solved DCS: A festival of stuttering.

[Tea-Pig]

Back in December I bought a new and very expensive PC to replace my pretty decent 3070/5800 based system, in the hope and expectation of finding the best possible performance in DCS and then upgrade my VR headset to something better than my Reverb G2. The new PC has all the stuff: 4090,R7-7800x3d,6GHz RAM etc...
What has followed has been three months of frustration and disappointment. While the new system has indeed perked up MSFS and IL2, the performance in DCS is barely better than my old system, possibly actually worse. The problem is stuttering. Apparently random micro-stutters and longer, prolonged stutters too. These stutters occur when playing on any map with any aircraft and seem unrelated to the complexity of the scene or the graphics settings in DCS. They occur with the game paused, and EVEN ON THE START MENU PAGE. I have spent many hours searching for a solution, both here and elsewhere on the web, and slavishly tried every suggested fix mentioned. DCS settings, PC power, Hotplug, Core affinity (maybe only for intel?), disabled antivirus, windows priorities, game mode on/off, disconnect from network, remove USB devices, rolled back to 2.8, etc etc. Nothing seems to make the slightest difference.
The general performance of my system seems very good. I can get good framerates in VR with reasonably high settings even in cluttered scenarios, but the continual stutters just ruin ruin everything. I get the impression that I might be unusual in that I'm getting stuttering when paused and in the start menu, so maybe someone can suggest something new? Thanks in advance to anyone who tries to help. At the moment I feel like I'm at the end of the road with DCS.

dxdiag.txt dcs.log

[Rene Coulon]

cannot wait to see some suggestions...I am in the same boat...never had so many micro stutters, worst its been since I began years ago

[plott1964]

..ditto

[The_Nephilim]

this might be a factor try increasing your Pagefile if you have the diskspace:

 

 

Page File: 35660MB used, 10637MB available    ( this was in the log) so basically you used more diskspace then you have avaialble.. so you get stutter when this happens worse then if it accessed the needed space files..

 

I set mine at 102400..

 

 

EDIT: Have you benchmarked your PC and if so did it meet expected performance levels? there are tons of factors as too why you get stutter but your log showed your pagefile is too small.. also make sure there is enough room on the disk and that it is on a fast drive no platter drive SSD M.2 if possible..

Edited March 15 by The_Nephilim

[Tea-Pig]

Thank you to @The_Nephilim for taking the time to look through my log. I've run several benchmarks and apparently my system is pretty good for its spec. The page file thing is a new one for me. Something else to fiddle with in the war against stutters.

In the meantime it seems I have made some very significant improvement. The prolonged and most objectional stutters seem to be gone and the frequency of the micro stutters seems to be down from about one every ten seconds average to just occasional, so still a bit annoying but no longer hideous. Unfortunately my expectations from recent tinkering were pretty much zero and I stopped being methodical and trying one thing at a time. I did a load of stuff together and don't know what exactly is the significant bit.

In a fit of disgust I deleted DCS completely, intending to never play it again. Everything went, game, saved games, control mapping, the lot. I think the level of disgust might be an important factor here as it really makes you want to get rid of every last vestige of the game. The next day the thought of never flying the Mosquito (even though ED have totally screwed up its ground handling), or the Skyhawk, or the FW190 was too much and I installed it all again. I've done a load of cleans and repairs before and my installation wasn't very old but maybe a good ol' clean out and reload reaches the parts that clean and repairs don't.

While it was downloading I found there is a new Nvidea driver so I updated to that.

Then I went through the stuff suggested by @Flappie in this thread and copied as many of them as I could. I've been through this before but did it again. The bit about HPET seemed a bit scary so I kept away from that.

There's also a VR prerendered frames setting in Nvidea which sounds like the sort of thing that might reduce stuttering but doesn't. I had it set to 3 and changed it back to 1.

I uninstalled Process Lassoo. There has been much talk of core management issues but I think a lot of it only relates to Intel CPUs. I never got any improvement from my AMD so I got rid of Lassoo and any botch up settings I might have made. 

I've also done something with Windows power management. Not sure what I've done but my PC now just restarts when told to shut down so I've obviously screwed something up. I had this service disabled previously with no noticeable effect. I re-enabled it and set everything to max performance but seem to have done something more to it.

And the result of all this is like a night and day improvement. Definitely not just a hopeful placebo effect. Almost no stutters in menus or when paused, and just a few dropped frames in game, usually when something happens like fire a weapon or look around quickly. For the first time I feel like I'm actually seeing the sort of results that my expensive system should be capable of. Got the eye candy dialled up now, shadows, AA, clouds, textures all up and still running pretty smoothly. Hopefully it will stay that way.

[DAZnBLAST]

I use to get stutters in the MT version. Since BigNewy posted the mt.lua file which goes into your config folder, mine is very smooth. I also enabled all P and E cores in my BIOS.

 

Edited March 16 by DAZnBLAST

[The_Nephilim]

19 hours ago, Tea-Pig said:

Thank you to @The_Nephilim for taking the time to look through my log. I've run several benchmarks and apparently my system is pretty good for its spec. The page file thing is a new one for me. Something else to fiddle with in the war against stutters.

In the meantime it seems I have made some very significant improvement. The prolonged and most objectional stutters seem to be gone and the frequency of the micro stutters seems to be down from about one every ten seconds average to just occasional, so still a bit annoying but no longer hideous. Unfortunately my expectations from recent tinkering were pretty much zero and I stopped being methodical and trying one thing at a time. I did a load of stuff together and don't know what exactly is the significant bit.

In a fit of disgust I deleted DCS completely, intending to never play it again. Everything went, game, saved games, control mapping, the lot. I think the level of disgust might be an important factor here as it really makes you want to get rid of every last vestige of the game. The next day the thought of never flying the Mosquito (even though ED have totally screwed up its ground handling), or the Skyhawk, or the FW190 was too much and I installed it all again. I've done a load of cleans and repairs before and my installation wasn't very old but maybe a good ol' clean out and reload reaches the parts that clean and repairs don't.

While it was downloading I found there is a new Nvidea driver so I updated to that.

Then I went through the stuff suggested by @Flappie in this thread and copied as many of them as I could. I've been through this before but did it again. The bit about HPET seemed a bit scary so I kept away from that.

There's also a VR prerendered frames setting in Nvidea which sounds like the sort of thing that might reduce stuttering but doesn't. I had it set to 3 and changed it back to 1.

I uninstalled Process Lassoo. There has been much talk of core management issues but I think a lot of it only relates to Intel CPUs. I never got any improvement from my AMD so I got rid of Lassoo and any botch up settings I might have made. 

I've also done something with Windows power management. Not sure what I've done but my PC now just restarts when told to shut down so I've obviously screwed something up. I had this service disabled previously with no noticeable effect. I re-enabled it and set everything to max performance but seem to have done something more to it.

And the result of all this is like a night and day improvement. Definitely not just a hopeful placebo effect. Almost no stutters in menus or when paused, and just a few dropped frames in game, usually when something happens like fire a weapon or look around quickly. For the first time I feel like I'm actually seeing the sort of results that my expensive system should be capable of. Got the eye candy dialled up now, shadows, AA, clouds, textures all up and still running pretty smoothly. Hopefully it will stay that way.

Well it could have been a corrupted install, that does happen but usually if there is a problem elsewhere.. sounds like that what it might have  been sometimes a reinstall works wonders even Windows sometimes..

 

Glad it seems to be all working out..