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Frame Rate Stuttering During Gameplay
Have a huge issue with frame rate stuttering on PC. My computer meets all of the recommended hardware with room to spare. It's not just cut scene issues either(like I've been seeing posts about) it also effects game play; the game is essentially unplayable right now. I can't even get out to the street after the first cut scene. I already tried lowering all of my settings and the lag is unchanged. An update of some kind would be nice. If anyone has a work around let me know. Thanks.
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It's not anytime and everywhere, but by judging at the system from the lightning demo of ME:C, it seems to happen everytime the skybox is changing and the light system has to make an update between two current and do a subtle blend so it can't be noticed.
The mirror's edge timer fixed the issue for me, I simply choose a time of the day where it doesn't freeze and I do "freeze time". Good thing is, I can select if I want daytime or night-time.
It's been almost a month now and I've not seen an official response anywhere about this issue. Waiting for it to be fixed before continuing. Very disappointed.
The Devs never mentioned this nor a solution because there isn't .. i seriously dare to challenge their eyes
You may be on to something there. I haven't noticed the same thing but ill keep at eye out.
for me it seems like ill be playing one day and everything is running perfectly but I get on the next day and I have unplayable stuttering. It seems random but ill keep watch for what you describe.
And yes, I have done all that. In my last reply I mentioned that I now notice it will be perfectly playable for a few hours then Ill get on the next morning and it will stutter again.
I recorded a video of the game to illustrate how badly the stuttering impacts gameplay:
Link to YouTube video
The symptoms are the same as described by others: very high CPU usage all throughout, and it mostly happens while traversing and rotating the camera, which suggests it's related to data streaming.
I'm running the game with the following specs:
- Intel Core i5 4670K @ 4.2 GHz
- 32 (4x8) GB Corsair Vengeance 1600 Mhz DDR3 @ 1866 MHz
- MSI GTX 1080 Gaming X @ stock clocks
- 2560x1440 resolution with Ultra settings
- Game is installed on a Samsung 850 EVO 500 GB SSD
I also recorded the video through another PC so as not to interfere with the performance on my main gaming PC.I got the latest game patches, I've updated all my drivers to their latest versions, and I've tried all the usual remedies, but without any result:
- Setting process priority to High in the Task Manager
- Enabling or disabling GPU Memory Restriction (not that it matters much on a 8GB GTX 1080 anyway)
- Changing VSync and fullscreen settings
- Setting GameTime.MaxVariableFps to 60 or even 30
- Lowering graphics settings to High or Medium
- Playing with mouse + keyboard instead of an Xbox controller
- Disabling the Origin in-game overlay
None of these made any noticeable difference whatsoever. The only thing that seemed to improve things was setting Origin to offline mode, but even then that didn't completely fix the problem.I'm kind of bummed out about this. I want to love this game but there's not much to enjoy right now. I thought I would get the best possible experience on PC with my new graphics card, but now I'm starting to regret buying this for PC and not getting it on console instead.
I agree with you; it is a shame. When it is magically playable the game is a lot of fun but I have no way to get around when it isn't. See if what GeoffreyOmega mentioned occurs for you-whether or not the stuttering happens when the time cycle changes from night to day or day to night. That may be when it occurs for me.
Hope someone takes notice soon.
Bring up the in-game console with ` (tilde)
Type in exactly
GameTime.MaxVariableFps 60
Stutters gone, playing with no stutter at all on a gtx 1080 with hyper settings 1080p.
Try it worked for me, now enjoying the game.
I cannot get the command to stick after exiting game so it must be inputted everytime the game starts.
P.S I am also capping framerate with msi afterburner, nvidia render frames ahead set to 1, vsync off in game and forced through driver, power mode prefer maximum performance.
Also, in my case the problem doesn't seem related to the day/night cycle either. It's happening all the time, regardless of the time of day.
I have tried every possible thing i could think of or search for with no luck. Except reinstalling the operating system(maybe a newer one ?) and playing on another drive.
The game starts in a solid condition after a fresh PC reboot. I mean a near perfect 16.66 ms frame pacing with odd and rare variations no higher than 3-5 ms. This is until you come across an autosave, checkpoint, notification, dialog and such... Normally this happens really really quick but i have found several small areas which i can roam freely without triggering any of it. This way i can successfully replicate my observations.
One example is an area i found just below Plastic's hideout, where you pass a bridged corridor and came across a nice room with a fountain in the middle. The area is that room with its surroundings; like the balcony and the other room it opens where you can jump to a rope or a rooftop next to it.
So; after a fresh PC reboot if you start in that area; you can roam freely without leaving there and never see any freeze or stutter as long as you play. Do whatever you want jump, slide, roll anything... Then; as its very close, just go back the corridor to trigger the notification near Plastic's hideout. After that return back and see that the area you were exploring flawless for some time became a freeze and stutter fest.
