I have been having major stuttering issues since coming back to HotS earlier this year, around the beginning of march. It hasn’t kept me from playing, but it certainly has made the game much more difficult to play.
The issue is that I lock up for multiple seconds. The issue started out being uncommon and has gradually become so consistent and often that I believe I may be spending about 30-40% of my game time waiting for these hang-ups to resolve. I am on a wired connection, my computer is the only one in the household with this issue. I tried playing this on several computers and none of them had this issue. All of them are on the same wired connection that I am on.
I am running on Windows 10 Pro x64. Here are my specs via CPU-Z:
https://imgur.com/a/qHGueLE
Here is my WinMTR from today:
https://pastebin.com/kdwZBHW2
Here is my DxDiag from today:
https://pastebin.com/qqGxMeuF
Here is an early example from back in April of this year.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmdNzSPsgZ4&feature=youtu.be
Things I have tried:
- Disabling HPET
- Uninstalling/reinstalling my GFX drivers
- Removing all Windows Firewall rules for HotS
- Deleting the Cache as listed here:
https://us.battle.net/support/en/article/34721
- Made sure that my Windows version is up to date
- Made sure my GFX drivers are up to date
- Made sure sound drivers are up to date
- Played with all accessories unplugged
- Tried installing on HDD & SSD
- Tried a different HDD
- Played game with no other non-essential services/processes running
- Set various suggested affinities via Task Manager > Details
- Disabled all Xbox/gaming related services on Windows
- Tried running without anti virus
- Tried running without firewall
- Tried running without Windows Defender running, but with Malwarebytes running
- Cleared out standby memory
- Tried in-app repair via Battle.net Launcher
- Turning off Blizzard Update Agent after launching HotS
- Tried various graphical settings in-game. Low, medium, high, ultra, Extreme. VSync on & off. Anti Aliasing on & off. Multiple different Resolution settings. Problem persisted on all levels
- Tried with headphones mode on & off
- Tried with Reverb on & off
- Sound Quality set to Low, medium, high. Sound channels set at various level from lowest to highest. Problem persisted on all levels
- Muted game sound entirely both in-game and in windows
- Tried changing Preferred Game Server
- Disabled Screenshake
- Disabled Voice Chat
- Played in Fullscreen, Windowed (Borderless), & Windowed
- Tried browsing every single item in Collection tab and allowed all items to load before playing a game
- Reset & power cycled modem/router
- Tried regular, underclocked, & overclocked settings
- cleaned all dust from my PC
- Reseated all hardware
- Increased & decreased shared memory settings
- Disabled/uninstalled OneDrive
- Tried all suggestion I could find via google/HotS Forum
I guarantee that I have forgotten many things that I tried. I have been working on trying to fix this myself near daily since around March. My google searches about this topic leave me with nothing but purple results nearing a hundred pages. I give up now, so I am turning to support.
EDIT: New version of Windows 10 JUST now became available to me. Will be trying that.
EDIT 2: Updated successfully at 12:44am, jun 15 2020. This in no way helped, and the issue persists.
Hey there,
Thank you very much for the links and detailed list of everything you’ve done so far. After looking at the video example and your DXDIAG I’m thinking that these freezes are video related, meaning that your GPU is either stalling out or not responding for a short period of time before it recovers.
I noticed in the DXDIAG you have nothing but LiveKernelEvent errors in the Windows Error Reporting section, and they are all showing a P1 code of 117 which according to Microsoft means “A problem with your hardware caused Windows to stop working correctly”. You may be looking at a GPU issue here.
If this is a hardware issue we are pretty limited on what troubleshooting we can recommend, and it does seem like you’ve gone through the majority of software-level stuff that we would normally suggest for issues like this.
One thing that I would recommend would be to download HWmonitor and have it running on your secondary monitor while playing HOTS, so we can check the clock speeds and temperatures for the CPU and GPU. Task manager would also be good to have running, so you can check to see in the Performance tab if any of the resources are spiking or doing anything when the game freezes occur.
- Download HWMonitor and install it.
- Launch the program before starting the game and allow it to run in the background.
- Play for at least 15-20 minutes or until the issue occurs. Playing a full match is fine.
- Switch back to HWmonitor, maximize the window, then expand all of the individual sections.
- Scroll to the top and take a screenshot. For Windows 10 press Win+Shift+S to take a screenshot of the window. For Windows 7 or 8.1 press the Printscreen key on your keyboard.
