(PC) Major Performance Drop Today

Discussion in 'Old Arkham (Bug Archive)' started by AV, Mar 13, 2019.

  1. AV Loyal Player

    I usually run the game at a perfectly steady 120 fps 1440p with forced AA. Today, no matter what I try, I get constant stutter. This persists even if I lower the res as far as possible and dumb everything down. Did something change overnight? What gives? Anyone else experiencing this?

    Additional info: My Nvidia drivers are up to date. Windows is up to date. Zero issues whatsoever until logging in today.
  2. HurricaneErrl Dedicated Player

    I'm on PS4 and yesterday really seemed bad for me.
  3. AV Loyal Player


    Thanks for the reply. The only info I could find online was that sometimes (maybe) server side issues could cause this sort of thing but I've never seen it. I think a Windows update may have also caused instability issues but aside from my having to do a few restarts and make sure my GPUs were cooking themselves afterwards, everything else seems normal. Was running Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice in 4k HDR w/o issue so it certainly seems to be a DCUO-specific problem.
  4. LadyLightning Issue Tracker Volunteer

    The new Nvidia driver rolled out a few days ago. It maybe messed up your custom settings....
  5. AV Loyal Player

    I did a complete manual wipe and reinstall to be safe and the issue persists even if I don't use the custom settings, unfortunately.
  6. LadyLightning Issue Tracker Volunteer

    Do you enforce an FPS cap? Is Open GL Triple bugffering enabled?

    The NVIDIA GTX and RTX series run really poorly on default settings.

    when PCtest is back up, run /perfmon max to see if you can identify the cause. Liveserver doesn't have that tool.
    • Like x 1
  7. AV Loyal Player


    I'll give /perfmon a shot.

    I've always run FPS capped to display refresh. Currently I've set Adaptive (half) as a workaround but having to drop to 60fps after playing at 120 forever is extremely frustrating and there are still occasional hiccups that shouldn't be there and have never been there before. Triple Buffering is on; I'm using all the same settings I always have. Just went from running flawlessly at 120fps 1440p with as much AA as anyone'd ever need to consistently flying all over the place from 120fps down to 40fps every few seconds regardless of ig or Nvidia settings or resolution. Makes zero sense and it's really puking the whole experience for me.

    It's a few years old now but my rig has 3x 980Ti in SLI; was built so I could play+record in 4K and render 4K in a timely fashion and there's some things it can handle at a playable refresh rate at 8K. Any one of those cards should demolish the game, and has until just a few days ago. I feel like this started, to a degree, with the latest seasonal update but it's hard to pinpoint given that we saw a game update, a windows update, and a gpu update all at the same time.
  8. LadyLightning Issue Tracker Volunteer

    NVIDIA rolled out a driver update. Check when it was installe ;)
  9. AV Loyal Player

    I know, I said I did a complete diver wipe and reinstall. That said I did this several more times today, removed all my cards, ran a third party driver removal tool on top of manually wiping Nvidia's divers again, plugged in a single card, reinstalled drivers, tested fine, now eating dinner then retesting with all three cards. DCUO was stable in wt at 200FPS max settings though on the single card so I'm hopeful.

    I'm used to Nvidia drivers corrupting themselves but if this happens to be the problem, as it seems here, this will be the most insidious case I've seen of it. Never had to scrub it from my registry before like this.
  10. LadyLightning Issue Tracker Volunteer

    Do you have a screen that can display that many frames? If not, capping it to 62 FPS max should stabilize it significantly no matter how many cards you use.

    The engine's internal soft FPS cap is 63 and I wouldn't be surprised if it is there for stability. Going way beyond what the engine was build for is a risk. I have seen everything from stuttering, HUD flicker and white flashes to game crashes and driver failure. There is nothing to gain from too many frames.
  11. Jafin 10000 Post Club

    I didn't have the same issue as you, but for a while there after some Windows update my FPS wouldn't cap itself no matter what I tried, which resulted in significant screen tearing. Eventually I realised that the culprit was Nvidia's Instant Replay/Shadowplay function where it continually records your gameplay for a set amount of time (the past 5 minutes by default) should something happen and you want to have a video record of it. What I had to do to fix it was actually turn off the Instant Replay feature.

