Performance/Stuttering Troubleshooting

Technical Support
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If you should experience any kind of performance issues or stuttering within the Nexus, there may be some useful tools to help analyze and troubleshoot what disruptions may be occurring. This guide should help identify what may be happening, what steps to try, and what to include should you require further assistance from Technical Support!

When troubleshooting an issue, please make sure to create your own thread, unless an ongoing issue has been stickied. Many issues will appear to be related, but are instead tied to individual system components or settings. By isolating each issue, it helps Technical Support provide better assistance and connect like issues together more quickly.

Table of Contents

  1. Performance Indicators In-Game
  2. Additional Troubleshooting
  3. Posting for Technical Support
  4. Using the In-Game Site Selector
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Performance Indicators In-Game

Heroes of the Storm includes several indicator icons to help identify causes to common technical issues. While several issues may manifest in the same way, these indicators will help identify the root cause. A full list of icons can be seen here. To see the performance indicators, you must enable the Debug Menu by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F.

Shader Issues

Restore your default graphics settings.

  1. Press F10 to open the main menu.
  2. Click Options.
  3. Select Graphics and click Restore Defaults.

Resource Cache Issues

Lower your texture quality in the Graphics menu.

  1. Press F10 to open the main menu.
  2. Click Options.
  3. Select Texture Quality and lower it.
  4. Click Accept to make the changes.

Renderer Issues

Lower your Screen Resolution in the Graphics Menu.

  1. Press F10 to open the main menu.
  2. Click Options.
  3. Select Resolution and choose a lower resolution.
  4. Click Accept to make the changes. Update your video card drivers to the latest version.
    Restore your default video clock settings.
    If you have a factory overclocked card, Try Debug Mode.

Packet Loss

  1. Please check out our Connection and Latency Forum Post[/url]

  2. Change to an optimized wired connection.

  3. Disable applications that may be consuming extra bandwidth. Common examples are file streaming, video streaming, or downloads

  4. Check with your ISP for current issues.

  5. Check for issues with your network card, router, or modem.

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Additional Troubleshooting

Before troubleshooting the issue, make sure to compare your computer hardware to the Heroes of the Storm Minimum System Requirements. These benchmarks have been tested in Blizzard’s Quality Assurance labs, and will ensure that the game is both capable of running as well as providing a solid gameplay experience on low/low settings. If you are unsure of how your components compare, check out sites like CPU Benchmark and Video Card Benchmark to compare your specifications to our minimum specs.

Once we’ve verified system requirements, check out the following steps:

  1. Make sure Heroes of the Storm has completed patching before playing. The game will continue to download while you’re playing, which may degrade in-game performance.

  2. Run Windows Update and update your video card drivers to confirm you have all available updates for your Operating System.

  3. If playing on a laptop, optimize your power management settings and graphics options for gaming.

  4. Restart your computer to clear its memory and free up system resources that Heroes may need to run.

    Note: Players running 64-Bit may see high physical RAM usage, as the game attempts to cache features to make the game more responsive.

Advanced Steps

  1. Programs running in the background may be consuming additional resources. Close any running applications and perform a Selective Startup.

  2. Changes to software settings on your video card may cause issues with performance, black textures and shaders, and crashes. Resetting your video driver settings may resolve these issues.

  3. System components can overheat, causing your system to lock up and become unresponsive or crash. Check for overheating, and if necessary dust your components with canned air.
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Posting for Technical Support

To make sure we get the necessary information to help attend to your issue, please keep the following in mind when creating your post!

Description

Make sure to provide details as to what issue you are experiencing. What does the problem look like? If you get a Performance Indicator warning, which one do you see? When did the issue start, and were there any other updates that seem to conicide with the issue (patch release, Windows Update, driver update, etc)?

Diagnostics

There are several diagnostic reports we can gather to help with various issues.

Poor performance/FPS, Shader/Resource Cache/Renderer Warnings
Please post your full DxDiag. This will provide us with details about your computer, components, memory, and drivers.

Rubber-banding, Packet Loss indicator
A round of network traces to your region’s game server.
A Traceroute
A Pathping
A WinMTR

Troubleshooting Steps

Make sure to include any prior troubleshooting steps you’ve attempted. If possible, try to organize them in the order you attempted them! This will help us in bypassing steps you may have already attempted and help better guide troubleshooting steps.

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Using the In-Game Site Selector

If you are experiencing poor latency to a specific game site, you can manually change which location you are connecting to.

Sites are currently sorted by best ping. Note that other factors such as packet loss and internet traffic can affect gameplay and are not measured using the in-game interface.

To use the Site Selector:

  1. In Heroes, open the Options Menu (Esc > Options)
  2. Click the Language and Region tab.
  3. Under Preferred Game Server, select your desired site in the dropdown.
  4. Click Accept to make the changes.

A Few Important Notes

  1. This setting will default to Best Match, but players may wish to change this if they notice connection issues when playing on a specific server.
    * Please note: As we continue to improve and expand our game sites, Best Match will provide the best play experience for most players. If you are not experiencing issues, it is highly recommend that you leave this set to Best Match.

  2. If players in a party have conflicting server preferences, the server that is most commonly selected among the party’s members will be used.

  3. It is still possible for players to get matched onto games in servers they did not select. This will be rare, but can still happen.
    * If players in a party have different preferred game servers selected, it will try to match to the most preferred site.
    * Solo queuing players are almost guaranteed their game server of choice, but there is still a small possibility they can be matched somewhere else.