The AT Battlefield 4 F.A.Q., News, and Discussion thread

[sigurros81]

Gents, anyone running into sound issues like I am? The sound keep popping in and out and sometimes I lose the sound of my footsteps entirely. Another example is that I don't hear a helicopter coming until it's right on top of me and all of a sudden I hear the helo sound. Is this a known bug?

While we're on the issue of sound, I am also finding that BF4's sound are kind of muffled compared to BF3's. Like gunfire is not as poppy.

 

[Termie]

Gents, anyone running into sound issues like I am? The sound keep popping in and out and sometimes I lose the sound of my footsteps entirely. Another example is that I don't hear a helicopter coming until it's right on top of me and all of a sudden I hear the helo sound. Is this a known bug?

While we're on the issue of sound, I am also finding that BF4's sound are kind of muffled compared to BF3's. Like gunfire is not as poppy.

I had that issue when I plugged in headphones last night. I usually run a 5.1 speaker set, but didn't have it on yesterday. Sound kept popping in and out at different points. If you don't have a surround setup, check whether it's trying to port sound to 5+ channels. I was guessing that was the source of my problem, but I didn't have time to check.

 

[sigurros81]

I had that issue when I plugged in headphones last night. I usually run a 5.1 speaker set, but didn't have it on yesterday. Sound kept popping in and out at different points. If you don't have a surround setup, check whether it's trying to port sound to 5+ channels. I was guessing that was the source of my problem, but I didn't have time to check.

I'm using the Logitech G35 gaming headset. It has 7.1 surround sound support but I always question surround sound claims on headsets. BF3 sounds beautiful for me, I'm just wondering WTF is going on with BF4.

 

[gregulator]

I am getting a lot of disconnects, client shut down error and connection timeout. This is pretty frustrating.. I might wait a bit for some patches to fix this.

 

[zach426]

Within the C: Documents\Battlefield 3\Settings\PROF_SAVE_profile .txt document that everyone should have, there is an option at the very top called GstAudio.AudioQuality. This is, as I have found, an independent variable outside of the normal HI-FI, War Tapes, Headphones, etc options that are available to us. It was defaulted to 0, and I changed this to 4. Instantly, all my sound glitches are COMPLETELY gone, and I am enjoying this game immensely now

Found this on the battlelog forums. This was an issue with BF3, so I'm assuming you can do this to fix BF4 as well. This has worked for many people.

 

[smackababy]

I had that issue when I plugged in headphones last night. I usually run a 5.1 speaker set, but didn't have it on yesterday. Sound kept popping in and out at different points. If you don't have a surround setup, check whether it's trying to port sound to 5+ channels. I was guessing that was the source of my problem, but I didn't have time to check.

I was having some strange issues I think were related to that. Sound was extremely directional when using headphones. I ended up using my 5.1 surround for the game sounds and thankfully, VOIP sound was still in my headphones.

 

[raasco]

Gents, anyone running into sound issues like I am? The sound keep popping in and out and sometimes I lose the sound of my footsteps entirely. Another example is that I don't hear a helicopter coming until it's right on top of me and all of a sudden I hear the helo sound. Is this a known bug?

While we're on the issue of sound, I am also finding that BF4's sound are kind of muffled compared to BF3's. Like gunfire is not as poppy.

I have the same issue, but only on some servers/maps(mostly the large maps with 64 players). If I recall correctly, this was also an issue with the launch of BF3. I seem to remember many of these same server side issues at that game launch. It took several weeks for Dice to dial that game in(at least that's what it felt like).

 

[MBrown]

What settings are you guys using? I've found my sweet spot for my system with Ultra textures, high everything else, No MSAA, High FXAA and 125% SSAA.

 

[Crusty]

The game is basically unplayable for me even at 1024x768 and everything on low. I get horrible stuttering and rubberbanding even in single player campaign.

Even if I turn up the GFX settings to 1680x1050 and 'medium' across the board my FPS numbers stay the same as running at 'low', but the stuttering and rubberbanding ruin it. So my rig should be capable of running the game no problem... if it didn't stutter every few seconds.

I also have terrible sound issues and wouldn't be surprised if they were somehow related.

