Why is my wife's computer stuttering so much in D4?

Technical Support
1

My PC runs the game perfectly. But my wife’s computer frequently chokes and her screen just stutters, occasionally stopping completely for a few seconds, with occasional really long load times, and even crashes. We’ve attributed it to lag, but it’s NOT happening to me and we play on the same LAN, so I’m trying to diagnose the system problem she’s having with her PC.

She runs a PC i7 8700 3.20gHz, 16GB of RAM, RTX 3060. The game is on 2TB SSD with plenty of room left, although her C: drive, where Windows 10 is installed, is 1TB and has only 118GB free. All the latest drivers.

Can anyone tell me if this is sufficient to run the game (I feel like it should be, she has no other problems running anything else we play), and if there are specific things I can check (swap files, partitions, whatever) to see where the choke point might be?

Also, are there any game or nVidia settings I can check to optimize her performance? Thanks in advance for any insights or suggestions. The game is virtually unplayable for her and it’s driving both of us NUTZ. Thanks.

2

See if you can get us a copy of the FenrisDebug file from that system. You can find that in the installation folder for Diablo IV. You can share it on pastebin.com. We can look through it for a better idea of what to suggest that could help.

3

Hey DTMAce, many thanks for the response and suggestion. Based on some research I did here and elsewhere, I learned that there is a setting in the D4 Launcher/Settings/App section to “Use browser hardware acceleration”. Another user found that turning that setting off by unchecking it, completely eliminated his frame stutter. I tried this on my wife’s computer and it completely ridded her of the stuttering.

Who woulda thunk?

Thanks again

4

Actually that is a known fix. But its been awhile since it was needed. Nice to see it still works for that sometimes!

5

Thank you for posting this. My entire office plays this and out of roughly 40 of us, 7 or 8 have all been complaining of this same issue. I just did this as well and it worked. I know it was stated that this was a known fix… But, I do not think it is known to all. If there is a way to get this out to the player base in a better way, it would be great. A follow up though, is while the stuttering slowed there is still constant disconnects. My wife at her computer does not experience this issue while I am constantly booted out of the game and have to reconnect. Food for thought.

6

The problem is, its a hit or miss fix. It really doesn’t solve the underlying issue, and that can be attributed to a few different things, not the least of which GPU driver issues.

7

You’re absolutely right, after a couple of hours playing, the frame stutter came back with a force.

Where do I find the FenrisDebug file on her computer? Can I just run a search of her C: drive, or do you know the specific location I’ll find it.

Thanks again for your assistance, much appreciated.

8

Its located in the game’s installation folder. Default is C:\Program Files(x86)\Diablo IV\

You can sort them by date. They can be shared via pastebin.com.

9

I am Wanderlust’s wife, it’s my computer that’s stuttering really badly. My husband asked me to post this link to the pastebin where I’ve pasted the contents of my FenrisDebug file. There are a bunch of them, numbered _0 to _6, so I posted the most recent one, _06.

Hope that helps. I really appreciate any ideas you guys have to fix this, it’s super annoying! Thx

10

@gr8dad05, yeah, my wife gets booted out of the game as well, that’s one of the symptoms along with the frame stutter.

I’m going to try getting the file that DTMAce suggested and see if I can post it for wider review. Meanwhile, I think you’re right that it would be good to get more visibility into this issue once we figure out the actual reason. Looks like the launcher change is just an inconsistent bandaid.

11

Going by the stats listed for your system:

3060
16GB of memory

Couple suggestions:

If the high-res packs are installed, you should remove them. You can do that via the gear cog next to the play button in the battlenet launcher. Game settings. Then click Modify install, then Modify install again then uncheck the highres pack and click ok.

Game settings:

  • DLSS set to Balanced
  • FPS set to 60FPS (you have a 75hz refresh and 60 is a good place to start here with your hardware)
  • Start with graphic settings on High (No Ray Tracing)
  • Distortion disabled
  • Chromatic Aberration disabled
  • Enable Low FX (to reduce the amount of on screen effects)

Monitor your FPS. Hit CTRL-R to bring up the on-screen display. If with those settings you see the FPS constantly dip below 60, then lower the graphics to medium, but with the other changes as suggested.

With a 1440p res, that 3060 is going to work somewhat hard, so it may need medium to keep up at 60FPS. Bottom line, you want to get the game to run a stable FPS. If its constantly changing, that’s a sign you need to make adjustments. I would also recommend not running other programs, like browsers or videos while playing the game with that setup.

12

We did all you suggested (High Res packs were not previously installed) and it appears to be working better. It held pretty tight at 60fps throughout play. When she got on her horse and dragged a huge train around, it would dip very occasionally down to 59 and once 58 but would quickly bounce back up to 60 and hold there.

We’ll give this a try and see how it works. She follows a Maxroll guide and likes having her browser open to refer to it as she plays, using Chrome. That’s the only app she runs while playing. Should she turn that off? What about Fullscreen vs. Windowed fullscreen?

