We need to talk about UE4 Shader compilation issues

Funny to mention he had stutters exactly on the same spots I did as well a CPU load on all cores when that happened. In this case dxvk didn't make a difference at all, so there goes any hope to use a modded API to fix this. I doubt this will be fixed because as we all know, the only way to do so is to pre-compile the shaders one way or other other, I doubt some indie devs that decided to use UE4 because it's the "easier" engine to develop with will do this, the game will stay like this and if it doesn't, I will be more than happy to admit that I was wrong. UE4 is doomed on PC, if you wanna play any of these games, get yourself a nice Xbox Series X or a PS5 and call it a day, don't suffer this curse on PC.

 

People with "no issues" on UE4 simply aren't capable of noticing them. Also, funny that users that claim this never give proof with MSI Afterburner frametime graph and simply get mad or defensive at others that talk about these issues. It's always the like this. I am not saying you have to experience the same because I know some games have ran badly on my PC due to other things, but not a particular engine where everyone describes the same issues and I can even go to Youtube, look for a benchmark or gameplay video and I can see the game stutters in the same places as mine, so the educated guess from seein this it's that IT IS THE GAME OR THE ENGINE, period. If you can prove otherwise, you are more than welcome to do so.

 

A great part of those frame spikes are from bad frame pacing, probably from having the bSmoothFrameRate and MinSmoothedFrameRate set incorrectly.
The rest of the stutter seem to be from asset streaming, not from shader compilation. I'm pretty sure that if they tweaked the memory pool settings, it would fix most, if not all of that stuttering.

 

Ah yes that is a quirk of minsmoothframerate, if you ever dip below it there will be a huge stutter, the defaulteditor config has it set to 5, it should probably be 0. I still haven't gotten the logic behind the smoothed framerate feature but I know it's necessary for the render ahead queue to work. the UDN page is cryptic at best.
Smooth Frame Rate | Unreal Engine Documentation
it also seems to be predicated on the idea of preventing double buffered drops to half the fps, which as I've discussed in another thread, is now impossible on windows 10

 

You don't understand. He has the magic hardware that none of you are worth of.

 

give me that magic hardware too please. my 3080 can't beat the cheap RX AMD card inside the PS5, neither my 4 extra cores, more clock speed, way more ram and just a slightly less performant pciE 4 SSD (1gb/s less than PS5) don't seem to help. elden ring (i dont know its engine) sucks aswell

 

Lol the old show a video with a frametimegraph silence.
Same crap with MHW a few months after release.Had a micro stutters related to input that a minority caught and ppl came in blasting in the threads blaming rigs "no problem on my end" and a year later Capcom themselves admit the issue existed since the start.
It thought me a lesson that day.The majority of ppl have really mediocre perception.

 

There is also people that claim "no problems on my end" simply for the sake of just keeping the contrary or to make others feel even worse for no reason. It happens. I remember a Steam thread about RE: Village due to the Denuvo stutter, among other issues the game had and stuff got really heated because there were like 3 or 4 users that just kept gaslighting the rest of people that couldn't get their game run properly no matter what, there was several proof of the stutter too all over Youtube, but these individuals had magic computers that didn't stutter on this game, one even tried to do the frametime graph thing and he just failed miserably because it only proved the game was also running like garbage for him but still tried to say it was fine. In any way, I am glad that game runs perfect now, Capcom did fix it in the end, but no after a massive outcry from a lot of PC gamers and even Digital Foundry showing the obvious issues.

You can also check Elden Ring (Elden Ring is running a bit better now also newer nvidia drivers seem to fix some issues) or any other game that has obvious and reproducible technical issue son PC, there are ALWAYS people with perfect and magical computers that somehow "skip" issues related to the game and not where its running on, but they never give proof of anything, they just keep arguing to no end, it just baffles me, why do this? Sometimes seems like console users understand each other better when they talk about issues with a game on their hardware, PC users is like "no u, no u, no u, no u, no u, no u" when it comes about having issues that even dev themselves acknowledge.

 

@jesped When did I say that you were not worthy of hardware that allowed a smooth experience? I didn't, quite the opposite in fact. I said I felt bad for anyone that was having stutter issues. That being said, judging by your picture, you won't be reading this as you'll be too busy planning your next murder.

