Microstuttering

[Fox]

I've never used gsync, but I would think it requires vsync on, since it is matching the vsync to the game's FPS.

Nope, if anything, we G-Sync users prefer to disable V-Sync and go the extra mile by simply limiting fps through other means like Precision XOC which allows for maximum fps up to the limit in games instead of rounding down which is what V-Sync does.

But this has been around for a long time, long before I got my G-Sync monitor and was using v-sync (tried both on and off). But I know that's irrelevant info since you guys don't care about previous game versions.

 

I have a feeling most people don't know what Microstuttering is.

More ppl know about it than you think.

https://7daystodie.com/forums/showthread.php?25024-Movement-stutter-frame-lag-while-at-60-fps

[asmosnuts]

Xeon 3.4ghhz gtx 1060 6gb ssd 24gb ram .Very few stutters up to 17.1 now full 1-2 second stutters every 15-20 mins and one full lock up opening a tower door in wooden trader fort.

[ghettochild2600]

Nope, if anything, we G-Sync users prefer to disable V-Sync and go the extra mile by simply limiting fps through other means like Precision XOC which allows for maximum fps up to the limit in games instead of rounding down which is what V-Sync does.

But this has been around for a long time, long before I got my G-Sync monitor and was using v-sync (tried both on and off). But I know that's irrelevant info since you guys don't care about previous game versions.

 

 

More ppl know about it than you think.

https://7daystodie.com/forums/showthread.php?25024-Movement-stutter-frame-lag-while-at-60-fps

 

Exactly, I always play with vsync off and cap my fps 3-4 below my monitors minimum refresh rate. However, for whatever reason in 7DTD having vsync off was resulting in microstutter regardless.

[The_Great_Sephiroth]

X8 versus X16 will not cause stutter. Look at tests running cards in X8 versus X16. So far no game can saturate X8, so it was likely due more to being loose than not enough bandwidth. In fact one thing you can do when low on PCI-E lanes is to force both video cards into X8 assuming you run SLI and need more lanes for NVME or other PCI-E stuff. No difference in framerates in X16/X16, X16/X8, or X8/X8 during testing done this past year.

 

I wanted to respond to the garbage collection though. I normally get the regular stuttering after playing a while (1hr or more?) and loading into a new area, so this makes sense to me.

 

Also, Fox, anybody not using V-Sync has no clue how it interacts with G-Sync. Again, just because the sheople do it religiously, doesn't make it right. Vertical sync prevents tearing due to pumping out incomplete frames or attempting to pump out more frames than the refresh rate of your monitor allows. G-Sync is the opposite of that. It adjusts the refresh rate down to your framerate when your rate drops below the monitor refresh rate.

 

For example, assume a 60Hz monitor. You're in the desert and you can pump 90fps out. VSync matches full frames to your refresh rate and prevents tearing. As you move into the burned forest you drop to 45fps. G-Sync would then lower your monitor refresh rate to 45Hz to prevent stuttering. Both should be on.

[CoolJ]

X8 versus X16 will not cause stutter. Look at tests running cards in X8 versus X16. So far no game can saturate X8, so it was likely due more to being loose than not enough bandwidth. In fact one thing you can do when low on PCI-E lanes is to force both video cards into X8 assuming you run SLI and need more lanes for NVME or other PCI-E stuff. No difference in framerates in X16/X16, X16/X8, or X8/X8 during testing done this past year.

 

I wanted to respond to the garbage collection though. I normally get the regular stuttering after playing a while (1hr or more?) and loading into a new area, so this makes sense to me.

 

Also, Fox, anybody not using V-Sync has no clue how it interacts with G-Sync. Again, just because the sheople do it religiously, doesn't make it right. Vertical sync prevents tearing due to pumping out incomplete frames or attempting to pump out more frames than the refresh rate of your monitor allows. G-Sync is the opposite of that. It adjusts the refresh rate down to your framerate when your rate drops below the monitor refresh rate.

 

For example, assume a 60Hz monitor. You're in the desert and you can pump 90fps out. VSync matches full frames to your refresh rate and prevents tearing. As you move into the burned forest you drop to 45fps. G-Sync would then lower your monitor refresh rate to 45Hz to prevent stuttering. Both should be on.

