When staring Overwatch and analyzing the wait chain in the Task Manager it says its in a CPU Deadlock. When I kill those Tasks Overwatch completely shuts down. My question: Why is Overwatch in a CPU Deadlock?
Because it has an fps lock defaulted at 300 fps, display based, or custom, which is just the game limiting the fps. Task manager reports that OW is the cause of the deadlock because it has an fps lock which makes task manager believe it is frozen.
The people who designed task manager’s deadlock function did not intend for it to be used the way the morons are writing on these forums suggesting that a deadlock exists because task manager said so. It is meant to find trouble applications that are freezing a program; not debugging fps issues.
Tl;Dr stop reading whatever you were reading from where you were reading about OW deadlocks affecting fps they’re not true.
Thx for the answer, now it makes kinda sense for me now
![:slight_smile:](https://d74zh8edaijub.cloudfront.net/en/overwatch/images/emoji/twitter/slight_smile.png?v=5" ":slight_smile:")
But on my rig, killing the deadlock thread actually stops FPS fluctuations and micro-stutter. The game feels noticeably smoother to play.
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Can you demonstrate this and reproduce the results consistently? I would love to see proof of concept because I’ve only ever been able to close OW when trying to terminate the deadlock from task manager. To my knowledge terminating a different program that is causing the deadlock would yield your reported results.
Well, it’s really hard to show microstutters in a video or something. Perhaps I can use Fraps to benchmark frametimes and see the results. Let me see what I can do. However, I know multiple people who have tried killing the “deadlocked” thread using ProcessExplorer and say the same thing as me - smoother gameplay and less random FPS drops. It just feels better to play on for us.
How are you terminating it btw? Using the Task Manager alone will only let you kill Overwatch entirely.
What I’ve been doing is this -
- Use the Task Manager to Analyze Wait Chain.
- Note the red number of the thread that pops up there.
- Open ProcessExplorer (free tool by Microsoft), then double click Overwatch there.
- Go to the Threads tab, find that number from earlier and hit the kill button on that thread alone.
I’ve been killing it in task manager like OP stated. I haven’t read the part about the processexplorer program however.
Demonstration as in the termination of the thread rather than the actual improvement from microstutters. Each machine will vary so I don’t expect it to work in the majority of computers but it’s interesting that there’s a thread that is causing performance issues.
From an engineering standpoint, the developers wouldn’t have included something in a design if it didn’t serve a purpose. I definitely wouldn’t recommend this unless the devs can determine if this can be done without affecting stability.
Interesting I try it out and I will see if something is different.
So I tested this myself and I can confirm, its a bit smoother when killing this thread. I will try out some ranked later and we ll see how it performs there.
So far big thanks to you Ashr, hopefully Blizzard will look onto this problem and fix this. Ups I forgot they dont do such things, nvm^^
Right out of interest are there any other threads that can be killed without any issues that will imrove performance?
It isn’t and shouldn’t be a drastic change in your FPS, but for me it feels smoother and visually clearer. The FPS also stays locked for me after killing the deadlocked thread while normally there would be some fluctuations, albeit minor.
I cant figure out which thread i should kill tbh.
“Note the red number of the thread that pops up there.”
Kinda stuck here because theres no red number in my task manager (win7).
I couldn’t find anything when I was on Win 7 either. I think it only applies to Win 8.1 and above.
regardless one thing is clear that overwatch is slowing down even on good rigs and the common link is that people are seeing overwatch is in dead lock on almost all these pc’s
cos of this i stopped playing overwatch because of this. going from a decent 100 fps, which is crap i know but still playable. then to to 30-12 fps stuttering. and not after a year later i thought i will install it again in hopes its fixed, but i was wrong now its 12-1 fps.
Please be mindful of the creation date of thread before posting in it. This thread has been inactive for more than a year.
If you want to have more FPS instead of just quiting you could try to create a support ticket or you could create a new thread in this forum sharing a DXDiag of your system.
Your FPS isn’t remotely normal for this game if it were pretty much everyone would be posting about the same experience.