Multiplayer stutters

[Wolf Rider]

okay... what are your system specs though? (Full system specifications)

[panzer_18]

Everybody, i know have this stutters......

It dont depend on the system on this level.......

 

Here:

Edited March 23, 2016 by panzer_18

[Wolf Rider]

Everybody, i know have this stutters......

It dont depend on the system on this level.......

 

Here:

 

err... not "Everybody, i know have this stutters......" Seems AMD/ ATI still aren't having much luck?

[panzer_18]

err... not "Everybody, i know have this stutters......" Seems AMD/ ATI still aren't having much luck?

 

 

 

My friends, who use Intel, have the same problems!

 

sorry....

Edited March 24, 2016 by BIGNEWY
1.2 trolling

[BIGNEWY]

it is not a intel / amd issue, user's from both camps have been having issues.

 

However not everyone is getting them, I am not, and have tried to reproduce the issue and can not.

Edited March 24, 2016 by BIGNEWY

[N1tch]

Just want to add some info that I too get these, specifically on multiplayer servers.

 

My ping is around 30 - 150 (but that should not cause the stuttering I see). It's like it can't or hasn't pre-loaded many of the ground / air models. Sometimes get this when I've just spawned in and look around on the airfield.

 

I've also tried reducing everything (all settings) and get the same results online.

 

My system spec is -

 

i7 6700k

32gb DDR4 RAM (so it's clearly not the RAM)

GTX 980Ti

 

I have 250mb up and down internet.

 

What makes some sense is what someone else pointed out earlier in this thread and it could be the HDD. I'm using a 7200rpm HDD for my games. I think I will try and install DCS on my SSD to see if that fixes the problem. However as I say it's as though the pre-load isn't working very well.

[112th_Rossi]

I did some tests on this. I ran ProcessMonitor against DCS.exe and it's due to DCS late loading files in the background. There will be a lag pause while it loads in things like textures and models, even Dll files.

 

I have proof of this as I did a video but haven't uploaded it yet. It shows process monitor displaying DCS processes and the lag happening in game when it accesses the disk.

 

I suspect this could be due to the fact some assets are in a zip file and DCS must uncompress these before accessing them.

 

Edit: An SSD will help but it wont' completely remove the problem. Besides, an SSD should not be a requirement to play this game.

 

Also, I noticed that DCS was unloading assets when it no longer needed them (which is good) however, the lag return when it wanted them again.

Edited May 9, 2016 by 112th_Rossi

[N1tch]

Interesting. Would like to see your video.

 

So if part of the stutter is due to the files being stored in zip, though I imagine they're not compressed would unpacking all the zip files help or be pointless?

[112th_Rossi]

It might help. You could unzip them into the same directory as the file name then move the zip files somewhere else.

 

There is definitely a correlation between loading assets and lag spikes in game. I'll post up the video later.

 

Edit, it could be that ED are experimenting with asset efficiency by late loading some non-essential assets to keep memory down or it's a bug.

 

I noticed it was loading things like .dds texture files and dlls such as Weapons.dll at a late stage.

 

I'm a software developer and I associate things like this with late binding or lazy loading. Late binding loads the asset as required at the cost of performance. It seems some dll files are being loaded this way.

Edited May 9, 2016 by 112th_Rossi

[Hadwell]

an SSD, for multiplayer, on servers with more than just 1 or 2 plane types really is a requirement.

 

to avoid loading a bunch of unneeded crap into the game, DCS loads models and textures on-demand, so access times are everything, even an ancient slow SSD can have bad access times and cause studdering.

 

you'd probably need that 32gb of ram and a videocard with a 16gb framebuffer to load every single texture and model in dcs into memory before hand, not to mention, loading the game up would take like 10 minutes.

 

because DCS has super high resolution textures and high poly count models.

Edited May 9, 2016 by Hadwell

[MegOhm_SD]

Interesting I do not have or never have had these issues on my meager system.

So if what you say is true, then why not?

[Hadwell]

Interesting I do not have or never have had these issues on my meager system.

So if what you say is true, then why not?

 

4.6ghz and a pair of samsung 840 ssds in raid0 is far from meagre, are you replying to me?

[MegOhm_SD]

4.6ghz and a pair of samsung 840 ssds in raid0 is far from meagre, are you replying to me?

 

No just in general...poor choice of words... My weakness is dsl 20 down 5 up. I live in the boonies by choice.

But I have no issues in Multiplayer large missions 20+ players..

 

I suppose I was thinking more about the statements that the problem is the software.

 

 

Years ago there were games I could not run on the system I had. I just had to wait until I acquired the hardware that could run it. I accepted that and never thought hey the Devs should design the game to run on a spartan system. Sorry I just can't wrap my head around that way of thinking.

Edited May 10, 2016 by MegOhm_SD

[Hadwell]

No just in general...poor choice of words... My weakness is dsl 20 down 5 up. I live in the boonies by choice.

But I have no issues in Multiplayer large missions 20+ players..

 

I suppose I was thinking more about the statements that the problem is the software.

 

 

Years ago there were games I could not run on the system I had. I just had to wait until I acquired the hardware that could run it. I accepted that and never thought hey the Devs should design the game to run on a spartan system. Sorry I just can't wrap my head around that way of thinking.

 

ah, yeah, there is tons of hardware capable of running DCS without studdering, therefore the problem isn't the software.

 

It's the people unwilling or unable to buy the hardware.

