Massive Frame Drops for HoTS

Hello,

I have recently been having issues with massive frame drops with the game out of the blue for maybe the last 3-4 months now. Before this time I’ve never had any issues. I have a 1080ti and I know this card is more than capable of running this game on extreme/ultra.

I’ve tried resetting my video card settings, deleting the game cache, lowered my in game graphics, enabled full screen mode, enabled/disabled gsync and nothing is working. At one point I thought Chrome was interfering so I tried playing with Chrome closed and I am still getting drops. Frames will drop as low as 15-20 fps and sometimes will hover around 60 fps.

Also to note, I’ve tried following instructions from this article and still no luck. Please help.

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If the game is stuttering, that is network connection related. The client must pause (0 FPS) while waiting for communication from the server. The symptoms of this is that the game appears frozen but the cursor is still moving smoothly as the cursor is not part of the game state.

If using an Intel CPU, make sure the display you are using to play HotS on is plugged into your 1080ti and not the motherboard. Displays plugged into the motherboard may end up using the integrated graphics of the CPU due to how older APIs like D3D11 worked.

Regarding weather effect related problems (no solution as of yet):

As DrSuperGood hinted at, the Engine Heroes runs on handles everything in one thread (except: D3D11 calls (1 thread), voice (2 threads) and watchdog threads (80 to 101)). Meaning a slightly delayed packet (= data going over the internet), or a busy harddrive, or a busy PCIe-bus will stall the game causing an FPS drop (= stutter).

I do not think this could cause noticeable stalls with modern hardware. The only device that does not have dedicated PCIe lanes is anything attached to the chipset, and even then it would require that the chipset bandwidth be maxed out. Maybe then transfers would take slightly longer depending on how the chipset multiplexes the bandwidth. For this to occur one would need to be running a very heavy background task in a consumer desktop systems with pretty much everything attached to the chipset using maximum bandwidth.

My HotS started getting massive frame drops as well. After much digging around, I discovered that the root of the problem was that my HotS was installed on a different drive from my boot drive. I had a smaller NVME drive as my boot drive, and a much larger, slower, SSD as my “data” drive. HotS does NOT like to be on a different disk. I don’t know if it’s an issue with HotS specifically or Windows, but I believe the frame drops was due to the game being unable to maintain a cache for reasons. But who knows?

tldr;

I had HotS installed on a different drive from the battle.net client. Moving HotS to the same disk as the battle.net client resolved the issue.

Which can happen with Intel platforms (DMI is only PCIe3 4x) with just one fast SSD and maybe a network adapter.
Just need Windows to run its stupid indexing and virus scan while you game and you have problems of 100ms latency to drive (and 200ms-ish drive response time).


Tried that before. Time to upgrade to 64Gig RAM to run HotS from RAM Disk I guess…

Warhaven
I had HotS installed on a different drive from the battle.net client. Moving HotS to the same disk as the battle.net client resolved the issue.

This is an interesting thought. I’ll give this a try and see how it goes. My app is also on my NVME drive and the game is on a slower drive. Hope this works but I also saw that thread with FPS issues and the patch with weather anomolies. I’ll post back on my results as soon as I try this.

Modern SSDs are more than fast enough. Practically no game is even designed to handle their potential I/O speed due to how technically challenging it is to process ~4 GB/sec of data.

It is not about R/W speed, but latency. Modern TLC and QLC NAND SSDs are sluggish compared to single layer NAND or Intel Optane.

Datarate is also a non-issue, unless you use interrupts.

That mostly applies to writing. Even with this technology they are still sub 1ms for read latency. 1ms latency is well below sub-frame.

I/O access is slow from a SSD when compared with RAM. It is not actually that slow compared with real time. For comparison the best random access latency of an average HDD was many milliseconds and pretty much only 1 request could be processed at a time. SSD controllers process multiple random access requests at once in a pipelined way allowing random data to almost continuously be read from.

Not sure what you mean by this. Applications cannot use interrupts directly as interrupts are first processed by the kernel for security and reliability purposes.

Well, it’s been about a month according to my last post on when I tried to put both Blizzard app and HoTS on the same hard drive.

I do get the occasional small glitch but overall I don’t really have any problems. At least not like before. I’m not sure why this worked but it seems to have done the trick for me.

So, reason was poor using of resources of PC after weather update? I believe they broke something in game code.

UPDATE: So after constant, constant issues no matter what I tried I finally figured out the issue. My monitor was setup to display at 100 Hz and Windows Display settings still had my monitor at 60 Hz. Evidently my game doesn’t know which setting to listen to (even with in game settings being applied) and was causing lots of issues.

To fix for Windows 10, go to

Windows Display Settings >> Advanced display settings >> Display adapter properties for Display “X” >> Monitor >> Screen refresh rate

Make this Windows setting match your monitor’s settings and all issues gone.

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Hello, I know this is an old post but the fix that helped me was dropping the refresh rate down to 60 hz. Even though both my graphics card and my monitor support 165 hz I guess hots does not like it. As soon as I did that no more frame drops.