Massive stutters with DF client

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1036

That’s it folks unfortunately we are in the hands of a company that has been declining over the years due to factors being one of them being bought by Atcvision that just like EA takes its subsidiaries to total ruin, The mediocre quality of work in the games only look at the poor job done in Warcraft Reforged and the icing on the cake that are the recent scandals. With all this the company continues with its negligence with its consumers not giving a damn about important things. How do you want to compete with FF14? Maybe when Microsoft wins the case, which is what will happen, and buys Blizzard for good, we can have a glimmer of hope that they’ll put their house in order. We are here for the love we have for the company’s games that have given us so many happy and fun moments, but what value does our love have? I don’t think so, but it’s our love for WoW, Diablo, OW that makes us stupid and continue to fill the company’s a$$ with money and we just want to get some feedback and respect from Blizzard.

No more and I wish everyone luck with these DF problems and that there are not few people as it seems.

2 Likes
1037

Yeah, same. I could do a big ol alliance raid with 10000 weird spell effects going off in FFXIV right now if I wanted to. A +2 Mythic, however, will randomly give me 3-5 FPS at important parts of the encounter. My friends have said it looks like I’m teleporting around when I run, apparently…

1 Like
1038

I think hard drive issues can be ruled out. My system just has a single 1tb nvme m.2 drive. No ssd, no hdd. Brand new build with a 7950x/32gb of memory. Latest drivers, bios, chipset drivers, everything. Still having this happen. I play wow in windows full screen and it will just fully freeze and I’ll just move my mouse to a browser window or whatever and dick around on Facebook until wow catches up. It’s so infuriating.

1 Like
1039

Sad but true. This company is limping to the barn right now and I certainly expected to dislike DF, but I definitely didn’t expect them to break a decades-old established graphics engine. That’s next level incompetence. Then to ice that cake they give us radio silence.

It’s pretty obvious over the past 5-10 years that making good games and having happy customers is not a priority. We just have to wait until someone who knows how to make video games grabs the reins of these IPs.

3 Likes
1040

Well, blizzard issued me a response and said it seems to be that my CPU is possibly overheating. I guess I’ll bring my laptop to the repair folks and have it taken a look at and check back here if it keeps stuttering?

1041

You will be back. They’re just trying everything they can to blame it on hardware, because they don’t know how to fix it.

2 Likes
1042

Nonsense, they’re being scoundrels and wanting to blame the hardware because they can’t fix their gross mistake or the most obvious one… they don’t care about the problem and for us. As I said, not many people are having this problem and they want to say that everyone’s CPU is heating up? well if it was the CPU then it would cause problems with all games… these bastards think we are idiots. Mediocre team of a company with no sense and scruples.

6 Likes
1043

TBF, poking around my CPU fans actually seemed to have helped massively. There was more dust than I was able to get from the outside so I had to go in… there is still some stuttering, which is odd, but I’m in Oribos and Orgrimmar and it’s not a PowerPoint slideshow at least. Lemme reiterate I don’t think this is what everyone is dealing with right now. I’m still stuttering some but it’s like, playable, at least….

1044

Literally everybody that Ive talked to said they experience stutters esp in Oribos after the prepatch, its been playable for me since the bandaid fix but theres still stuttering, some people just don’t care to comment on here and assume itll get fixed over time but this should be a prio for blizz atm, have a friend who recently got his 4090 saying the game runs fine in certain areas but theres still major pop in and stutter issues regardless

2 Likes
1045

Yeah, I’m still having stutters in combat, for instance, but not in a totally unplayable way just in a “pretty damn annoying” way at this point. I doubt everyone else ALSO needs to take their computer apart and pry all the dust bunnies out with a well placed toothpick…

1046

Feel like a colossal idiot for pre ordering a game that just stutters lol

7 Likes
1047

I hear you, sadly I pre ordered after trying my best to “accept” the stutters, but now I feel like I’ve mad a terrible mistake. Probably won’t play much of DF, so long as this performance issue persists

1 Like
1048

I finally found a PC setup that produced some of the stuttering. This is on a PC with an i3 10100 and an RX 6600, fully up to date. 22H2 and 22.11.1 drivers for the GPU. Vsync+Freesync Premium enabled systemwide.

EDIT: I just found out is that while I was recording clips it wasn’t spiking around at all. As soon as I stopped recording, it started spiking like mad. Maybe this is some kind of syncing/focus issue?

Here’s what the frame time looks like when I’m not recording and it’s a disaster:
https://imgur.com/iY3wfok
Here’s what it looks like when I record, almost perfectly smooth:
https://imgur.com/0RLTddE

This is using RTSS only with delay set to zero to render every single frame on the graph, instead of averaging to something like 100ms.

Yet another EDIT: Compute effects set to good or lower still seems to fix the spiking, even if I'm not recording. I’ll have to test more later on to check to see if something weird is going on with the GPU clocks that’s causing them to rapidly bounce between idle and normal.

2 Likes
1049

Glad I am not alone with the stutters. I play mainly on my Mac Studio with an M1 Ultra. It worked just fine keeping 120fps in Shadowlands. I thought DF was just too intensive for it.