Of course; it doesn't end there. The freezes and stutters only happen when i stop Faith or perform an action which may slow her down a bit in certain spots. For example close to the edges... İf i don' t stop and continue or make circles in the exact spot where the freezing or the stuttering happens i see no drops. Just flawless... Also, there is a camera in there and if you stay on its range to trigger K-Sec Response; the freezes and the stutters completely goes away for the duration until K-Sec Stands Down message. As soon as K-Sec stands down, freezes and stutters kicks in again. I have to tell again that i can replicate this on a lot of areas around the whole map even with larger routes.
This behaviour doesn't go away until you do a fresh boot of your computer and kicks in as soon as you trigger something like i have described above which is actually lightning fast during normal gameplay as you are bombarded with lots of saves, dialogs notifications, triggers and such. So if you roam around the city like a headless chicken without stopping and/or K-Sec is after you, frame pacing is acceptable. But if you somehow stop, or attempt a semi successful action effecting your speed you are doomed.
All these point to a streaming issue and i have observed that frame drops coincides with disk activity accessing save or cas files. Maybe my drive is the issue but i haven't seen something like this for a very very long time. Like 15-20 years... It' s like i am completely out of resources and playing through the page file which is definately not true as i have a more than capable system with plenty of resources. Even Id Tech games which are known to be notorious on this runs flawless on my system. Or maybe its the drm as it is known and disscussed being heavy on the drives. I don't know...
But i am done blaming my system and looking for a solution through it. Now i am just hoping for the issues to be adressed and fixed which doen' t look promising as the devs seem to have moved on...
I made another video, this time with PerfOverlay.DrawGraph enabled, and focusing on a single area with different texture settings:
Link to YouTube video
As you can see, if I don't move the game runs fine at a solid 60fps. However, if I spin around in place, the game immediately starts to stutter with massive CPU spikes. If I start running around the problem becomes even worse. As soon as I stop moving, the framerate goes back to a stable 60fps again. The problem goes away if I set the texture quality to Low, but reappears when I set it to Medium.
Just as a reminder, I am running the game off of a Samsung 850 EVO SSD, so disk access speeds are unlikely to be the cause. I also have GameTime.MaxVariableFps set to 60, put Origin in offline mode, and set the Mirror's Edge executable's process priority to High in the Task Manager.
Watched your video, thats pretty bad, im not getting that at all. When i load my game in the same area as yours i can spin around on the spot with no drops at all, i noticed you have in game vsync turned on, turn that off. Have you tried CPU core parking turned off, set power management to high performance, render ahead to 1, also what OS are you running im on windows 10 64bit. Latest nvidia driver also.
Try using msi afterburner RTSS to cap frames to 60fps also, without this enabled i get stutters.
Ive uploaded a video to show you how it runs on my system for comparison.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=LJmM4dhjp8c&feature=youtu.be
I think I should also make it clear that I have plenty of recent graphics-heavy triple-A games installed on my PC, and without exception I can run all of them flawlessly at 1440p on Ultra settings without any drops below 60fps. Mirror's Edge Catalyst is the only game that has these kinds of issues. I'm pretty sure my PC is not the problem. You could argue that my Core i5 4670k processor isn't the newest anymore, but it is still one of the most popular processors out there, so I can't imagine the developers requiring something faster than that to make the game playable.
I guess I can play with texture quality set to Low for now, at least that's playable, but that's not exactly what I got a brand new GTX 1080 for...
Im playing on hyper settings with no problems and about 5 hours into the game. My friend has an i7 3770k with GTX 780ti and he says it runs smooth at ultra but with gpu restriction on as he has only got 3gb of graphics memory.
I'm just trying to help, wish i could get it working for you as its a great game when it works! lol Sorry man.
Configure Surround Physx - Auto
ambient occlusion - off
anisotropic filtering - 16x
antialiasing - fxaa - off
antialising gamma correction - on
antialising - mode - application controlled
antialising - setting - application controlled
antialising - transparency - off
CUDA - GPUs - all
DSR - factors - off
DSR smoothness - off
Maximum pre-rendered frames - 1
Multi-Frame sampled AA (MFAA) - off
Multi display/mixed gpu acceleration - single display performance mode
Power management mode - prefer maximum performance
Shader cache - on
Texture filtering - anisotropic sample optimisation - off
Texture filtering - negative LOD bios
Texture filtering - quality
Texture filtering - trilinear optimisation
triple buffering - off
vertical sync - on
Virtual reality pre-rendered frames - 1
I have just installed a new Corsair RM750i PSU in my PC, so I doubt that's a problem. The stuttering also occurred with my old PSU by the way. I did install the game onto a secondary hard drive initially, but moved it to the SSD when I first noticed the stuttering. So that eliminates the disk drive possibility. And like you, I use the Nvidia DisplayPort Audio from my videocard, with headphones plugged into my monitor. On-board audio is already disabled through the BIOS.
Perhaps I should try a fresh installation of Windows 10 on a spare disk sometime, see if the problem also happens then. While unlikely, there is still the possibility of some background process messing with the game's performance. Perhaps something installed by one of my developer tools.