Thanks so much for your assistance, you’ve been very helpful!

13

my husband is having same issue!
the link where I made a post about it.

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@DTMace: Unfortunately, it did not last. We did an Undercity run and her frame rate dropped down to 0 at times, 20’s, just unplayable.

I did notice that she has no way to turn off Ray Tracing, the lowest setting is “Low Ray Tracing”. She was running Quality Preset as Custom while making your suggested changes. So she changed the Quality Preset to Low Ray Tracing directly instead of Custom, and several settings went down, including Textures, etc., to Low.

Even with that setting her frame rate drops into the 40’s. We then went out and did some whispers in Nahantu and she was able to keep up, dropping into the 50’s or so, without too much stuttering, but still dropping from 60 a lot.

@Skull, we’re not the only ones, there are others even in this thread. Man they need to fix this.

Any other ideas? Only affecting her PC and not mine, that’s what’s driving me nuts.

1 Like
15

Since you menthioned she uses a multi-minitor setup, MPO (Multiplane Overlay) disabling might help. worth a shot at least.

This is something you can easily disable and enable yourself in the Windows Registry (always make a backup before making any changes).

It’s recommended to get the files from the cust help NVIDIA post. This post only covers a very basic issue with MPO as it is slightly dated but the registry adjustment remains the same. More information can easily be searched via Google with even more issues related to games and newer Windows updates.

Once you download these 2 files (enable & disable) you can right click them and open with notepad to see what they’re doing if desired.

https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5157

16

My wife does not actually use a multi-monitor setup, she just has one monitor. Does disabling the MPO still have the potential to remedy her problem?

17

No, its there. You need to scroll up or down. It lists them with and without RT. Or it should. Or you can simply turn all the ray tracing options off at the bottom.

As for the frame drops.

Sounds like its hitting a performance wall. It plays fine, then starts to bog.

Try monitoring the memory usage:

  • Open task manager
  • View the performance section
  • Click on Memory
  • Monitor both overall memory usage and Committed memory usage. (you can alt-tab back and forth when it starts to choke)

If either of these get full or near full, you will start to drop frames.

18

Hey, sorry I misinterpreted this assuming this meant multi. It wouldn’t hurt to make the adjustment then reboot… but this is usually a multi monitor thing.

19

@DTMace: Would it help to upgrade the amount of RAM she’s running? I remember when 16gb was a lot lol.

The dropdown on the Quality preset did not show any option lower than “Low”, but I was able to turn off Ray Tracing at the bottom as you suggested.

Using Task Manager itself apparently uses a lot of memory because when I bring it to the foreground, her game frame rate drops to 8 and stays there. Task Manager shows that 80% of physical memory is being used, but as soon as I put the game back into the foreground, FPS goes back up to 60 and I can no longer see the Task Manager, so I’m not sure how to monitor memory usage while playing, but it sure does look like memory is tight. Back to my question, you think it would help to stick a bunch more memory in her machine?

@NitroMethane: no problem, I can see now how that could have been misinterpreted.

20

It wouldn’t hurt a bit. Other than your pocket book.

I would examine her setup. See how many memory slots she has, and what kind of memory it supports. 16GB could mean you have 4x 4GB, or 2x 8GB, or 1x 16GB. Your board may have 2 or 4 slots total. Rare more expensive boards might have more memory slots. (I have an older 3 channel with 6 for example)

If you are only running one module, you should get a pair of 16s that match. If you have two slots with two 8s, then you will still need a pair of 16s. If you have 4 slots and are only using 2 of them, then you can either add a pair of 8s or a pair of 16s.

Or you can go crazy and buy a pair of 32s, but honestly it shouldn’t need that much. I run 32GB here, and a 16GB GPU - 4080 Super FE.

I just did a WHOLE bunch of stuff that will probably cause me issues in the game. I updated my BIOS, updated my Intel motherboard drivers, updated the video card again today to 556.12. I still have 9 more driver updates to switch to as I run through them one by one. (I’m doing this to see how the game performs after each update) To start with, I was 20 driver versions behind most of you two weeks ago. lol

SO FAR. The game has been playing okay. I have noticed some hitching here and there, but it usually smooths out. Today was just heavy, as I had changed a TON of things. Including the CPU power usage. I had it capped to 150W, now its back to 241W. So its producing more heat and using more power. But a tad faster. I was capped in response to the BIOS/Intel issue, even though I was on a 12th gen i9. Just wasn’t taking any chances.

As for task manager:

When you alt tab, it moves the game to the background FPS, which is set to 8. So that tracks for it to slow down.

All you really are looking for is the graph, it will show where it has been for the past few seconds. What we want to see is if its nearly full at any time. Same with the section labeled “Committed”. ← That’s your virtual memory, which is also critical to the game. Its a combined total of your physical memory and your currently allocated swap file size.

If the first number is near the same as the next number

(example: 31.3/32.0 GB)

Then its also too full.