Further Details on Hitching

Hitching. It’s a foul word many of you have come to loathe recently and something the team is spending a lot of time working on. The word itself can mean a lot of different things and we would like to take the opportunity to give you a little more insight into how we define some of this behavior.

Why do this? Mainly because it helps us understand what you guys are experiencing, and guides us to begin looking at the right aspects of the game that are causing the issue. What happens will likely fall into one of three categories:

Frame Hitching – Frame Hitching occurs when your gameplay appears to “stall” for a certain period of time. For example when flying forward your clearly stop for a few moments. Estimates of time are always useful for us in this case i.e. “About every 2 minutes the game pauses for half a second.” Here is an example of Frame Hitching:

Player Jitter – This is defined as erratic or otherwise not smooth movement of objects in the world. It can be useful to call this out specifically what is impacting you such as Infrantry or Vehicles which helps us nail down the issue. Here is an extreme example:

Input Lag - Input lag is the feeling that your input is not having a visible impact in the game fast enough. Being explicit about reporting the action is important for instance lag trying to enter a vehicle would be completely different than lag in screen update when moving the mouse.

We know these are a big issue for many of you and appreciate your continued patience as we track them down. Thank you to those who have provided us videos and very specific descriptions and we look forward to hearing more of your feedback. Continue to post your videos!

Thanks, Radar
Frame hitching is certainly what I am suffering from. It's not game-breaking, but it is annoying. I might freeze every minute for less than a half-second, and sometimes, the game hitches once every ten minutes. Good luck on fixing the issue, and have a nice Thursday

The first video looks like shader cache hitching with a Nvidia Card.... if the shader is turned on it looks like this if you run in ultra on my PC...! It is caused by the shader trying to write the video color info to a slow hard drive. (none-SSD)
The shader buffer is not big enough to handle the graphics of PS2... Nvidia only allows 256mb and that's not big enough for PS2 type graphics so the buffer is always over written on the hard drive. (This only happens in high or ultra graphics)

The writes/reads go to the hard drive in temp file of widows temp memory. It's the hard drive speed and type that causes this. Slow drives are worse than a fast drive with big memory.

You can tell by the left right movement in this type hitching.

The only fix for this is turning the shader off in the card.

Thanks Radarx for the definitions of the definition with supporting videos, now I can better use in-house terminology to /bug report these - the one I did just before logging of and getting on the forums would have included input lag in the description as the normal key to bring out a motion spotter wasn't functioning...

I don't have the stated issues personally, but I hope we can see fixes soon. I can only imagine how jarring this is for others.

Thank you for clarifying that user101. Despite what RadarX says and the title of the video, I wasnt convinced the first video was a video of hitching, until you posted. Could you please help me with video 2 ? I know RadarX describes it as a Player Jitter video, but Im not so sure. I wont be convinced its Player Jitter until an expert like yourself can verify thats what it is. I for one will sleep much more soundly tonight knowing the community now has a professional software guru on the job and not just a random SOE employee. Thank you so much In advance

Spirit it's good of you saying that, thanks you so much, but I am not SOE programming quality. But the first video was just what my video looks like if I play ultra no less..! Nvidia also say that it is there problem because i asked them... ! And they agreeded that the shader is the problem and they are going to fix it in the future -- it's on there list of to do things. From 3 months ago...! There par with SOE.

Since I have a klunky old hard raptor that has almost no buffer and is slow for now a days.... it shows doing the exect same thing.

I am sure SOE could improve things though.... Spirit you a good programmer feel free to voice your opinion... you have been around the block.. Spirit you did notice I said it looks like (not is) -- I am sure it is not just the video driver totally.

Spirit you input is welcome any time.

After updating my rig, or after you fixed it I seem to have rid of myself of hitching for a couple months now.

Last few days seem to have been worse for player jitter, though. I often like to try my luck at flying(not so lucky, I've found out) and from time to time people just warp a hundred meters in a seemingly random direction. Usually Scythes or Reavers, I'm sure Mossies would behave the same way for other factions. My FPS is always around 60/62 and ping rarely goes over 150.

Also, not sure if this is related, but in some cases turrets controlled by other players don't turn accordingly. You'll see them shoot into directions different than that, which the turret is facing.

what's the name of this folder. can you post a screenshot of this folder with ps2 cache files in it.

it was a little better for me today after whatever the fix was 87mb download... i was just standing near the jump pad at the small satellite of allatum to the north shooting at the jumping nc guys.. frame hitching happened like perhaps once a minute for 10-15s but when i jumped into allatum myself it got worse.. its better but still not playable.. earlier it was just a barrage of frame hitching couldn't even move..

hmm can't edit previous post.. anyways i take everything back i said earlier.. now tried in a bigger fight and i can't even watch the frigging map when i'm dead without constant frame hitching

I have to comment you I've been playing this game since the beginning and I had no problem at all... dont even RECORDING the game with the in game provided system. Now, every patch is getting worse to play, with LOT of HITCHING.
And was no problem to my Core 2 Dúo E8400 @ 3,6 GHz and 6 GB of RAM and GTX670 before (Also I had a GeForce 8800 GT Alpha Dog and that I was using playing AND recording) despite the Nvidia Experience says with High and some Ultra graphics.
The game is just getting worse instead of better to play. I love this game but bearly can play (not mentioning I used to fly...) cause the Hitching thing... Was just after the latest patches and is exactly as shown in the video. Sometimes the screen is frozen for eternals 2 or 3 seconds and I think is worse when more populated the place. (Sorry about my english I speak Spanish here)

This!