Yeah sounds like a good idea. I did notice though that your graph was really jagged where as with mine it's very flat, the funny thing is if i don't enable the GameTime.maxVariableFps setting its fluctuating up and down a lot, as soon as the command is inputted it goes rock solid like in the video. You say its cpu related but the graph on your video shows the gpu chart shooting up sometimes with the cpu chart?
I have heard that some gamepads and keyboards can have a negative effect on some games. When you are standing still it seems fine, its when you turn or move, maybe try a different control method, im using an xbox one pad via wired connection. Also my game is installed on a seagate 3tb 7200 barracuda, which is alot slower than an SSD. In fact all my games are installed on this drive and work 100%, my windows is running on the samsung m.2 950 pro 256gb.
I have my pagefile set to automatic. I have nothing overclocked, also hyper threading is enabled in the bios. Just a quick thought, ages ago i had very bad stuttering in some of my games, i ended up finding out it was the motherboard, it was a **** no-namer that was cheap at the time. As soon as i changed the board to a Asus my problems went away, and i used the same hardware all i changed was the board.
Now i swear by asus motherboards, never had a problem since. My only thought about this is that the game only likes certain hardware setups, maybe even though you have a gtx 1080 something else in the chain is not agreeing with the game, as i have proved that the game runs solid on my setup and i have seen it working on an i7 3770k also with no stutters. It's really weird!
(By the way, the Core i5 does not have hyperthreading, so I cannot enable that. It does have 4 physical cores, so it meets the required specs for MEC.)
As for the GPU chart shooting up sometimes, I can imagine the GPU being starved of rendering commands regularly because the CPU is stalled, which would cause those frames to take a long time to render. Note that the GPU spikes are always accompanied by CPU spikes, while the CPU is doing plenty of spiking by itself as well. Besides that, I can clearly see in the Task Manager that the game is eating up close to 100% of the CPU when the spikes occur.
Before I had the latest WHQL drivers from Nvidia installed (386.81), but last week Nvidia also released a hotfix driver (386.95) which fixes some DPC latency issues. Installed those, did a clean driver install while I was at it, and now the CPU spikes are completely gone! I can run the game at 1440p on Ultra settings and no matter what I do, it stays at a rock-solid 60fps.
Everything else is back at their default settings now too. The clean Nvidia driver install means all 3D settings were reset back to their original state, and I didn't touch those. Windows power plan is back at Balanced. I've got VSync enabled in the game. GPU Memory Restriction is off. I'm using a wireless Xbox One controller. Origin is online. I didn't touch the process priority in the Task Manager. None of these remedies made a difference before, and they don't have any adverse effect now either. The DPC latency issue was apparently the only thing that mattered.
For anyone else still suffering from stutters, you can get the Nvidia hotfix drivers from here: http://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/4202
For me I am still running the 386.81 drivers and still need to use GameTime.MaxVariableFps 60 to smooth out the remaining stutters. I might give the hotfix drivers a whirl and see if it needs the command line still inputting.
I have a 970 and like you Astfgl, I tried pretty much everything but no positive effect...
Hope that EA and nvidia will work something out concerning that on all other GPU as well.
Tried all the suggestions here in this thread, bur couldn't fix the problem. I wonder when they are going to release a definite fix for this......
Exactly, it sucks for now but they have priorities on making other games first. EA has a reputation to not immediately fix things like this. Some people are talking about DLC's already meanwhile they should first make this game simply playable. So I feel for you guys and I hope a fix will come soon but for now enjoy the summer outside
Played Catalyst again after almost two months, back then the game ran absolutely smoothly, but now the fps is broken here too.
Needless to say, my system (Windows 10, Intel i5 3570 3.40 GHz, Nvidia Geforce GTX 970, 18GB RAM) has remained the same.
Installing that latest hotfix driver (386.95) didn't help.
Neither that console command. And I refuse to set my settings lower when it worked fine with these settings earlier!
I just played 1 hour... That's juste unplayable !
Running with a i7 920 @ 4.4Ghz, 16GB RAM and a GTX 970. (Windows 7)
Stuttering, freezes... The only way to fix that (for me) is to set the priority process to "high", but micro stuttering remains, and make the game unplayable.
I feel like someone with parkinson, or like someone who's blinking every second.
Is a patch comming to fix that ? I read on many forums that the last patch has fixed these problem for most players, looks like I'm not "most players".
To help :
I've played with and without HyperThreading : no change
Setting priority process to "high" : stop freezing, but still stuttering
Settings graphics to low : no change
I've turned ON/OFF V-sync : no change
I've turned OFF the memory option : worst.
I've turned off Origin Interface in-game : no change
I've set Origin to "offline" : same thing
I've tryed some commands in the console (to lock to 60FPS for example) : nothing happens
I've changed my sound card (from the motherboard Chipset, Soundmax, by disabling it from BIOS, to an USB external sound card) : nothing change
I've tried to play with an Xbox controller : I just can't aim correctly, because I'm not a console player... But the stutterings remains.
Ho, and, of course, all of my drivers are up to date.
If somebody have an other solution... or just a news about a future patch...