@burgi It's not magic hardware mate, just don't go on all those dodgy sites you frequent and you should be golden.

@kman Mediocre perception yet I already stated I'd had stutters on past rigs? I'm sensitive to it like any hardened gamer so I'm not just oblivious to it at all.

@Smough You're always bitching that somethings wrong with your rig or gaming experience. PEBCAK little snowflake.

Personally, I'd just like to thank all you obnoxious and difficult people. You serve as an important reminders of how NOT to be. Off to play on my magical rig. All ignored. Take care x

 

I see 2 reasons, they don't have any clue what they are saying, but because it's "The Internet", everybody can say anything... and 2nd, they are in denial, brand new 2-3 grand "high spec" PC, having the same issues as everyone else... brain says NOPE, mine is fine.

These days I rarely touch any game day one (started playing pc games since '98-99), I usually wait at least 4-6 months before even considering installing, and even after I decide to try them, they always make my heart racing when I see those bloody spikes in RTSS frametime graph, especially on UE$.... really sad times....

 

Most UE4 PC ports have two stutter problems in my experience:
1) Shader Compilation stutter which will "eventually" go away (til a driver update or game update at least RIP)
2) Genuine Asset Streaming stutter -- this will never go away sadly. A lot of times it seems games have these set "trigger points" where you'll walk over a spot and suddenly the game tries to drop everything from memory and pull all the new stuff in all at once so you get a big hitch. Or at least perceptually that's what it seems like.

Stuttering/microstutter/bad frametimes and all that jazz is the single greatest evil in gaming imo, I could rant about it all day long lol.

 

There is no "stutter-free rig", the UE4 thing is universal, its just that some people can't notice sh1t, i even know some that can't tell the difference between 30 and 60FPS, lol.

 

"judging by your picture" is already a great testament to the kind of people you are, but being called crap by the psychopizzaface boy that needs to hide behind anonymity it's really a compliment.

"Snowflake", says magical rig pizzaface.

"Obnoxious and difficult people", says the guy labeling murderers and snowflakes left and right with ZERO positive content to add beyond the classic "it works perfect for me" trolling that, oh surprise, for 'whatever reason' you can't prove, like all the other dozens of cases of trolls that come out to say the same here, on Steam etc.

Go back to your cave, sad troll.

 

Exactly. It's blind ignorance or just trolling. Everybody gets the same stutters in the same places, no matter if you get the top rig that money can buy.

 

@PapaJohn I have had issues with my PC, we all have at some point, but that has nothing to do with the discussion here about UE4, but you trying to say that and using it as some sort of "argument" to try to dismiss what I said just goes to show you have the mind of a 10 y/o and the intellectual prowess of a parrot.

 

And it seems like in this past gen of newer games, this is the norm. I even think about this sometimes when I am not on my PC and makes me downright sad to think PC gaming used to be so smooth and epic, now feels like we are coping with these horribly optimized games, looking for "fixes" that barely do anything, meanwhile the console "peasants" add hours to their game without ever knowning this depressing situation. I feel most devs simply don't care about PC anymore and just release games on the platform as some afterthought. And now, PS5 and Series X being PC's but easier to work on and optimize for, PC optimization seems more distant and rare now. Now each new game release I pray and hope that it won't stutter and guess what? At some point they do anyway, so sickening...

I am gonna end up becoming a console player again, this is too much, UE4 is PATHETIC and it won't be fixed unless some heavy work is done and I doubt old UE4 games will ever receive any patch anyway.

 

This is a really fascinating subject, take Elden Ring for example. I have buddies that claim they have never noticed the bad frame pacing on their consoles or PCs. And I mean, hey -- that's awesome for them, I'm genuinely jealous actually, but it's just sort of strange at the same time since it's very jarring for me personally. Sometimes I almost wonder if these folks are not all that familiar with the concept or perhaps they're not sure what "stuttering" means in this context -- maybe I miscommunicated and they were thinking more like "full blown freezes for a couple seconds" or some such, I'm not sure, but it does seem in any case that people have a different tolerance for this kind of thing (my tolerance is very very low).