I tryed everything... i'm done with it. It is / was never a problem on my side!
(maybe i try to get another video up here when i'm done being frustrated....)

I would love it if they fixed the 64 bit clients ability to record. I could show you so many graphical errors...

Right now when I try to record something, All it does is record sound and a black screen, Nothing else. Radar, If you could, Pass this suggestion to the team to get it fixed. Otherwise I can't help show you the issues that I see every single day.

Like a light assault having a leg seizure when they hit an object the wrong way after jump jetting..

Hello, i'm gonna add my 2 cents on these hitching problems and how i've found a quick and dirty (emphasis on dirty) workaround to have a better experience (no idea if that would work for everyone).

My rig's pretty subpar for PS2, consisting of a Pentium E5200 oc'd to 3.4ghz, a radeon hd5770, 8gb ddr2 PC6400. On the upside, i have at least a decent SSD with the game installed on it, so hdd hitches are practically a moot concern.

Anyway, you can imagine that with such a config, my recent gameplay experience was pretty much freeze-hell, wherever i was or whatever battle happened (even an empty warpgate was atrocious) and even the last few patches didn't do much to resolve these issues.

So I used Process Explorer to see exactly what made the game hiccup so often.

This is what I've found:

Incidentally, I noticed those freezes happened even more often while looking through a 6x or more scope, for some reason.
Anyway, whenever a freeze happened, one of the PhysX thread flared up to hog about one core's worth of kernel-mode (the red part in the monitor) cpu. After some tries, I found that by killing the non-hogging thread (process explorer allows that, without killing the whole process altogether), the hogging one would revert back to a normal usage, and would no longer hog the game again until the next time i run PS2.

In fact, I tried killing one of the physx thread from the main menu (any of them) before choosing a character, not only the game didn't crash after that, i didn't have a single hitch at all and could have an actual playable experience again.

So there it is, like i said it's a pretty dirty way, but it's the only one i have. Hope that helps in some way.

Acidule may have something here.

On my system (i5 4gb 32bit client), I have 2 problems. A memory leak that gives me the windows low virtual memory warning after playing for an hour or so and the CTD in large battles and alerts. For most of the last month, I have had to fight on esimir in 12-24 battles or less, and even then, I frequently CTD.

I haven't had a lot of time to test this but I ran 4 sessions, 2 normal sessions in a 48-96 battle, and 2 sessions where I killed one of the PhysX threads at the player screen before starting the game.

Session 1: Normal - CTD after about 8 minutes
Session 2: Killed PhysX - Played for 45 minutes before CTD
Session 3: Normal - CTD after about 15 minutes
Session 4: Killed PhysX - Played for almost an hour before mem leak caught up and then crashed (virtual memory warning)

I will do more testing tonight. I am posting this in the hitching thread because I think the 32bit CTD is the same issue as the 64bit hitching except the 64bit client recovers without crashing. The CTD acts exactly the same as the hitch for the first few seconds with the screen freeze and some repeating audio sounds.

Core I5-650
4gb ram
Radeon HD 5670 512mb
32bit Windows

things are better now for me sometimes a have a little frame hitching
when the hitching started after the update it started with a little frame hitching and gotten worse with time
the frame hitching becomes so bad that the game seemed to stop like players jitter

i could walk around, shoot everything u normal can except when i was cloaked
only i could not interact with other players they were all frozen
after a minute ore so the server told me i lost connection and was kicked off

if i played for 2 hours i logged off waited for 10/15 minutes then i was able to play another 2 hours

AMD FX6100 six core
8 GB ram DDR3-1334
Nvidea Geforce GTX650 1GB DDR5
64bit Windows 7

Did another test tonight killing one of the PhysX processes at the character screen and I played for over an hour without issue in some larger battles. Going back to the same fight without killing the PhysX thread.

YOU Sir! You are the best!
One simple Trick and my ******* game works like charme. Like in the old days. Played in a 48-96 battle without ANY hitch for some minutes until i logged off.

Hopefully the Dev's get this info soon and going for a patch or something. And they should reward you with a special gift for your work!

I think i just need to report back again (cause i'm still unable to edit my post - sorry about that again)

I just played 1 1/2 hours straight without any hitching/stuttering problems!

The gameplay was absolutly fine. I think i got a little bit of stuttering here and there after something about a hour but that was frame hitching and is a problem on my end (cause of to high graphic settings and a not state-of-the-art pc).

Acidule again: You are absolutly awesome! Because of you i'm actually able to play the game again. The dev's should mention your name!

Now spread the word - maybe this is going to help way more people...