance, when I had CSM disabled and tried to install Windows, I always got a Machine Check Exception BSOD during the installation. Also I can't disable the Asmedia USB 3.1 ports, as I need them.

    Thanks for the offer. I'm going to take you up on it later, when I have more time.

    I remember when I did my first and second play through that I used to do some ini tweaks for the Witcher 3, but I don't know whether they were effective or not. I may have to revisit them again.
     
  14. Carfax

    Carfax Ancient Guru

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    That's what I'm doing now. But I think it's possible that I may have found the root cause of the stuttering. First a bit of background. I installed Gears of War 4 yesterday, and I started playing. Everything was fine, but I noticed some occasional severe lag in some of the cutscenes (the video ones), and also in a gameplay segment when the main character was moving quickly across the level. At this point, I was furious! :mad: I was practically certain my SSD was defective now, because when I had Gears of War 4 on my 850 Pro, these issues never occurred.

    Then I decided to try one more thing. I disabled my Logitech Gaming Software completely, and miraculously, that solved the problems with Gears of War 4! Only problem is though, that I already uninstalled Witcher 3 from my 960 Pro, and I'm honestly not even in the mood to install it again considering how much I went through trying to diagnose the micro stuttering issue. So while I can't say for a fact that the Logitech Gaming Software caused my problems with the Witcher 3, I can say for certain that it fixed my problems with Gears of War 4, which was even worse because it was major lag!

    This really soured my opinion on Logitech though. I have been buying Logitech products for years, and I currently own a Logitech G910 mechanical keyboard and a G502 gaming mouse. And while the hardware has always been great. the software has become more and more bloated over the years. This isn't the first time I've had a problem like this with their gaming software. I remember a few years ago I had an issue with Watch Dogs on my G19 which caused stuttering, and this was due to the Logitech gaming software.
     
  15. Carfax

    Carfax Ancient Guru

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    I have no idea. This is the first time I've heard of message signaled interrupts.
     

  16. BuildeR2

    BuildeR2 Ancient Guru

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    Oh yeah, I had forgotten about that! Several years ago I had the same thing play out with a couple games. I'll have to try that out again for Gears 4 as that's what my buddy and I are doing right now.

    He is talking about using this small but awesome utility made by our own mbk1969. Download it, run it, put the NVMe drive or controller in MSI mode if it isn't already, reboot and hope for no BSOD. Make a backup/system restore before trying this, obviously. You can tell what devices are already in MSI mode by the fact that they will have a negative IRQ number.

    https://forums.guru3d.com/threads/windows-line-based-vs-message-signaled-based-interrupts.378044/
     
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  17. Agent-A01

    Agent-A01 Ancient Guru

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    Drivers for 960 enable this by default, but you should make sure every other device that is able to run MSI mode is enabled.

    Trying to install 960Pro as the main OS?

    I had the same issue and decided to just use the 850 1TB sata for the OS install and have my apps/games on the 960.

    CSM enabled means you are running in legacy mode, not exactly optimal.
     
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  18. Emille

    Emille Guest

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    I use a 950 pro. I have used it for 2 windows installs and use it for gaming also. Zero stutter in any games including with witcher 3 maxed out including hairworks hbao+ etc at 4k. 60 frames at all times anywhere in the game except for in novigrad at the top of the hill presumably when there is a lot of ai stuff going on and insane draw distance where it goes down to 45 for a few seconds. Still no stuttering.

    I just turn off the usual superfetch/indexing stuff that is recommended for an ssd as I have always done on my past sata drives and this drive.
     
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  19. Carfax

    Carfax Ancient Guru

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    Yeah I always do that. I prefer to have everything on one drive. The only other drives I have in my system are two 600GB raptors which I use for video storage.

    I find the whole CSM thing very confusing. When I first installed Windows 10 with CSM disabled, it worked! Everything ran smooth. But when I tried to do a Windows file integrity check, it failed. And then I tried to do chkdsk and that failed with a machine check exception. It took another install before I figured out that CSM being disabled was actually causing it.

    But after I read your post, I went back into the UEFI and disabled CSM again. It booted up fine, and when I did a sfc /scannow file integrity check, it passed :confused:

    So I don't know what's different now, but CSM disabled seems to work fine for me.
     
  20. Carfax

    Carfax Ancient Guru

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    I really think that my Logitech Gaming Software was the cause of my problems. I can't verify it though until I install Witcher 3 again, which I will probably do some time down the road as I have other games I'm playing at the moment.
     

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