Last night I upgraded my gpu from a gtx 970 to a geforce 2060. Now, when I play heroes of the storm, I get continues stutters in game play. Everything freezes for about .5 seconds to a second about once every 10 to 15 seconds. I’ve never had any issues with the game before. I have all of my drivers up to date, and I tested many other online games that i own, and they have ran without issue. I also tried playing a match of heroes of the storm offline versus AI and it still stutters, confirming to me that its not a connection issue. If you have any tips for me to fix this issue, I would love to be able to play again!
Does it stutter in training mode?
If the RTX 2060 is a partner model then make sure it is operating at reference performance. Some partner models come pre overclocked and it is a known issue that memory overclocks can potentially degrade performance while still being stable.
I just checked and it does in fact stutter in training mode. In regards to your other point, I purchased an MSI Geforce rtx 2060 ventus model. In the name on amazon is does say " (RTX 2060 VENTUS 6G OC)" Im guessing the OC means overclock? hm
Have you clean installed the NVidia graphic drivers? Make sure to install the latest stable certified (not beta or studio) drivers.
If the issue still persists you might want to try swapping back to the GTX 970, if you still have it, to see if the issue goes away. If it does then the cause is most certainly the RTX 2060. If the old card has the issue then something else is the cause.
The base clock for 2060’s are 1365, and mine came pre-boosted at 1680. Unfortunate how it only seems to be effecting HOTS 
is your monitor plugged in directly to the GPU, or though the motherboard?
That is the only “obvious” thing I can think of that would be causing it.
If it is connected to the motherboard it might let you use the iGPU on your (presumably) Intel i5/i7 CPU.
A dxdiag would probably help whenever technical support gets to the topic!
Is there a BIOS switch on it? Some OC cards come with a switch allowing you to toggle between OC and stock bioses.
Otherwise you will need to download the MSI overclocking tools. From there you might be able to revert it to reference.
One of the recommendations that used to be on the SC2/HotS tech support forums was to revert any OC, even if the component came pre OCed.
Still should not stutter. It should perform badly, but not stutter.
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You are correct–it shouldn’t stutter.
Except maybe if textures are set high enough, and the iGPU is setup to limited access to the DRAM, couldn’t it stutter?
But I recall the default being like 1.7GB of RAM accessible, so that doesn’t seem a reasonable explanation.
Intel IGPUs use the main system RAM. Hence all textures that spill over into system memory are trivially accessible to the IGPU. A memory copy should not even be required as the IGPU should be able to access the memory directly, like it would its own reserved memory.
AMD IGPUs are slightly different as they are discrete GPUs inside the CPU package. They have dedicated GRAM and so there is a performance overhead when data spills over to the main memory. This performance impact is still quite small as both CPU and GPU share the same memory controller. That said anyone using a RTX 2060 should be using a Ryzen 5 2600 or 3600 or better which do not have IGPUs on them.
Even discrete graphics should not stutter, just drop a frame or two at most. Although not good from a performance point of view, PCI-E 3.0 16x is still very fast and can trivially move many game textures back and forth each frame.
If all graphic memory was depleted, including shared spill over, then either major graphical glitches should occur (missing textures) or the HotS would out right crash with an out of memory error. Reaching this stage is quite difficult.
Yes, but they only allow allocations up to ~1.7GB maximum iirc.
It doen’t work like that. At least not last time I checked. It might have changed.
No, it doesn’t work like that.
Both Intel and AMD’s iGPUs are integrated GPUs into the CPU die. The “dedicated GRAM” you’re talking about for AMD is just a reserved amount of memory for the iGPU.
The same thing Intel does. But they don’t have their own RAM on package or anywhere else. They run out of the system RAM.
Just because it’s the same architecture that is in graphics cards doesn’t mean it’s a discrete GPU.
I had experiences with Starcraft 2 Legacy of the Void stuttering with a GTX 960m yers ago soon after the game launched. The system reported to use ~2GB of memory (the GPU was 2GB model).
Might have been CPU side memory, as I think I accidentally had the game in 32 bit mode.
No, depending on how you’re using the memory the bandwidth impact can be great. But no games, unless specifically coded for it, should have a massive impact if memory serves.
But given your thoughts such as ARM cannot match x86 in IPC, and mis-undestanding of how the iGPU in an AMD APU works… not that surprising.
As far as I am aware it is 1GB reserved and then some variable amount additional on top of that. It might vary with generation, with older ones reserving less.
That is how it works for discrete cards. I would not expect integrated to work any differently.
For example my GTX 760 has 4GB of dedicated memory. However there is an additional 8GB of shared memory available for it, if it needs it.