- Paste the image into the Paint program and save it as a .bmp or .jpg
- If you were unable to capture all of the sections in the first screenshot, scroll down in HWmonitor and repeat the process of screenshotting and saving it.
- Upload the images to an image hosting website like imgur.com then share the unique links in your next post. Paste the links here, then highlight everything and hit the </> button in the posting section so it will allow the link.
Other than that, have you tried unplugging your second monitor and tested the game with a single display hooked up to the GPU? This could help reduce the stress on the GPU and help narrow down the issue.
Thank you for your response. I forgot to list it, but I did actually try running the game on a single display, once with each monitor. It did not resolve the issue. I will do as you suggested with HWMonitor, and get back with a screenshot when I can.
Edit: In case this matters, I would also like to mention that this issue only happens with HotS, but does not happen with other games. I can run graphically intensive programs like Monster Hunter World/Apex Legends at full settings without this issue occuring.
Edit 2:
Here is the HWMonitor information after a full match of HotS:
https://imgur.com/a/AFJ0qzz
Thanks for the link Waldo,
The temperatures look fine so we can rule out overheating. I noticed the 1660Ti boost clock was a tad high at 1905Mhz, but that may just be the factory overclock. You mentioned you tried setting the clock speeds back to default and underclocking though, so as long as you’re not overclocking then that shouldn’t be causing it.
You might want to try testing this in Try mode with a hero that you don’t own. Try mode is truly offline, so if it’s happening there then it can’t be a network issue.
Can you post a couple of the latest Graphics log files from the \Documents\Heroes of the Storm\GameLogs folder?
The WinMTR shows that connection latency is highly inconsistent and capable of reaching up to 600ms at times. A 600ms (0.6 second) delay with packets will cause Heroes of the Storm to stutter as it will wait for communications from the server. The linked video shows symptoms which match with what an inconsistent connection would cause.
All it takes is a single packet to be delayed by a large amount and stutter will happen like in the video. As such one has to look at the worst case response time rather than the average response time.
@ Jambrix
Here are the two latest Graphics.txt files from GameLogs:
https://pastebin.com/U4ka3zW4
https://pastebin.com/muqBfrPN
@ DrSuperGood
If the case is that it is my conenction, what would a course of action be to resolve this? I am on wired connection, and the problem only appears to be with my computer. All of the computers in my home are on the same connection. Could I possibly have a faulty wire or outlet? Should I contact my ISP about this?
Thank you both for responses.
Edit: I just tried running in try mode (I assume this was to go to ‘Collection’, pick a hero, and click ‘Try’) and did not have the issue happen at all. Would this confirm that it is a network issue?
This is more evidence supporting that the cause is likely network related. Try mode runs locally if I recall correctly, and so does not depend on a connection with Blizzard.
Have you tried with one of those other computers? If those play HotS fine then the issue may be with the local network and your computer.
The Graphics logs look fine, and since it’s not occurring in Try mode that would indicate it’s network related like DrSuperGood mentioned.
You might want to try resetting the network config in Windows to see if that helps. Go to Start -> Settings -> Network & Internet -> Network reset. Then accept the prompts and after rebooting the PC try the game again.
@ DrSuperGood
Yes, as I said in the OP, I have tried the game on more than just mine and it works fine on them. Just mine that has the issue
@ Jambrix
I tried the Network Reset and reboot, but the problem is still happening.
Waldo,
Thanks for your patience through all this. I checked out your thread and it looks like you’ve done a ton so far for this. Because of that, there’s honestly not much else we can recommend here. You can try putting your GPU in debug mode (right click your desktop, go to Nvidia Control Panel, click Help at the top of the control panel, and checkmark “Debug Mode”.) If you do this it disables all factory overclocking which can cause minor instabilities like this. If you’re overclocking your RAM or have XMP, see if disabling overclocks/XMP on those fixes it.
Beyond that, there’s not much else I could recommend other than a full windows reinstall. I know that’s a bit extreme, but that’ll pretty quickly help you figure out if it’s software or hardware. If you go this route, make sure to back everything up and work with Microsoft if you need help getting your Windows key.
If the reinstall fixes it, you know it was something software. If not, it narrows it down to hardware.
1 Like
Hello again, thank you very much and I appreciate the help.
I finally got around to completely reformatting both my drives and reinstalling Windows 10 entirely. This seems to have solved the issue.
While it is great that the issue is gone, I would have preferred to actually be able to find out exactly what was wrong. Thank you again for the responses, and I will mark that as the solution.