Far Cry 3 Stutter issue: Final thoughts (nvidia only)

[umkc]

FINAL THOUGHTS( for Nvidia only)

I have spent enough time messing with the game settings to get rid of stutter. Based on my experience and researching articles here, on guru3D and ubisoft forums, here are my conclusions:

PROBLEM: The game stutters if the fps is below 60. the DX version doesn't matter. I have tested with both dx9 and 11. many people on forums report the same.

CAUSE: unknown..the game has issues with the frame rendering time..maybe

TESTED FIXES: I have tested almost all the fixes people posted on the internet. here are the results:

forced adaptive V-Sync: Doesn't remove stutter, but it is a lot better than in-game vsync which has mouse lag. RECOMMENDED
Triple buffering: it actually makes the game much smoother recommended... doesn't eliminate stutter . RECOMMENDED
Max-Pre-Buffered frames: I did not find any improvement in performance. UNKNOWN
MaxFps in Config file: setting it to 30 or 45 did not eliminate stutter. as i said above. anything below 60 stutters. NOT RECOMMENDED
DX9: Game stutters even fps falls below 60 even in DX9. Same with DX11. NO DIFFERENCE
Drivers: I have tested with 306.97, 310.54, 310.64, 310.70. none of these eliminate stutter. 310.64 may produce better fps though.
Patch: i have tested 1.01 and 1.02. both patches will not remove stutter. I feel that 1.02 is even worse than 1.01. your experience may vary.

MY SETUP (with forced adaptive vsync+ triple-buffering from Nvidia inspector):

I played on DX9 lowest settings for 2 hours. I run this at low to maintain 60 fps. but fps still drops near towns and in firefights. lowest (48)
I played DX11 for 1 hour. 2x MSAA, SSAO, enhanced foliage. lowest settings. I still get 60 in most places, but same as DX9 it drops down near towns and in firefights. lowest (44)

shadows and PostFX are the main power hungry features here...so i put them both to LOW and rest of the settings to HIGH and tested it again in DX9 and 11 for 2 more hours. suprisingly, I still get 60 in many areas. fps drops again in towns and firefights.

*IMP*: i know there is 4-5 fps difference between DX9 and 11 when the fps drops below 60. The catch is, it doesn't matter.....the game will look like it is running at 20 fps( due to stutter) even when it runs at 1 frame less than 60. So...55 will look 20. 44 will also look like 20.

TEMP FIX: For people having similar problems, all i can say is: try to run the game so that your fps is always 60. So that you will not suffer from that damn stutter nausea and migraines like me


YOUR DUTY!:

I have already filed a complaint with Ubisoft. All you people having similar issues..please report the issue to Ubisoft immediately. If enough people complain about this, maybe they will fix their damn game!
people who doesnt have stutter should also report a complaint just to help us other gamers!

Peace out!



My Specs:

i7 3720 QM
GTX 680M
16 GB RAM
512 GB SSD

[crosslimit]

Hey thanks for your tests. I will try out the adaptive vsnc and triple buffering later. (finally found adaptive vsync lol)

What you could try are the stock 302.77 drivers. I know they shouldnt really perform better than the specially "optimised +38%" value we are getting from nvidia but they suprisingly work the best for me.

[MrDJ]

thanks for doing the tests umkc. + rep to that man

[YodaGoneMad]

I wonder, do you have Optimus?

It truly should not matter, but that is the only difference I have been able to think of between my machine and yours. I have an M17x R3 so to have the 680m I have Optimus disabled in the bios.

I guess you could try flashing an unlocked bios and changing your primary display to PEG. You will probably need to install your drivers again and then see if it makes any difference.

It is really weird that your machine which is extremely similar has issues while mine does not.

FINAL THOUGHTS( for Nvidia only)

I have spent enough time messing with the game settings to get rid of stutter. Based on my experience and researching articles here, on guru3D and ubisoft forums, here are my conclusions:

PROBLEM: The game stutters if the fps is below 60. the DX version doesn't matter. I have tested with both dx9 and 11. many people on forums report the same.

CAUSE: unknown..the game has issues with the frame rendering time..maybe

TESTED FIXES: I have tested almost all the fixes people posted on the internet. here are the results:

forced adaptive V-Sync: Doesn't remove stutter, but it is a lot better than in-game vsync which has mouse lag. RECOMMENDED
Triple buffering: it actually makes the game much smoother recommended... doesn't eliminate stutter . RECOMMENDED
Max-Pre-Buffered frames: I did not find any improvement in performance. UNKNOWN
MaxFps in Config file: setting it to 30 or 45 did not eliminate stutter. as i said above. anything below 60 stutters. NOT RECOMMENDED
DX9: Game stutters even fps falls below 60 even in DX9. Same with DX11. NO DIFFERENCE
Drivers: I have tested with 306.97, 310.54, 310.64, 310.70. none of these eliminate stutter. 310.64 may produce better fps though.
Patch: i have tested 1.01 and 1.02. both patches will not remove stutter. I feel that 1.02 is even worse than 1.01. your experience may vary.

