How to fix frame stuttering?

[Shroud.2307]

Have never had this issue until DX11 was announced. Since then, I will occasionally have very severe frame stuttering in larger groups. Like almost full 1 second stops at times.

I've tried enabling and disabling DX11, changing various settings, and tinkering with NVidia, but I'm not doing so with any reason. I don't have any sort of knowledge about this kind of thing.

The exact computer and specs I use can be found here.
Note that again, I have never had an issue like this until somewhat recently, so I'm assuming this is something I can fix with some sort of setting or by updating something.

[ShadowCatz.8437]

20 hours ago, Shroud.2307 said:

Have never had this issue until DX11 was announced. Since then, I will occasionally have very severe frame stuttering in larger groups. Like almost full 1 second stops at times.

I've tried enabling and disabling DX11, changing various settings, and tinkering with NVidia, but I'm not doing so with any reason. I don't have any sort of knowledge about this kind of thing.

The exact computer and specs I use can be found here.
Note that again, I have never had an issue like this until somewhat recently, so I'm assuming this is something I can fix with some sort of setting or by updating something.

You have 8 GB RAM (which is shared with your GPU) and 256 GB SSD. How full are your SSD? It can have an impact when SSD get to full (it need some space reserved to work without issues). Do have a web browser open with many tabs, then it is also possible that suddenly you have not that much RAM to use for game.

Make sure that you don't have anything else running in background, if possible. Open Windows Task Manager to see what is running and check your tempeture (Graph and usually you see GPU as the last/buttom graph with tempeture). Here you can also how much RAM is being used while playing. Set GW2 in Options to Windowed Fullscreen which let you see Task Manger above your gaming surface (it will make GW2 run in a window without border like all other windows apps).

https://www.howtogeek.com/405806/windows-task-manager-the-complete-guide/

It would also be helpful to know if you use any overlay (Discord, Steam overlay or any other thing that can display information above a games surface). Do you use any add ons like TACO or Blish HUD?

 

What settings do you have in game Options for Graphics and what setting are you using for NVIDIA Control Panel?

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Options#Graphics_Options

 

[Shroud.2307]

20 minutes ago, ShadowCatz.8437 said:

You have 8 GB RAM (which is shared with your GPU) and 256 GB SSD. How full are your SSD? It can have an impact when SSD get to full (it need some space reserved to work without issues). Do have a web browser open with many tabs, then it is also possible that suddenly you have not that much RAM to use for game.

Make sure that you don't have anything else running in background, if possible. Open Windows Task Manager to see what is running and check your tempeture (Graph and usually you see GPU as the last/buttom graph with tempeture). Here you can also how much RAM is being used while playing. Set GW2 in Options to Windowed Fullscreen which let you see Task Manger above your gaming surface (it will make GW2 run in a window without border like all other windows apps).

https://www.howtogeek.com/405806/windows-task-manager-the-complete-guide/

It would also be helpful to know if you use any overlay (Discord, Steam overlay or any other thing that can display information above a games surface). Do you use any add ons like TACO or Blish HUD?

 

What settings do you have in game Options for Graphics and what setting are you using for NVIDIA Control Panel?

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Options#Graphics_Options

 

The computer has nothing on it, basically. I only use it for GW2. So it has about 98% of it's memory free.

I don't ever run anything else in the background and I don't have any overlays or addons.

My settings are "medium high", is how I would describe it. I can reply again later with screencaps of the settings if needed. Basically, Reflections are off, Particles are limited, Character Model Limit + Quality is Lowest, but a number of other things are on High or Medium. I average FPS in the 60's even in larger scale groups, but it does sometimes drop to the 40's depending on the location. 

As I'd said in the OP, this never used to be an issue. And considering that nothing has changed on my end, because I only use the computer for GW2, it seems strange for it to suddenly start having frame hitching, which is why I'm figuring it has something to do with GW2 or NVidia - likely related to updates.

Edited December 20, 2021 by Shroud.2307

[SoftFootpaws.9134]

1 hour ago, Shroud.2307 said:

The computer has nothing on it, basically. I only use it for GW2. So it has about 98% of it's memory free.

I don't ever run anything else in the background and I don't have any overlays or addons.

My settings are "medium high", is how I would describe it. I can reply again later with screencaps of the settings if needed. Basically, Reflections are off, Particles are limited, Character Model Limit + Quality is Lowest, but a number of other things are on High or Medium. I average FPS in the 60's even in larger scale groups, but it does sometimes drop to the 40's depending on the location. 

As I'd said in the OP, this never used to be an issue. And considering that nothing has changed on my end, because I only use the computer for GW2, it seems strange for it to suddenly start having frame hitching, which is why I'm figuring it has something to do with GW2 or NVidia - likely related to updates.

Having free memory on a computer is a misnomer, there's no such thing.

 

The game itself consumes 6GB of RAM, leaving you for only 2GB of disk cache, which is what the majority of your RAM is used for these days. To put this into perspective, for a game with a 50GB data file, having just 2GB of RAM leftover for disk cache isn't much, and the game is likely having to constantly thrash your disk because of it. Even though SSDs are fast, its still just a single disk that will be bottlenecked in throughput when reading lots of small files (a recent update was 40,000 ~1kB files, for example, which would seriously bog it down).

 

On top of this, the game requires about 4GB of VRAM for High Textures & High Shaders, That listing doesn't say how much VRAM is on the mobile GPU, but if its less than around 4GB you'll need to play on Medium textures/shaders to avoid constantly swapping textures back and forth between VRAM, system RAM and the disk itself.

 

DirectX 11 (and dx12pxy and DXVK too) naturally uses more resources to increase performance.