 

when they blatantly ignore the advice of the people that don't have problems with dcs, or for that matter, blatently ignore the fact that there are people out there with systems good enough to run dcs with no problems, I don't see how people, who are having problems getting dcs running smoothly, can say that it's not their system that's the problem.

Edited May 10, 2016 by Hadwell

[hansangb]

In the other thread, folks who experience constant stutter tried this suggestion (especially Edit 2: part) and was getting relief. So it's certainly not *one* thing causing stutters. And certainly, the whole change of High is Higher, Medium is High, and Low is Medium reference change caused a lot of headaches as well! :)

[N1tch]

to avoid loading a bunch of unneeded crap into the game, DCS loads models and textures on-demand, so access times are everything, even an ancient slow SSD can have bad access times and cause studdering.

 

I don't think there are many games that don't do dynamic loading and de-loading but that is the point of the pre-load buffer.

 

 

because DCS has super high resolution textures and high poly count models.

 

Again very true but so do many newer games and high poly count isn't an issue if the models have a decent amount of LOD which I assume ED has done on their models.

[codefox]

We are seeing a similar issue on our DCS servers. Currently, we got two servers up and running (Virtual Aerobatics for Caucasus and Nevada).

Hardware specs:

CPU - Intel i7-4790K

RAM - 32GB

SSD - Samsung MZ7LM240HCGR 240GB (really fast!)

Internet connection - 250Mbps up/down

 

We are still frequently seeing stutter issues on NTTR where the server(!) freezes for a few seconds. This causes every client to freeze too.

Same issue on the Caucasus server, although it happens much less frequently. I doubt these freezes are about file loading.. at least not about reading them from the disk - rather processing them inside of DCS.

Also, as we disabled 3D rendering and all that stuff, I also doubt it is directly related to rendering 3D models.

Edited May 10, 2016 by codefox

[112th_Rossi]

It happens in single player too though. It's definitely something to do with loading and/or processing. In particular clipmaps on the nevada terrain. You can see that it dynamically loads the clipmap texture files.

 

I wrote a tool that parses every zip file in the DCS World directory and extracts them so that DCS does not need to access a zip file in order to obtain the asset. It sorted the issue somewhat, but it still happens occasionally.

 

If you open process monitor, filter on DCS.exe and then look at disk activity, there is a clear correlation between accessing asset files and stuttering. I'm not saying this is the cause of the issue but it seems to be related somehow.

[codefox]

I wrote a tool that parses every zip file in the DCS World directory and extracts them so that DCS does not need to access a zip file in order to obtain the asset. It sorted the issue somewhat, but it still happens occasionally.

 

I will give this a try on our NTTR test server and post in here if it changes anything on multiplayer as well.

[Falcon_S]

...

 

I wrote a tool that parses every zip file in the DCS World directory and extracts them so that DCS does not need to access a zip file in order to obtain the asset...

 

Does the tool publicly available somewhere? Thanks in advance!

[112th_Rossi]

No, but I can make it so. I wrote it last night so I'll have to make a few changes to make it public. But yeah, I'll release it later. It's just a small console app written in C#, parse the DCS directories and extracts any zip file it finds, then backs up the zip file to a seperate folder out of the way.

[piXel496]

The typical frame hickups I experience in DCS singleplay and multiplay are related to spawning objects. In MP that could be a joining client or explosions. In MP & SP it happens if I spawn objects with a script. I imagined it to be some general .lua table updating or loading models+gfx of the DCS engine locking the continuity of the game progression. It always existed, maybe now it is slightly more prominent due to filesize?

 

I don't experience new performance stutters related to my network or system.

3770k-4.4GHz, gtx980, 16GB, SSD, utp lan.

 

The only metaphysical tweak I do is set affinity_mask in DCSconfig to my last 3 logical cpu cores. So the 1st core and other threads are for whatever my system likes to compute.

 

 

 

 

 

:)

Edited May 10, 2016 by piXel496
ofcourse I doubt it has effect..

[N1tch]

The only metaphysical tweak I do is set affinity_mask in DCSconfig to my last 3 logical cpu cores. So the 1st core and other threads are for whatever my system likes to compute.

 

I'm interested in trying anything. How do you define which cores work on the affinity_mask? I don't have my game on this machine so can't easily look. I just wonder is it simple to do?

 

Thanks

[112th_Rossi]

It won't make any difference. Setting the affinity just bundles the process threads into the cores you specify.

 

You cannot span a process across cores and expect to make it faster it doesn't work like that.

 

You can force a process onto a single core if you require but you can't do it the other way. The CPU will logically divide up the process threads across cores if the code is designed to work asynchronously.

[piXel496]

@ N1tch

It is very simple. Edit or create a txt file called autoexec.cfg in directory config, like this:

c:\users\-userName-\Saved Games\DCS\Config\autoexec.cfg

 

In this file you add the text:

affinity_mask = 84

 

The number 84 is for my cpu (4cores & 4threads). You can calculate your number here.

 

Why do this? Because you can.. And the first core is always working it's ass off and some processes could even be restricted to the first core. The last cores are lazy. They try to sleep whenever they can, even when playing DCS. So now I force DCS to not use core 1 and not use the 4 threads because they are not cores. Giving the first core some breathing room and it can do some background concurrent calculations.

 

This type of tweaks can lead to not noticing any difference. But it does not harm at the same time and if it does. It's removed in a second.

 

 

 

.

Edited May 10, 2016 by piXel496
I will not discuss this. I freed upper memory blocks for fun, but why?