    Again, different issue to what you have, but it's worth trying turning it off if you currently have it turned on and see if that gives you any improvement.
  12. AV Loyal Player

    I don't normally run it at that, was just for comparing GPU performance to what I was seeing before (ie after the issue started I'd be lucky to get 40 in wt). I cap at 120 and see a pretty big difference between that and 60 tbh. Personally, I've never had issues at higher FPS but cap it to display native regardless due to common sense.

    It looks like scrubbing the registry and the third party removal tool did the trick. Back to running stable 120 with everything maxed and forced AA. I've gotten used to Nvidia updates needing to be removed and reapplied occasionally but never to such an insidious degree as this.
  13. E Clip Dedicated Player

    Shadowplay barely uses CPU resources, it might make a big performance hit on dual/quad core CPUs, but for newer CPUs (7th gen onward or Ryzen), the performance hit is barely 5%. If you're running it on a SSD/NvMe the performance loss is negligible. HDDs can impact performance especially if the game runs from it and the Shadowplay scratch disk is set to the HDD as well.

    I didn't notice any performance issues after installing the newest NVidia driver, though I have a 1080Ti so it might be a problem with the RTX cards. Have you tried other games? Its possible you have a card with one of those faulty VRAM from Micron that can impact performance. Try running MSI Afterburner to see if your vram frequency is where it should be, if you notice its stuck at a very low frequency, RMA that card immediately. Another thing that can cause problems is installing the CUDA drivers, in case you did install the recently released ones, always use DDU, wipe all drivers including CUDA, install CUDA and then install the latest display driver. Must be in that order.


    Well there is, input lag and responsiveness are increased two fold when you go from 60 to 120 fps, 16.7 ms versus 8.3 ms. It doesn't seem much because we dont perceive 8ms as a whole lot, but once you get used to it, going back to 16.7ms feels sluggish and delayed. Monitor refresh rate has nothing to do with system responsiveness, even if you play on a 60 fps monitor and your games runs at 120+, the reduced latency is very noticeable once you lock your frames to 60 or there about. Also if you have a 60 Hz monitor, there's 99% chance you can overclock it to 75-80Hz from the Nvidia control panel with custom resolution, just going +15-20 frames will be pretty noticeable, when you go 120+ its buttery smooth, night and day difference. Once you get used to this, going back to 60Hz especially with Vsync on will make you want to pull your hair out. :p
  14. LadyLightning Issue Tracker Volunteer

    Ingame Vsync? That caps the game to 30 FPS.
    Input lag and responsiveness are limited in DCUO. It might work on other games but going beyond what the game is intended for is a high risk for a doubtful gain. 60 FPS vs 30 FPS makes sense, but the engine is capped to 63 FPS and that it rund higher than that is a bug.
    And no, we can't change the engine's cap. Running with too many FPS seems to make the engine freeze FPS to catch up in frames and in many cases gives white screens and crashes as well.

    Input lag is dominated by connection and has been discussed to death: In most cases responsiveness in DCUO (PvP) is around 200-500 ms and can go up to 800 ms on poor connections. Overclocking that custom UE3 engine to gain a few miliseconds does nothing.
  15. E Clip Dedicated Player


    The ingame Vsync is for PS, correctly using Vsync on a PC, at least for DCUO, is to use it from the Nvidia control panel that will lock it to your monitor refresh rate. DCUO ignores monitor refresh rate and locks it to 30 which isnt a good experience. Either that or you can configure the ini files. Or as you often suggest to use NVinspector, but that does the same thing as the Vsync option in Nvidia control panel.

    There are many variables that go in input lag, one is introduced via connection as you said, the other via your hardware.

