Stuttering & 1-2 second freeze frame potential fix

Hey all -

Many of you have reported a periodic 1-2 second hitch in game which we have been working on tracking down. The following seems to have helped some people with reducing some or all of these long hitches. This won't fix any and every hitch in the game, but if you've had a hitching problem it might be worth trying, if you do try it out, please report back if it was helpful or not.

In your Planetside2 directory is a file called UserOptions.ini. In that file, find the section headed with [Rendering] and try putting the following line in there:

UseFences=0


Run the game play for a bit and report back if it makes any difference with the hitching, one way or the other.

Thank you for your help and patience as we continue to track down this issue.

Note: If you are having a 3-5 second black screen in game and have recently upgraded to the latest NVIDIA 334.89 drivers there is a known issue which you can read more about here.

Thanks for the tip.

Thank you. I will definitely report back

Thank you, did the change, will report.

Nope. doesn't change anything.

It's still there. It might or might not happen less often. Had 2-4 hitches per hour before, now had 2 in 2h. Too early to tell tho, gonna play more (AMERISH).

Also I'm curious what this peculiarly named setting does.

Played for a bit with the modified .ini

Hitches are definitely still there, but possibly slightly less frequently than before.

Hope that helps!

If makes things worse for me . It made my frames lower and causes even more hitching. Also it deletes that entry out of the .ini unless you set it to read only. At least it was something to the problem.

Didn't disappear from my .ini, did you do it while the game was running or put it under the wrong heading? If it's not in the .ini it means you probably didn't actually set it, so it can't have made hitching worse

I put it in the right place while the game was closed. Yes it did make things worse

Would be nice if you said what that setting does.

No difference for me still get it

Any other useroptions.ini settings info for us? A full list of possible values and their meanings, as well as non-standard values we can use for testing might be helpful. It's easy enough to set it back to default (delete the file, reload the game) and I doubt the people who mess around with it would flood the support team.

Still get a 1-2 sec hitch every so often after the ini change

Tried it, feels like it made things even worse, hitching became more often.

What is UseFences actually controlling?

I have noticed the more recent the NVIDIA driver the worse the problems are.

331.81 : plays flawlessly for 1-3 days then starts getting hitchy. _a reboot fixes this for a few days_
332.21 : hitches (1-3s pauses) after a few hours, can't tell if reboots help
334.67 : hitches (1-5s pauses) pretty consistently probably every 5-15 minutes of playing

This is on a Quad Core i7-2600k and GeForce 780ti on Win 8.1.

The hitches can occur anytime, even walking round empty biolabs or flying around on abandoned continents. You just notice it a lot more when you are about to shoot someone and get killed

I suspect the game is doing something that is causing the driver to get pathologically worse at handling, and NVidia's optimizations to their more recent drivers are making things worse. I would not be surprised if both sides (SOE and NVIDIA) have a bug to fix.

A friend of mine is running the game on an ATI card and started getting the hitches in around the same frequency at the same exact time I did. I don't think it's an NVIDIA-specific, or driver-specific issue.

The community of players demands more commands in [Rendering] for thinner control of game for receiving comfort and fps!