Things I've done.
1) Disabled core parking(not sure this has any effect on my CPU)
2) Clean re-install of Video and Sound drivers
3) Reinstall DirectX
4) Various process priorities

Win7
Core2Duo e8400 @ 3.6ghz
NVIDIA 660ti
Realtek AC'97(onboard ABIT IP35-e)
8GB RAM
Intel SSD drive

 

[slightlyhuman]

i'm having the sounds issues as well, will try the suggestion in the above post.

 

[smackababy]

You might be experiencing issues with your processor. It is an older dual core. 2008 is ancient in terms of PC performance. You do meet the minimum specs though.

 

[AHamick]

Do you use Teamviewer or any other applications like it?

I am not sure what teamviewer is so I would guess no.

Yep - I had the exact same problem and it is definitely frustrating. This seems to have fixed it for me so far. I don't know if it matters or not but I never actually spawned on the map in the game I joined when I went through these steps:
Enter game and have it load in non-maximized mode. Change mode to borderless and apply. Go back into video and change to and apply full screen. After applying full screen quit the game through the menu. Then once I started a new game the video settings worked correctly.

I was able to then play several newly launched games in a row without the issue

AMD drivers for my 6950

I will have to give this a try and report back. Thanks

 

[Kev]

hey, for those interested in trying:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMGmY6qQWQY&feature=*********&t=57s&hd=1


guy shows the performance increase disabling hyper-threading. i'm going to try it tonight on my 2600k/670gtx.

check out this thread:
http://battlelog.battlefield.com/bf4/forum/threadview/2955065217567138642/

You'd probably be better off disabling cpu core parking. I had never heard of this until today and it seems to work.

 

[felang]

The game is basically unplayable for me even at 1024x768 and everything on low. I get horrible stuttering and rubberbanding even in single player campaign.

Even if I turn up the GFX settings to 1680x1050 and 'medium' across the board my FPS numbers stay the same as running at 'low', but the stuttering and rubberbanding ruin it. So my rig should be capable of running the game no problem... if it didn't stutter every few seconds.

I also have terrible sound issues and wouldn't be surprised if they were somehow related.

Things I've done.
1) Disabled core parking(not sure this has any effect on my CPU)
2) Clean re-install of Video and Sound drivers
3) Reinstall DirectX
4) Various process priorities

Win7
Core2Duo e8400 @ 3.6ghz
NVIDIA 660ti
Realtek AC'97(onboard ABIT IP35-e)
8GB RAM
Intel SSD drive

I wouldn´t say an E8400 " should be capable of running the game no problem" I´d say you´re probably severely CPU bottlenecked. Check CPU usage during gaming and I´ll bet you´re pegged at 100% all the time.

 

[Kev]

Found this on the battlelog forums. This was an issue with BF3, so I'm assuming you can do this to fix BF4 as well. This has worked for many people.

that option wasn't in my PROF_SAVE_profile file. Maybe I just need to add it. My god it's taken an incredible amount of work to get this stupid game to work right.

 

[AznAnarchy99]

The game is basically unplayable for me even at 1024x768 and everything on low. I get horrible stuttering and rubberbanding even in single player campaign.

Even if I turn up the GFX settings to 1680x1050 and 'medium' across the board my FPS numbers stay the same as running at 'low', but the stuttering and rubberbanding ruin it. So my rig should be capable of running the game no problem... if it didn't stutter every few seconds.

I also have terrible sound issues and wouldn't be surprised if they were somehow related.

Things I've done.
1) Disabled core parking(not sure this has any effect on my CPU)
2) Clean re-install of Video and Sound drivers
3) Reinstall DirectX
4) Various process priorities

Win7
Core2Duo e8400 @ 3.6ghz
NVIDIA 660ti
Realtek AC'97(onboard ABIT IP35-e)
8GB RAM
Intel SSD drive

You're pushing that minimum line.

 

[Crusty]

You might be experiencing issues with your processor. It is an older dual core. 2008 is ancient in terms of PC performance. You do meet the minimum specs though.

I agree that my CPU is ancient, but like you said I do meet the minimum specs.