    Here's a diagram to understand why you need more FPS even though your monitor doesnt display as many as your GPU can output

    [IMG]

    The black lines represent the fixed refresh rate of your monitor. The pink lines represent the FPS output by your GPU. When the pink line is closer to the monitor output frame that is what gives you faster responsiveness. That difference depending on where the pink line falls can be up to 16.67ms (1000/60) assuming you're on a standard 60Hz monitor. The more FPS you have the higher the chance that piunk line will fall close to the black line, which is what gives you that responsiveness. Your network works the same, you can replace the pink lines with network information that goes betwen your PC and the game's servers and you basically can explain the same thing as with FPS. So, the higher your FPS or the faster your network traffic the faster your response. There's very little you can do to improve the network, except making sure to have a good router like Mikrotik/Netgear and configure it properly for online gaming. The rest is on the game servers when it comes to connection. I suggest people watch the youtuber Battle(non)sense for more info about this. He delves into details about how these things work.

    As for the argument that more FPS isn't needed, that's a myth perpetuated by a large portion of the internet who still think that people cant see beyond 60 FPS and that humans don't have senses to detect changes on a millisecond scale. Both of those claims are utterly wrong.

    Keep in mind, Im not arguing if high FPS is good for DCUO, you keep bringing up the argument that it has to do with drivers and something with physics engine. That might be true and Im not disputing that, Im simply generalizing. However, I've been running DCUO for 6 years on 200+ FPS and only recently we are getting problems, so I do not accept that I have to handicap myself to have a crash free, stutter free experience on a game that can be run on a smartphone so to speak. I think the problem needs to be solved on the other end not on our end.
    • Like x 1
  16. LadyLightning Issue Tracker Volunteer

    Unfortunately such fixes require the cooperation of Nvidia with game developers and Nvidia is known to be ignorant, only interested in scoring high in benchmarks rather than trusting in open source enviroments and driver stability. If there hadn't been the bitcoin hype much much less players would have NVIDIA. Radeon was just far too expensive.
  17. E Clip Dedicated Player


    Im curious, how do you know the problem is in the drivers? I've been searching the Nvidia forums and other tech related forums for driver issues with DCUO, came up with nothing. Quite frankly Im not sure Im buying this explanation, the game was running fine a few months ago on my Nvidia cards.

    Well at the moment Radeon are at least 20-30% cheaper in every category, yet no one is buying them. Its the brand image rather than anything else. As for professional work, Nvidia is pretty much the only choice due to widely used proprietary technologies present only in GTX/RTX/quadro cards. For some compute/scientific workloads AMD can compete with them, but in all other fields except gaming, AMD are so far behind. Intel throwing their hat in the GPU ring this year can perhaps create a better market, we'll see. I would like them to catch up with Nvidia and offer equivalents to CUDA, tensor, RT cores etc because that would be good for the consumers, and most importantly they need to market it well and work with software developers to implement those technologies. Nvidia are spending a ton of money to push their technologies via various software developers, AMD keeps sleeping for the last decade. They are doing great with their CPU lineup, I bought TR 2950X and a R2700X last year and Im very happy with them. Im eagerly awaiting their Zen2 lineup this summer, I might get some of the newer chips if they offer good improvement over Zen+. This kind of competition is sorely needed in the GPU segment as well, hopefully Navi delivers later this year.

    AMD supports open source where it suits them, but they are fine having a monopoly on x86 with Intel ... Perhaps ARM will change that in the near future, at least I hope so.
    • Like x 1
  18. LadyLightning Issue Tracker Volunteer

    How else would you explain that a custom NVIDIA profile made with the inspector can fix flickering HUD, white flashes, FPS stutter and screen tearing? I tried everything with the drivers and only a custom profile allowed me to play DCUO again, because the HUD flicker made it very unplayable.
  19. E Clip Dedicated Player


    Did you turn those features off, if so which features you turned off or on?

    If its a problem with th driver, we should be seeing it on every Nvidia card no?
  20. AV Loyal Player


    Might be worth doing a full GPU driver scrub like I just did. I used the guru3d uninstaller after manually removing everything as much as possible. Nvidia's drivers are quite good in and of themselves but their update process, especially when handled by Geforce Experience and without manually uninstalling, is prone to error/corruption to the point I end up having to do a totally clean install for every few iterations.