 

I'm sorry if this is too technical. One thing you can do is go into your driver settings and enable Triple Buffering and max Prerender Frames, this will increase your input latency but allow the game to take better advantage of DX11 as well as eliminate alot of frame rate instability, screen tearing and other issues.

 

And yes, regressions can happen in drivers, especially on older hardware. If the game runs better (as in more stable, not a higher framerate) with -dx9 or -dx11, its likely you've encountered a regression in that specific driver you're using. Sometimes you can find which driver versions perform the best with certain games.

 

You should also try the various addons (like dx12pxy) for alternative testing, I think they still work.

 

I'm sorry if this isn't helpful at all.

Edited December 20, 2021 by Hannelore.8153

[Shroud.2307]

2 hours ago, Hannelore.8153 said:

Having free memory on a computer is a misnomer, there's no such thing.

 

The game itself consumes 6GB of RAM, leaving you for only 2GB of disk cache, which is what the majority of your RAM is used for these days. To put this into perspective, for a game with a 50GB data file, having just 2GB of RAM leftover for disk cache isn't much, and the game is likely having to constantly thrash your disk because of it. Even though SSDs are fast, its still just a single disk that will be bottlenecked in throughput when reading lots of small files (a recent update was 40,000 ~1kB files, for example, which would seriously bog it down).

 

On top of this, the game requires about 4GB of VRAM for High Textures & High Shaders, That listing doesn't say how much VRAM is on the mobile GPU, but if its less than around 4GB you'll need to play on Medium textures/shaders to avoid constantly swapping textures back and forth between VRAM, system RAM and the disk itself.

 

DirectX 11 (and dx12pxy and DXVK too) naturally uses more resources to increase performance.

 

I'm sorry if this is too technical. One thing you can do is go into your driver settings and enable Triple Buffering and max Prerender Frames, this will increase your input latency but allow the game to take better advantage of DX11 as well as eliminate alot of frame rate instability, screen tearing and other issues.

 

And yes, regressions can happen in drivers, especially on older hardware. If the game runs better (as in more stable, not a higher framerate) with -dx9 or -dx11, its likely you've encountered a regression in that specific driver you're using. Sometimes you can find which driver versions perform the best with certain games.

 

You should also try the various addons (like dx12pxy) for alternative testing, I think they still work.

 

I'm sorry if this isn't helpful at all.

I don't understand much of this, but there's no need to apologize for helping.

It is an older laptop and has been in for repairs several times. I have a second one that I don't use for gaming (because it can't support it), so I had everything unnecessary removed from the older laptop to save as much space as possible and to avoid any potential background programs bogging down GW2.

I will @ you later on with some screencaps of my Task Manager processes while GW2 is active and even programs that are installed on the computer (of which there are very few - basically the bare minimum). If there's anything else I can do to help in diagnosing the problem, please let me know.

Edited December 20, 2021 by Shroud.2307

[Shroud.2307]

6 hours ago, Hannelore.8153 said:

-snip-

 

https://imgur.com/a/ts8avev
This is a small album of things like NVidia settings, Task Manager Performances, Drive space, etc. GW2 was running in the background while those were taken.

[DemonSeed.3528]

I don't know if it's the same similar problem I had, but it was basically thrashing my I/O and it still comes around even after I got a new ssd on the 16th this month. If you know how to check processes (I use Process Lasso for this), you can see cpu usage, mem usage, i/o and other things happening you'll be able to see what's happening with the gw2 client. You should more or less be able to see the same information with the free program Process Explorer https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/process-explorer. Maybe that can help point you to the source of the issue. I've been having this problem rock up just a couple of weeks before the recent WvW beta happened, and it is still present until now. It goes away when you switch maps, but comes back on the same map and it will keep looping this behaviour until you restart your game client.

[Archangel.9261]

On 12/20/2021 at 7:28 PM, SoftFootpaws.9134 said:

Having free memory on a computer is a misnomer, there's no such thing.

 

The game itself consumes 6GB of RAM, leaving you for only 2GB of disk cache, which is what the majority of your RAM is used for these days. To put this into perspective, for a game with a 50GB data file, having just 2GB of RAM leftover for disk cache isn't much, and the game is likely having to constantly thrash your disk because of it. Even though SSDs are fast, its still just a single disk that will be bottlenecked in throughput when reading lots of small files (a recent update was 40,000 ~1kB files, for example, which would seriously bog it down).

 

On top of this, the game requires about 4GB of VRAM for High Textures & High Shaders, That listing doesn't say how much VRAM is on the mobile GPU, but if its less than around 4GB you'll need to play on Medium textures/shaders to avoid constantly swapping textures back and forth between VRAM, system RAM and the disk itself.

 

DirectX 11 (and dx12pxy and DXVK too) naturally uses more resources to increase performance.

 

I'm sorry if this is too technical. One thing you can do is go into your driver settings and enable Triple Buffering and max Prerender Frames, this will increase your input latency but allow the game to take better advantage of DX11 as well as eliminate alot of frame rate instability, screen tearing and other issues.

 

And yes, regressions can happen in drivers, especially on older hardware. If the game runs better (as in more stable, not a higher framerate) with -dx9 or -dx11, its likely you've encountered a regression in that specific driver you're using. Sometimes you can find which driver versions perform the best with certain games.

 

You should also try the various addons (like dx12pxy) for alternative testing, I think they still work.

 

I'm sorry if this isn't helpful at all.

This works. The triple buffering + the Prerender Frames (I set frames to 4 in case anyone wanders exactly). I also activated low latency mode and threaded optimization on top of what SoftFootpaws said (don't really know which of the settings did the trick but not only stutter is gone, but also gained like 20 fps (although to be sure I was capped at 250 in most places anyway, however I think it worth a mention).

 

Tyvm.