Is this the "normal" type of framerate hitching/stuttering?

[CarlCAgathon]

I have a i7 3770k/GTX 680/WD Caviar Black 1 TB/Samsung 840 Pro SSD/Corsair Vengeance RAM (1600 MHz).

I was playing Mirror's Edge and I noticed that there were very brief periods where the framerate would dip from 60 to as low as 55. These dips occurred when a new area of the level was obviously being streamed in. For example, the dip would occur in a small room that leads to a very large area. Outside of these dips the game plays at a locked 60 FPS except for the odd intensive Physx effect here and there. My questions are:

1) Is this a normal type of hitching/stuttering?

2) When these dips occur, what actually causes them? Is the game engine sending the level assets to the RAM and that causes the hitch?

3) Can the hitches be eliminated? I've ruled out SSD vs HDD. Having the game installed on the SSD produced the same results in the same areas.

 

[ViRGE]

1) Yes, that's considered normal hitching for an Unreal Engine 3 game.

2) Correct. UE3 uses resource streaming (primarily texture streaming), which can lead to hitching at times.

3) Not really. Some games can be INI tweaked to reduce the hitching, but since you can't turn off resource streaming entirely, you can't eliminate it.

 

[CarlCAgathon]

1) Yes, that's considered normal hitching for an Unreal Engine 3 game.

2) Correct. UE3 uses resource streaming (primarily texture streaming), which can lead to hitching at times.

3) Not really. Some games can be INI tweaked to reduce the hitching, but since you can't turn off resource streaming entirely, you can't eliminate it.

Is it possible for developers to optimize the game so well that these hitches don't happen? Any examples of UE3 based games that are super well optimized?

 

[SPBHM]

newer games based on UE3 should have a better chance, like bioshock infinite? ME3?

 

[NJCermak0224]

Bioshock Infinite is actually pretty bad in those regards. On my system (installed on an SSD) it will fluctuate from ~120fps down to 50-60fps quite frequently. Mass Effect 3 I don't recall having that problem. But that game had frequent loading screens (?).

 

[BrightCandle]

Almost any graphically intense PC game seems to suffer from 50% drops in performance. Its not normally anything to do with the pipeline but the game trying to do too much and producing frames that are twice the rendering time of those before.

When it comes to optimising PC games it is harder, there are a lot of configurations and its quite easy to produce a small sequence that has a performance problem or a group of effects that cause slowdowns and for it to get through QA and into the game.

 

[futurefields]

Far Cry 3 is terrible in this rregard.

Also, every game mentioned here was also designed to run on 512 megabite consuls such as Xbox 360 and ps3 so that probably impacts how the engine performs when its scale to a PC that has 8 to 16 gigabytes of RAM the engine probably still just doesn't know what to do with it all hopefully this will get better next generation.

 

[escrow4]

Adaptive Vsync. Solid 60FPS in Bioshock Infinite, only rare dips to 45-55 ish.

 

[Cerb]

When it comes to optimising PC games it is harder, there are a lot of configurations and its quite easy to produce a small sequence that has a performance problem or a group of effects that cause slowdowns and for it to get through QA and into the game.

Bolded the most important part. Console players get to feel lucky when they can have upscaled 30FPS, and the PC versions of similar games tend to get whatever happens to work. It's not universal (some devs do care), but if it's in the game, it's in the game, and something that only the game makers can usually fix (though, some games have had the luck of getting mods for some of their performance issues, like FO3 and F:NV, off the top of my head).

 

[futurefields]

Optimizing nowadays should be a lot easier since all GPU's and CPU's use the same/similar basic under the hood tech. Unified shaders, x86, etc...

the developers just pick a baseline hardware configuration. ie "target 60fps on a 7850/660" etc... then lesser cards will still be running optimized code, they will just process it slower, at 40fps for example.

 

[BrightCandle]

The problem is not everything is a linear scale. High end cards are often ram bandwidth starved comparably to the mid and entry level cards so scaling a feature heavy on any one aspect of a card does cause issues.

Until the prevailing group think of 30fps is just fine and drops from 60 to 30 is thus also fine is replaced with a better understanding of how we perceive motion I don't anticipate this changing. We have a lot of analysis now on stuttering and perception, but not enough to be certain on the exact figures and range. Yet the idea that vsync and 45 fps is better than 30 fps remains.

So what you are seeing is normal, its the symptom of a lot of problems in the industry. I don't think we will see a fix to this any time soon.