AM I the only one that notices this? (got to shake out the camera)

[futurefields]

I notice in a lot of games, upon first loading, the first few mouse movements will be kind of stuttery, but usually once I've done like a full 360 degree camera pan the game smooths out.

Notice it quite a bit in pc ports like Assassin's Creed 2 and Arkham City. They run flawlessly after that initial "shaking out" of the camera.

 

[Sabrewings]

Probably a RAM issue. The OS is having to offload to the pagefile assets as you look around and they are required. Could be a VRAM issue as well.

 

[Hitman928]

It's probably just the game textures/assets still loading when you first start. I've noticed this in some games. I think it initially loads what it needs for your initial view, but there might be things that haven't been loaded as you pan the camera around that cause the stutter. Much more likely to happen in more open world type games.

 

[yacoub]

It's probably just the game textures/assets still loading when you first start. I've noticed this in some games. I think it initially loads what it needs for your initial view, but there might be things that haven't been loaded as you pan the camera around that cause the stutter. Much more likely to happen in more open world type games.

It's this. Any game with a large amount of texture and such assets loading into memory when you first enter a level is going to cause this. It's common and normal.

 

[escrow4]

An SSD will reduce those dips.

 

[MustISO]

I notice this in WoW when I first load the game and occasionally when I zone into a new area. I always assumed the graphics had to be moved to the VRAM so I just put up with it. Running a 6970 with 2GB of VRAM. System is an i5 with 8GB of DDR3.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

Most modern game engines load in lower resolution art assets first and then drop you into the game world ASAP to keep loading times down. The world then streams in dynamically the art assets which are needed at the time, normally things inside your field of view or within a certain radius of you (LOD radius), which normally causes some lower frame rates and stuttering initially, once all that data is loaded into video memory it smooths out.

It's mostly a trade off between loading times and visual quality, a lot of this streaming tech was pushed because last gen consoles mostly loaded from disc which is very slow.

 

[KingFatty]

Could you test out the hypothesis that simply waiting (without panning around) results in the same smoothness? Maybe give it an additional minute or two without moving the mouse, and see if it still needs the look-around to be smooth, or if it's already smooth just after waiting for a bit.

 

[DustinBrowder]

It has nothing to do with ram memory, I think its just how some games are coded. They load all the data to start the level, but further textures and and some other data are loaded once you start the level.

I mean for example Dota 2 has big stuttering when loading the heroes, because it waits for all layers to select heroes and then loads all the data at once, causing stutters and freezes. Its ancient engine also uses only 1 processor core.

With the new source 2 engine this has been fixed though and it loads stuff gradually and uses more than 1 processing core.

 

[Sabrewings]

It has nothing to do with ram memory, I think its just how some games are coded.

It can most certainly be a RAM issue. Back in the day with Crysis Warhead I had this problem pretty bad. I stuck another 2GB of RAM in and the problem went away. Obviously it can be game specific, but it can be a symptom of insufficient memory.

With my current rig in my machine, this problem is completely gone from every game I've tried.

 

[Carnage1986]

I notice in a lot of games, upon first loading, the first few mouse movements will be kind of stuttery, but usually once I've done like a full 360 degree camera pan the game smooths out.

Notice it quite a bit in pc ports like Assassin's Creed 2 and Arkham City. They run flawlessly after that initial "shaking out" of the camera.

Arkham City has very terrible texture streaming problems and it stutters every time on some NVIDIA cards. Changing some values on config files reduces texture streaming stutters(the game has another stuttering problems)

Now the Arkham Knight! It needs no introduction, doesn't it?