 

 

Well in my case, it wasn't just limiting it to x8. If it was, I would have probably never known and ended up with something like power issues or something even worse. I actually used a version of kombuster that is built into GPU-Z to test what PCI-E mode it was using. It never went from 1.0 before I reseated the card. After, it went to x16 instantly and I never had the problem again.

 

Also, I am not suggesting that people are having bandwidth issues and that is what is causing it. Mostly, I think there is a problem with certain configurations of parts and drivers people are using which is exposing edge cases. Turning on V-Sync is a suggestion to see if that would help even out frame times. It seems to work for most people. It is not at all surprising to me that adaptive sync users would also suffer from frame pacing issues.

 

Another thing to note, enabling V-Sync in D3D games will not reduce your frame rate per a mathematical factor of your refresh rate like it used to in the 90's. D3D employs a dirty flip cue to keep this from happening. While it is not triple buffering, which is the correct way to handle that situation, it works to some extent. The remaining problem being mouse lag in certain situations, since this "dirty flip cue" does not always show you the most recent frame available.

 

I don't personally have any problems with mouse lag in this game with V-Sync enabled. YMMV.

[faatal]

Here is what i found after extensive testing and i will say this. A17.1 performance has improved vs A17 for my issue, it's not fixed or great but better at least.

 

4k - reflection quality low = fps 50's and good frame time

4k - reflection quality ultra+ = fps 50's / p*ss poor frame time (9ms - 30ms range, fps does not change)

 

Looks like it is reflections doing it then. No surprise since they are expensive. They have to do 6 renders to update the cubemap. The higher the setting, the more often it updates and the higher the resolution and the renders use a longer distance. At high or better it is doing a lot of extra rendering, which would give you spikes.

 

I've tweaked reflection settings several times now and nothing will make them faster other than reducing values, which is what the lower settings do.

[faatal]

Xeon 3.4ghhz gtx 1060 6gb ssd 24gb ram .Very few stutters up to 17.1 now full 1-2 second stutters every 15-20 mins and one full lock up opening a tower door in wooden trader fort.

 

That is not microstutter. That could be garbage collection, but that normally happens about every minute. Could be windows doing some heavy background work or some game system stalling out for a moment like a big load/save.

[SnakeWildlife]

I have a lot of Microstuttering, at worst the stutters can go up to 300ms

 

Windows 10 64bit fully up to date.

Ryzen 7 1800x / H80i V2 Liquid Cooled

GTX 1060 6gb Palit

16gb 2600mhz DDR4 Corsair Veangance ram

Running from a SSD: Agate 960gb with 550mb/s read 530mb/s write.

Motherboard: ASUS PRIME B350

 

Vsync ON

 

Im fine when traveling fast, it seems to happen a lot more to me when im trying to engage in combat.

 

Besides this issue im running on balanced graphics, 1080p, have 60fps and temperatures are pretty cool. (god bless the 1060)

 

I am currently running the experimental beta.

[Hek Harris]

Thanks fo your advices and thanks Faatal to follow this thread. I tried everything suggested by other players, but it didn't change anything. I'll post a video because as it was said it's possible that we don't all talk about the same thing when saying "microstuttering". I have to say it's absolutely not game breaking, just a little annoying, but I can live with it.

 

However, I killed today a lot of process in the task manager and it gets better. This f***ing Skype that I've no use for seemed to be one of the possible issues. I'll try tomorrow to eliminate an other bundle of process to see how it works.

(My config - ssd - 16g ram - nvdia gtx1060 6g - Ryzen 5 2600 6c)

[CrashKZ]

The latest build of experimental seems to have fixed the microstuttering for me. For the most part anyway. Sometimes I feel like I can spot a little bit for a brief moment but unsure(maybe placebo). There is definitely one scenario though where it still happens: standing in the space a door occupies.

 

I started a new game just to see if this build fixed this dreadful microstutter issue plaguing people and noticed whenever I stand in the block space a door occupies, I have microstutters moving through that block space. It doesn't matter if the door is open or closed. I only tested the one POI but it was happening with every door the building had.

 

Overall, definitely playable now in regards to the microstutter.

