Solution to ingame stuttering / choppiness

[Timmah!]

So played a bit of Firewatch yesterday, which is hardly the most demanding title ever - even though i like its stylized graphics, its truly pretty game IMO - and i realized that its not exactly super smooth. I had the Steam FPS counter on and saw the FPS fluctuate between up to 240 down to cca 50. Everytime there was a drop, even if for split second, the game would clearly stutter. Running with Vsync ON would not help either, cause even if the game would run at 60 FPS 99 percent of times, there are those moments, when it drops to 50 or i saw even 40 and it clearly chokes.

Similarly Deserts of Kharak, playing on top details, as its similar case as Firewatch, and scrolling around the map is everything but fluid, Vsync ON or OFF.

This kinda takes away from enjoyment, and its bit disheartening, cause its on gtx1080 and 4,2GHz BW-E, so i could not really do much better in terms of HW...i have to wonder if this is natural then, if everything is OK with my machine, as its fairly new, if its the games themselves or drivers... surprisingly Black Ops III multiplayer does not seem to struggle with this (luckily, as it would be unplayable otherwise) and Ashes of Singularity built-in benchmark felt pretty fluid to me as well...

Will the G-SYNC help with this? Even though i spent almost 3000 EUROs on brand new rig, i kept my oldish HP ZR24w LCD 1200p display... which i plan on replacing too in not so distant future. Should i look for Gsync displays then, if i´d like to help with this?

Thanks

 

[Hi-Fi Man]

Some games are rather unoptimized and/or have poor frame pacing which causes a frame not to be delivered every 16.6ms (for 60Hz). Even console games suffer from this, a recent example is Final Fantasy VX which has poor frame pacing on just the PS4 which causes stutter.

Short story. I remember back when Deus Ex HR came out; I had my GeForce GTX 260 which could only run the game with D3D9 but when I upgraded to a GeForce GTX 560 Ti and tried running the game with D3D11 the game had insane micro stutter which only went away when I ran it with D3D9. Another recent example is the game Life is Strange, this game uses UE3 and recommends a GeForce GTX 260 or Radeon HD 4890, very easy game to run for my rig but it still had micro stutter at 60fps that only went away when I capped the framerate to 30fps (using NV inspector).

 

[simas]

Posting to follow. in similar boat with older hardware (2600K not OC, 970 GTX) , playing Total War :Warhammer and in larger battle (40 units on the map at the same time) see extreme choppiness, computer not acknowledging mouse click, video slows down to few frames per sec and then 'jumps' (skips) few seconds forward. Not sure CPU or GPU limitation, not sure how to measure it properly.

will be looking to build new system soon (post Zen) just wondering at what point next graphic gen comes out to understand price/performance


I guess a little discouraging to see my 6 year old with 2 year old video card not playing 1440p on 2016 game well...

 

[bystander36]

Try either adaptive v-sync or dynamic v-sync. This will turn off V-sync when your FPS drops below 60. Dynamic v-sync is a 3rd party solution similar to Nvidia's adaptive v-sync for AMD.

 

[aniket93]

Posting to follow. in similar boat with older hardware (2600K not OC, 970 GTX) , playing Total War :Warhammer and in larger battle (40 units on the map at the same time) see extreme choppiness, computer not acknowledging mouse click, video slows down to few frames per sec and then 'jumps' (skips) few seconds forward. Not sure CPU or GPU limitation, not sure how to measure it properly.

will be looking to build new system soon (post Zen) just wondering at what point next graphic gen comes out to understand price/performance


I guess a little discouraging to see my 6 year old with 2 year old video card not playing 1440p on 2016 game well...

Its your cpu thats causing a bottleneck here...try checking the cpu usage using msi afterburner and if its hitting 99 or 100% then thats your bottleneck.

If you need help with msi afterburner, let me know and i will be glad to assist!

 

[simas]

Thank you guys, I will try to check the CPU . Would MSI afterburner work on the card that is not made by MSI? Mine is EVGA model. Will try adaptive/dynamic v-sync as well

How far away are we from next generation for video cards from both green and red teams, summer? Would love something that is 2X of my 970 (that I bought for $290 two years ago) in both RAM and performance and does not cost over $400...

 

[gradoman]

Yeah, MSI would work with a non-MSI card.

 

[casiofx]

Gsync alleviates most of stuttering issues but if the game engine itself have problems then even gsync won't be able to help. Experienced this on few games that i tried

 

[simas]

In my case I run the game Totalwar Warhammer with resource utilization monitor opened on the second screen and CPU never went above 40%.
Separately, when running the game I am now getting 'system is low on graphic memory' and that 'system lowered settings for you'. If I lower the settings myself, gameplay becomes smooth so I am pretty certain it ix GTX 970 chocking in that game at 1440p and running in DirectX 12 mode. time for new GPU in 2017...

Thanks to all who helped!