FWIW I was able to run BF3 at 1680x1050 @ Ultra with no noticeable issues so I can't imagine that BF4 is that much more CPU intensive where I can't even run the game on the lowest possible settings.

Watching my resource monitor during these stuttering events I can see that BF4.exe drops from 99% CPU to 50-60% but the overall system CPU usage remains at 100% due to large amounts of time being spent in the Kernel(according to task manager).

 

[dougp]

I wouldn´t say an E8400 " should be capable of running the game no problem" I´d say you´re probably severely CPU bottlenecked. Check CPU usage during gaming and I´ll bet you´re pegged at 100% all the time.

Yeah, my 660Ti runs the game great - but I have a 3570 and 16GB of RAM compared to him. That E8400 is a SEVERE bottleneck.

 

[Crusty]

I wouldn´t say an E8400 " should be capable of running the game no problem" I´d say you´re probably severely CPU bottlenecked. Check CPU usage during gaming and I´ll bet you´re pegged at 100% all the time.

Every game I play pegs my CPU at 100%, that's how a game is supposed to run!

 

[moonbogg]

I wouldn´t say an E8400 " should be capable of running the game no problem" I´d say you´re probably severely CPU bottlenecked. Check CPU usage during gaming and I´ll bet you´re pegged at 100% all the time.

Oh, he will be. I ran into his issue with BF Bad Company 2 when I had my E8400. It was 99% all the time while OCd to 4ghz. I personally think its kind of mean of DICE to claim a dual core can run the game.

 

[Kev]

The game is basically unplayable for me even at 1024x768 and everything on low. I get horrible stuttering and rubberbanding even in single player campaign.

Even if I turn up the GFX settings to 1680x1050 and 'medium' across the board my FPS numbers stay the same as running at 'low', but the stuttering and rubberbanding ruin it. So my rig should be capable of running the game no problem... if it didn't stutter every few seconds.

I also have terrible sound issues and wouldn't be surprised if they were somehow related.

Things I've done.
1) Disabled core parking(not sure this has any effect on my CPU)
2) Clean re-install of Video and Sound drivers
3) Reinstall DirectX
4) Various process priorities

Win7
Core2Duo e8400 @ 3.6ghz
NVIDIA 660ti
Realtek AC'97(onboard ABIT IP35-e)
8GB RAM
Intel SSD drive

- Does the stuttering happen with vsync off?
- If vsync is on, have you enabled triple buffering?
- Also try turning on dynamic vsync. I'm not sure how you'd do it with an nvidia card. With my 7970 I used RadeonPro to do it.

 

[Childs]

One thing I really have to stop doing is reloading after firing a few rounds. I'm not that efficient with ammo management in general, but now I find myself out of ammo after a few minutes because I am constantly reloading. If I dont reload it never fails that I run across a small group of people and dont have enough in the clip to deal with it. I think once I finish the classes I'm just going to run support with a carbine or shotgun.

 

[Crusty]

- Does the stuttering happen with vsync off?
- If vsync is on, have you enabled triple buffering?
- Also try turning on dynamic vsync. I'm not sure how you'd do it with an nvidia card. With my 7970 I used RadeonPro to do it.

That's one thing I haven't tried, messing with V-sync. It's frustrating to watch the game render at 60FPS no problem but then have horrible stuttering where the whole game freezes at random times so perhaps Vsync is the issue.

 

[felang]

Every game I play pegs my CPU at 100%, that's how a game is supposed to run!

No, that´s called a bottleneck.

One thing I really have to stop doing is reloading after firing a few rounds. I'm not that efficient with ammo management in general, but now I find myself out of ammo after a few minutes because I am constantly reloading. If I dont reload it never fails that I run across a small group of people and dont have enough in the clip to deal with it. I think once I finish the classes I'm just going to run support with a carbine or shotgun.

Agree 100%. Also, why the heck do I need to know how many bullets I have available if reloading is clip based. Just show me how many bullets my current clip has, and how many full extra clips I have left please.

 

[AznAnarchy99]

Ugh crash again. I was actually getting into the grove of it again this time too.

I do better in smaller maps when there arent so many points you can die from.