[Mday]

microstuttering in A17.1 is worst than A17 for me.

I was outside at the roof of a POI. The game suddenly spawn like 10 zombies from a POI in door. The stuttering begin. I can hear them hiting walls and doors. So I turn around to leave the place. 3 Secs later I turn around again and the zombies are all outside. The stuttering never stop and I die right there. I think the game can glitch zombies though walls like noclip when players are not watching. I have seen dogs do that at the same POI. The place has two dogs and 2 zombies at the first level, and when they awake and start hitting the same block, 1 of the dogs always glitched though the wall.

 

My PC:

i7 6700K

16GB ram, SSD, GTX970,

[hotpoon]

microstuttering in A17.1 is worst than A17 for me.

I was outside at the roof of a POI. The game suddenly spawn like 10 zombies from a POI in door. The stuttering begin. I can hear them hiting walls and doors. So I turn around to leave the place. 3 Secs later I turn around again and the zombies are all outside. The stuttering never stop and I die right there. I think the game can glitch zombies though walls like noclip when players are not watching. I have seen dogs do that at the same POI. The place has two dogs and 2 zombies at the first level, and when they awake and start hitting the same block, 1 of the dogs always glitched though the wall.

 

My PC:

i7 6700K

16GB ram, SSD, GTX970,

 

That doesn't sound like microstutter. It sounds like lag.

[Mday]

Except it was a singleplayer game.

[hotpoon]

Except it was a singleplayer game.

 

You can lag in single player. Somebody more clever can confirm, but as I understand it you get graphics lag and network lag. Perhaps yours was graphics lag. I've had a few lag spikes myself like you describe, though less severe, and I play on a multiplayer server mostly.

 

The microstutter is a constant jittering that you can see when you look at an object and strafe around it. Try this with any quality settings but make sure reflections are on, and you will see what I mean.

[The_Great_Sephiroth]

Lag refers to network latency, not framerate. Stuttering, choppiness, and bad video performance is just that. The "graphics lag" you speak of is the video device working at capacity and being unable to keep up, thus causes stuttering, loss of framerate, etc. Bad framerate is NOT lag. It's like calling my pickup a tank. I can do it, but it doesn't mean I drive a tank.

 

Also, I have everything maxed on my GTX 1070 in 1440p without the stutter. What fixed it on my end was removing a registry key which, when created, caused G-Sync to fail and the stuttering you describe here. There are two fullscreen registry entries. One is fine and the other causes a whole mess of issues. My solution was to go into the game, set everything how I wanted it, exit the game, and then delete this one key. Now everything works and no more stuttering. The key I removed is "Screenmanager Is Fullscreen mode_h3981298716". There's also a normal fullscreen key which handles fullscreen. Not sure what this does, but it killed my framerate, disabled G-Sync, and introduced the micro-stutter.

 

If you want to test what removing the key would do, just rename it and add ".bak" to the end of the name. This way if it doesn't work for you, you just rename it back and you're golden.

[Mday]

It was a frame rate issue indeed. Usually I have fps at 7x. When the loss of framerate happens the frame rate drop to 5x. That in effect means within 1 sec period, for may be 0.2 secs you have no frames update at all, then for the remaining 0.8 sec you have like 8x frames/sec, which avg out to 5x frames/sec. It is annoying when the zombies teleported behind me with noclips while I am not watching ,and when I try to shot them I cannot aim well because the frame lost make it hard to track zombies movment. And I know they glitched thou because the wall is intact and there is no other way they can reach me that fast otherwise.

[The_Great_Sephiroth]

Did you try temporarily renaming that key I mentioned? When that key is present on my system aside from no G-Sync and this micro-stutter, I got REALLY low framerates. We're talking 20-30fps. Deleting the key got me up to 40-80fps basically everywhere. Add G-Sync and no stutter and it is fine for me.

[Mday]

Did you try temporarily renaming that key I mentioned? When that key is present on my system aside from no G-Sync and this micro-stutter, I got REALLY low framerates. We're talking 20-30fps. Deleting the key got me up to 40-80fps basically everywhere. Add G-Sync and no stutter and it is fine for me.