 

My suspicion, and I could be wrong mind you, is that it has something to do with consoles using "Unified Memory" and PCs having so many bespoke/individual memory pools pools that the CPU has to be responsible for "managing"/copying data between very frequently.

My understanding is that on console 1) they already have had "True Direct Storage" like functionality for a good long while now and 2) the CPU and GPU share the "one big memory" pool which leads to a lower CPU overhead from what I have heard. On PC by comparison 1) We don't have "true" direct storage yet so all of the big transfers have to be managed by the CPU and even when we do get our version of DirectStorage it's not like games are going to magically/retroactively use it regrettably and 2) the CPU has to manage what's in RAM and VRAM separately.

Clearly it IS possible for games to stream assets very efficiently on PC with high detail since I've never had any issues with Red Dead 2 or Cyberpunk 2077, but my "guess" is that many games are built primarily for console and the unified memory architecture then haphazardly/lazily ported to PC with virtually no effort going into reworking how assets are streamed (or how shaders work either since on console they're always precompiled). They recompile the game in UE or whatever for PC and whenever the game needs to move assets they don't account for the differences on the PC architecture so you get huge mammoth stutters while the CPU manages RAM/VRAM and all that jazz.

Maybe I'm completely off base with this, but it's my current "theory" since there isn't much of a difference left between console and PC beyond the memory hiearchy and direct storage. Consoles also allow for "bad code" in the sense that you can get away with hard coding a ton of stuff and not writing your code in a generalized/scalable fashion seems to me. But yeah -- 5800X3D's mammoth uplift in 1% lows for many games seems to be bypassing a kind of memory bottleneck that exists on PC at the moment. I don't know what needs to change exactly, but something has simply got to be done to standardize how shaders and asset streaming are handled on PC. It's become a tremendous problem and it's only gotten worse, not better over the years (and I have very modern hardware for context -- 5800X + 3070 + 16 gigs of 3600 MHz RAM + NVMe Drive + G-Sync 1440p/144 hz).

For whatever reason, maybe it's budgetary (what do I know) devs either don't care, don't have the skill, or don't have the time/budget to make "good" PC versions of their games frequently these days. I'm inclined to think it's genuine incompetence/perhaps they are not even aware of the issue in some cases like Fromsoft's.

 

Not directly related to the conversation you're having, but in my view, "Snowflake" can be appropriate or it can not be appropriate, it depends. Sometimes people really are being overly sensitive or getting up in arms over something trivial -- in such cases the term "Snowflake" might reasonably apply. In other cases, it is misused -- say if a person, as Cleese suggests, is being reasonably empathetic about something that actually matters.

In a lot of ways I think Twitter hasn't been good for people, at least famous people. Having a million followers that hang on your every word and then being able to block people who don't on top of that turns the platform into an ego-stroking machine of sorts -- it's an environment where you can get an overly big head/become too big for your breeches as the phrase goes. To me, more anonymous hobby focused boards are social media at its best, but all of this is just my own opinion I suppose

 

I don't wish to search through 10 pages; does anyone have a clear description as to what this stutter is?

I figured it to be normal for games to hitch on shader compiling, and I'm used to it when dealing with Linux and DXVK. But once the shaders are compiled, everything is fine.

The easiest way to prove this is numbers. Can this stutter be measured easily and displayed in a HUD, along with being reproducible?

Spoiler

People say the Quest 2's latency is fine on PCVR, and I agree it's tolerable, but when you look at actual latency numbers, it's more than double the latency best-case than the previous two Rift headsets. And side-by-side, I notice it easily.

People also claim PCVR to be fine with 15ms+ network latency, which I find crazy. Yet without numbers, these claims are just put out there and occasionally mislead.

There's people that claim they can handle 120Hz, but if they had up their encoder HUD, they would see it likely never reaching 120Hz and causing overall stutter. I'm confident this is the case for every AMD GPU with Quest 2, but the stutter here isn't visibly noticeable (it's still notably better than 90Hz), and it's barely known you can access that HUD to see that; basically this is mostly only a problem if you go out of your way to notice it, but it's likely there regardless.

People tolerate a lot of things with VR that I don't quite understand with the numbers.