The only exception to this is Vulkan where only vendor specific memory pool allocations might be subject to such movement.
It is completely different. If one looks at the Vulkan profile of the two GPUs the Intel one has the GPU local memory as shared memory all in a single massive heap. The AMD one will has a separate 512MB odd of GPU memory as GPU local with the rest of the memory acting as normal shared but not GPU local memory.
Maybe this memory is not part of the CPU package. However from the outside world, the Vulkan API, it is.
This is an example of an Intel IGPU from something like a top end I9 9900K. This specific one exposes a single 4GB continuous memory heap which is both device local and host visible.
https://vulkan.gpuinfo.org/displayreport.php?id=6649#memorytypes
This is an example of an AMD IGPU from something like a Ryzen 5 3400G. One can see that it exposes 3 memory heaps of which only 2 are device local. Only the small 256MB heap is both device local and host visible. The larger 800 MB heap is only device local and the biggest ~3 GB heap is only host visible.
https://vulkan.gpuinfo.org/displayreport.php?id=6474#memorytypes
The 32 bit client running low on memory would usually cause a crash as the game cannot allocate any more memory. This was one of the reasons to move to 64bit.
It should still not cause stutter. The result may be stupidly low FPS like 15 or so but it should not be causing 30+ FPS and then 0 FPS for 0.5-3 seconds sporadically.
For 3 weeks I had to play on a computer which had not enough memory at times for HotS. The result was abysmal frame rate and extremely bad asset loading at times but not what one could really call stutter. Now this was not GPU memory, however GPU with CPU transfer is a lot faster than CPU with page file transfer and even that was not causing stutter.
AMD APUs almost certainly have nothing to do with this topic. If one uses a RTX 2060 one will almost certainly be using one of the 6, 8 and 12 core parts which do not have APUs. If not then the system was poorly specified and will likely be CPU bottlenecked.
I suggest re-reading the topic. I stated that one cannot compare ARM and x86 with IPC because they are different instruction sets. ARM might require more instructions to produce the same result as x86-64. One has to compare measurements of more realistic desktop level work loads like cinebench scores, which no one has for the powerful ARM CPUs from what I can tell.
Checking diagnostics with CTRL ALT F in game, fps stays at around 145 fps. When game-play freezes, it stays the same while its frozen, then the second game-play unfreezes, jumps down to around 40 to 50 fps and rushes back up to a stable 145 150 fps. All other numbers for memory and all of that stay the exact same throughout the stuttering.
I have recently learned that going into the nvidea control panel, you can check debug mode, which sets the card to reference clock speeds. Unfortunately , the game still stutters when debug mode is activated. I have verified this by watching clock speeds through MSI afterburner. Still, hots is the only game effected. Will update if anything changes.
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have you tried uninstalling your drivers and then a clean install of the drivers only? no Geforce Experience. for a while now there have been reports here and various other places that the Geforce Experience will cause problems with things. so it is best to not have it installed.
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yeah I am going to try that when I get the chance. I did in-fact use Geforce experience to clean install the drivers when I first booted after putting in the new card.
This would point towards a network connectivity issue. Is your computer connected wirelessly? If it is connected wirelessly then the new more powerful GPU might be generating more interference or shielding the wireless antenna.
The gameplay freezes while waiting for communication from the server. Since it is now behind it has to fast forward which reduces frame rate until caught up. Once caught up gameplay and frame rate resume as normal.
Try running the support recommend WINMTR tests and posting the results.
Hi, just got home and going to run some tests. Something i wanted to point out to you
- im running a wired Ethernet connection.
- I played a match of heroes and had task manager up in the background. I was looking at my Ethernet graph, and it looks very abnormal. Its giant spikes. Send and receive packets jump wildly, going from 8 to 120 back to 8 to 74 to 8 to 120. Looks like rapid spikes. No clue if that is normal just wanted to point out. Currently running win mtr tests
Hi. Almost same happened to me. Heavy stutter every 24-25 seconds in training mode no matter whats going on on the screen.
Problem for me was updated nvidia driver.
I rolled back to earlier ver and that helped.
nvidia. com /drivers/beta
You can download earlier version here.
I am currently using 430.64 version.
You may test after witch one it starts, Im just too lazy for it. I remeber few days ago I installed drivers titled “Control (game) ready” and it was okay. And then new update screwed everything up.
just throwing it out there for anyone else that may want it.
if you want an easier location to find the previous drivers for NVIDIA or AMD try this:
https://www.guru3d.com/files-categories/videocard-drivers.html