 

Not Yet. Next time I play I will try it out and let you know about it.(may be tomorrow.)

[faatal]

Also, I have everything maxed on my GTX 1070 in 1440p without the stutter. What fixed it on my end was removing a registry key which, when created, caused G-Sync to fail and the stuttering you describe here. There are two fullscreen registry entries. One is fine and the other causes a whole mess of issues. My solution was to go into the game, set everything how I wanted it, exit the game, and then delete this one key. Now everything works and no more stuttering. The key I removed is "Screenmanager Is Fullscreen mode_h3981298716". There's also a normal fullscreen key which handles fullscreen. Not sure what this does, but it killed my framerate, disabled G-Sync, and introduced the micro-stutter.

 

If you want to test what removing the key would do, just rename it and add ".bak" to the end of the name. This way if it doesn't work for you, you just rename it back and you're golden.

 

"Screenmanager Fullscreen mode" appears to be an old key, since there are no references to it in code.

 

"Screenmanager Is Fullscreen mode" should have a 0 or 1 value that is set by the video settings UI Fullscreen no or yes. Deleting is would turn fullscreen off, which you can just do by setting it to No in the UI. We don't do anything with this value other than send it to the Unity SetResolution(int width, int height, bool fullscreen) function.

[ZombieHorde]

That is not microstutter. That could be garbage collection, but that normally happens about every minute. Could be windows doing some heavy background work or some game system stalling out for a moment like a big load/save.

 

Faatal: If garbage collection needs to run roughly every minute, are you able to force it to happen when you open the map, a menu or when you get in/out of vehicles, or other situations where you aren't generally in an intense moment where microstutter is the difference between life and death?

[iicecube]

There's a few seconds lag when doing TNT blast and if there more than 5 or more zombies around..

Using 2700x with 1080TI same issue with my 2nd spec 1070TI too..

Other than that everything fine..

[The_Great_Sephiroth]

"Screenmanager Fullscreen mode" appears to be an old key, since there are no references to it in code.

 

"Screenmanager Is Fullscreen mode" should have a 0 or 1 value that is set by the video settings UI Fullscreen no or yes. Deleting is would turn fullscreen off, which you can just do by setting it to No in the UI. We don't do anything with this value other than send it to the Unity SetResolution(int width, int height, bool fullscreen) function.

I know that it isn't used correctly. On my end, A17.0, if I go into my graphics options and exit them, then exit the game, that value is created and the next time I start the game G-Sync won't work and I get micro-stutter. The game DOES create "Screenmanager Is Fullscreen Mode" if you go into your graphics options in-game. However, deleting that entry and playing the game without ever entering the options again means the entry never shows up in my registry again and G-Sync works, and no micro-stutter! I believe this is a bug, but either way, the value IS created by the game AND the value DOES disable G-Sync and cause micro-stutter on my end.

 

If this is not supposed to be how it is, I would be happy to send you any info which may help you in squashing this bug.

[TopAce6]

Can confirm, it also creates/recreates the registry entry for me as well. Deleted it twice to confirm. Whether or not its causing g me any problems is undetermined, as my system runs the game fine.... barring the gigantic loss of fps with reflections on. Which sucks because the game is too dark with out reflected light.

[SurvivalUK]

Looks like it is reflections doing it then. No surprise since they are expensive. They have to do 6 renders to update the cubemap. The higher the setting, the more often it updates and the higher the resolution and the renders use a longer distance. At high or better it is doing a lot of extra rendering, which would give you spikes.

 

I've tweaked reflection settings several times now and nothing will make them faster other than reducing values, which is what the lower settings do.

Possibly a setting best change to on or off then in the options and default on value of low in a future build?

 

Even dropping down to 720p when using high reflection quality the frametime variance is jarring.

[The_Great_Sephiroth]

Can confirm, it also creates/recreates the registry entry for me as well. Deleted it twice to confirm. Whether or not its causing g me any problems is undetermined, as my system runs the game fine.... barring the gigantic loss of fps with reflections on. Which sucks because the game is too dark with out reflected light.

What video card do you have? I am running the one GTX1070 while the other idles (why won't Unity get with 2004 and support SLI?) and I play in 2560x1440 with everything maxed, including reflections.