MY SETUP (with forced adaptive vsync+ triple-buffering from Nvidia inspector):

I played on DX9 lowest settings for 2 hours. I run this at low to maintain 60 fps. but fps still drops near towns and in firefights. lowest (48)
I played DX11 for 1 hour. 2x MSAA, SSAO, enhanced foliage. lowest settings. I still get 60 in most places, but same as DX9 it drops down near towns and in firefights. lowest (44)

shadows and PostFX are the main power hungry features here...so i put them both to LOW and rest of the settings to HIGH and tested it again in DX9 and 11 for 2 more hours. suprisingly, I still get 60 in many areas. fps drops again in towns and firefights.

*IMP*: i know there is 4-5 fps difference between DX9 and 11 when the fps drops below 60. The catch is, it doesn't matter.....the game will look like it is running at 20 fps( due to stutter) even when it runs at 1 frame less than 60. So...55 will look 20. 44 will also look like 20.

TEMP FIX: For people having similar problems, all i can say is: try to run the game so that your fps is always 60. So that you will not suffer from that damn stutter nausea and migraines like me


YOUR DUTY!:

I have already filed a complaint with Ubisoft. All you people having similar issues..please report the issue to Ubisoft immediately. If enough people complain about this, maybe they will fix their damn game!
people who doesnt have stutter should also report a complaint just to help us other gamers!

Peace out!



My Specs:

i7 3720 QM
GTX 680M
16 GB RAM
512 GB SSD

[jaug1337]

D3DOverrider should fix this.

Also HERE is 131 pages about this particular problem. Enjoy

Last but not least, my friend did exactly THIS and it fixed the problem.

Good luck to all your stutters

[unreal25]

Last but not least, my friend did exactly THIS and it fixed the problem.

Good luck to all your stutters

Thank you, I followed the settings there but also added 1-frame vsync in game and the microstutter is finally gone (it was gone even without vsync but then I got stuttering due to vertical sync). Even though it didn't really bother me that much as I think it was less than what I saw with other people (this is on a desktop GeForce 660 Ti) the game does feel smoother without it. If you switch to 2-frame vsync the microstutter shows back btw.

[moviemarketing]

Any of you guys tried using a frame rate limiter like MSI Afterburner to cap the frame rate so it doesn't go above 60?

This was one workaround to fix the stuttering problem in Skyrim.

[unreal25]

The microstutter shows up (as noted in the original post) when the FPS drops below 60. How would limiting the FPS to <= 60 help?

[moviemarketing]

The microstutter shows up (as noted in the original post) when the FPS drops below 60. How would limiting the FPS to <= 60 help?

Crazy as it sounds, might be worth trying. For some reason this fixed it in Skyrim for many people. Some got a better result capping at 59 fps, someone else found it only stopped if they capped at 42fps.

More info:

1. The basic flaw appears to arise from using GetTickCount for game logic timing. GetTickCount normally returns a number of milliseconds that increases by 15 to 16 milliseconds every time that 15.625 milliseconds of real time pass. In theory that should produce a subtle 4 Hertz beat frequency on games like Oblivion when FPS is maxed out on and the monitor is running at a 60 Hertz refresh rate, where the game does 14 frames in which 15-16 millieconds of game time pass per frame, then one frame where 31-32 milliseconds of game time occurs, then repeat. The relevant code for that in Oblivion is fairly simple and does not appear ambiguous, though other methods of timing are used for some other purposes (IIRC QueryPerformanceCounter is used for performance monitoring and on some sound cards something else is used for lip synching, but not on other soundcards) and it is concievable that something less obvious is effecting things somehow. Note that a wide variety of software uses GetTickCount in basically this way.

2. GetTickCount is, I've heard, implemented in the hardware abstraction layer, with the most common implementation (described above) being the reference implementation provided by Microsoft. It may vary slightly on some exotic computers, possibly including Xboxes. The behavior I described in #1 above is what I measured on my own computer and confirmed on every other computer I've tested GetTickCount on.

3. A few people do report something that looks like what theory would predict on Oblivion. Most people report not noticing such a thing on Oblivion, or noticing it but it being very minor. I personally have never noticed anything like that from playing Oblivion. When GetTickCount calls are patched to use finer resolution timing instead those people report the issue to be fixed. Oblivion Stutter Remover is the standard fix (it also does a bunch of other stuff).
Note that Oblivion had plenty of other unrelated issues that cause much worse stutter, but the 64 Hertz issue is the only issue that occurs all the time no matter what is happening in the game (unless the game is paused).

4. The FO3 & FNV game logic timing code is slightly different. I have not investigated exactly how it is different, since the issues related to it are readily fixed by the same GetTickCount hook as Oblivion. On FO3/FNV, a very large number of people report (and sometimes show videos of) severe issues on Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas that look vaguely similar to what a 4 Hertz beat frequency should look like, but are probably too much worse than the Oblivion issue to be really the same thing. When GetTickCount calls are patched to use finer resolution timing instead those people report the issue to be fixed. I personally do not notice the issue they describe or show in videos on my FO3 install, but I *do* notice an equally severe issue with NPC animations that goes away when GetTickCount calls get patched (why do I never hear anyone else talking about the vibrating NPC animations?). Fallout Stutter Remover fixes these issues on FO3. New Vegas Stutter Remover fixes them on FNV, and so does the 4GB enabler linked from the NV script extender web page. My presumption is that FO3 / FNV added some sort of issue with scheduling, inter-thread communication, or multiple time measurements per frame that amplified the effect of the 64 Hertz issue. But I don't know, I've never looked for code relating to the issue.