1050

It’s a clocking issue probably caused by some kind of frame syncing or focus issue or driver power saving issue. Here’s more proof with some graphs showing a lot more details of it happening and the only setting I change is compute effects. Everything else is on slider 10 and I have ray tracing on good:

Compute effects on ultra:
https://imgur.com/w4xQl8Y

Compute effects on good:
https://imgur.com/C1NCddM
(Keep in mind that the frame time graph moves like 10x faster than the other graphs)

Compute effects on ultra while recording:
https://imgur.com/MXbbgFJ
Notice how it fixes the clock speeds and everything goes to normal?

For some reason, using compute effects on good keeps the clocks up, but setting it to high or ultra will cause the jumping. Yeah, it’s lowering the FPS some, but not enough to fully choke the card out I don’t think. The highest I’ve seen this card go, tempwise, is around 65C, to but that into perspective of load. With WoW, at worst, it’s sitting at 54C. It’s possible that the compute units are spinning their math and while the rest of the card waits for them to finish, they downclock, which then means they have to ramp back up after the compute effects are finished.

Basically, what I can conclude is that there is something either wrong with Windows or the Drivers that are making the GPU clocks drop, which is causing the stutters. If they can be held high, the stuttering completely goes away. It’s possible that it’s coming from WoW, but when I show it going away while recording, that speaks volumes as to what’s actually creating the problem.

EDIT: Found yet another bug/issue, but it leans more and more towards Windows/AMD window focus issues again. I disabled hardware acceleration in Chrome, to test some other theories out, then reopened WoW. Found a spot to test from, changed raytracing from good to disabled and my FPS dropped to like 40, from 90. I had to hit the start button and then click back into the game client to refocus the window and my FPS went back up. I have multiplane overlays disabled and am only using one monitor (two are connected, but Windows is only set to display on primary). This is now letting me use compute effects on ultra, without having the constantly dropping clock speeds and my FPS graph looks normal now…

EDIT AGAIN WITH MORE TESTING:
I tried disabling fullscreen optimizations on the wow.exe (right click>compatibility>disable)Not having any issues with compute effects on ultra now and clock speeds are staying high. Not only that, my frame rate went up by a ton(80 to over 100 in the exact same test spot). I can change settings around with no problem, tab in and out, etc etc, the frametime graph is staying completely level now. So I’m going to pretty much confirm and tie a bow on this in saying that it’s a Windows/Driver issue and not a WoW issue.

4 Likes
1051

Same issues here too, just tagging the topic for updates!

1052

So to summarize a ton of testing I’ve done now, on a PC that I can replicate the horrible constant stutterfest on, even when the camera is still:

The culprit seems to be a Windows or Nvidia/AMD issue. Something is going on with the client focus, that’s causing the GPU clocks to downclock/upclock rapidly. Some game settings seemed to trigger this easier, compute effects specifically when set to high or ultra.

The resolution that I've found, that has not only completely corrected the issue on this i3 10100+RX 6600+22H2 PC, but yielded me a 25% increase in FPS at the exact same test spot and view angle:

  1. locate the Wow.exe(not the launcher one, the ones inside the retail/ptr/classic folders are the ones you want)
  2. right click
  3. properties
  4. compatibility tab
  5. check disable fullscreen optimizations
  6. apply and okay

Can some people test this out for me? Not talking about people having issues with popins or anything, talking about people who are having the constant stuttering issues where even while still, their frametime graphs look like an EKG. One note: I did still have to tab out and back in to get my FPS to unlock from 60 back to 120, but after that, smooth as butter now.

EDIT: The CPU side of things in the client still hates Org on Area52 though, but at least the frametime graph is still almost completely smooth now(slider 10+RT on good):
https://imgur.com/xmFH93x
Note the low GPU usage because it’s CPU bound with that many people around, which causes the card to do a lot of idling with the clocks.

Here’s like 100000000 people fighting the raid boss in the barrens:
https://imgur.com/UwUBPQi
Yes, the frame rate is terrible with maxed out settings and that many people around, but note the frame time graph being pretty much smooth.

Anyways, that’s enough testing and experimenting for the day.

5 Likes
1053

This seems like a whole different issue entirely, and you only experience this on one PC?

1 Like
1054

The length that this has been a known issue with the amount of data the players have given them is beyond pathetic. This isn’t some rare bug or something negligible.

This is a very serious problem that many people are experiencing and it’s making the game nearly unplayable for a lot of that group.

26 days since any word on this. Absolutely ridiculous. Not even a post acknowledging it’s still being actively worked on.

Blizzard needs the Twitter treatment, clearly half of their workforce isn’t contributing anything meaningful and the company can do without them.

This is something on their end, as people with very high end PCs are experiencing this as well. Not a single addon, settings all on low, framerate capped low, still get the stutters.

1 Like
1055

Pls fix asset pop in blizz omg. Unbearable. My inner dracthyr is crying so hard. Gonna make me go do dumb desperate things like go and reinstall warframe… or gotham knights… :dizzy_face: