Low resource utilization

The performance of the game is all over the place for me. For example, on Utah I might get hundreds of frames per second with proper GPU utilization (60-90%) but then on more demanding maps like East Coast USA the FPS drops to 30-50 and utilization goes to around 20%. Also frame dropping is quite bad at times, it might drop to single digit framerates for seconds at a time. CPU utilization is around 20-30% most of the time, sometimes spiking up or down. Especially on Italy the problem seems to be more pronounced but that might be due to lack of optimization 'cause it's a new map, and I understand that. I'm also running the game at 1080p with everything else on low except textures on high, anisotropic filtering on 16x, anti-aliasing on SMAA and SSAO on.

PC Specs are:

CPU: i7 5820K @ 4.6GHz
GPU: GTX 1070
RAM: 8GB DDR4 2133HMz (Single channel tho, idk if this matters with this game)
Game running on SSD

Temps for both GPU and CPU are quite low so that ain't my issue.
If this has been adressed in some other thread, I apologize.

Also I've been playing the game for about two or three years now. I only started to notice the issue after the release of East Coast, and I've been monitoring the issue since. I know the performance leaves a lot to be desired but it seems weird to me that if an area or map is more demanding on hardware, the utilization goes down, rather than up. But I'm no expert on how optimization works.

 

Do what Nadeox1 mentioned and it should be possible to see better what is happening, but for example if Antivirus or Steam does downloading while you have game running, that can lower framerate a lot.

For single digits to happen, it can also be some hard drive related aspect.
With 1070 you should be perfectly fine running high details, also your CPU is not that weak even in single thread, it should do fine, but single channel memory can have some impact, especially with your memory speed.

One thing that could be happening is that your memory is running out and that slows things down a lot and quite randomly.

About CPU utilization, total utilization is not very important as it is always single thread that hits limits first with single vehicle, but that is tricky as task manager might show 60-70% for single thread while in reality it is spiking to 100% really fast so task manager just don't catch it, but performance graphs should show that I think.

Remember to hover mouse over CPU graph when you take a screenshot so all the numbers are shown.

 

I drove around a bit before taking the screenshots. The framerate was fine on Utah and gridmap but on East Coast it jumped between ~50 and 70. Also higher speeds seem to cause intermittent fps drops.

I only use Windows Defender and that is idle most of the time, and whenever it is running a check it doesn't affect performance much. Steam downloads also cause a general fps decrease but I usually stop any downloads before playing Beam.

 

Here's a couple of good examples form a few minutes of gameplay. It seems West Coast produces these kind of stutters consistently while East Coast and Utah are more stable. I hope this helps.

I also had shader quality on medium, when i turned that to low it seemed to kind of remedy the low framerate issue, although it still sometimes creeps to low 40's, but that is less of an issue now.

 

Something is oddly spiking there, I wonder if it could be some 3rd party thing or disk access thing?


All I know is that when I had defender beginning of this year, it did cause game to run much worse than with AVG, but then again AVG is really annoyance other ways.

Does these happen even after you have driven full loop? First time driving around there can be some loading that causes such hiccups.

GPU utilization goes down when CPU is limiting factor.

My guess is that either something else is using CPU hard for a moment (thing defender can do) or then loading from disk takes bit longer than usual, but can be something else too, such hiccups are bit hard to pinpoint accurately.

Such hiccups were reason why I disabled every automatic update and maintenance function on my Windows 8.1 install, eliminating potential causes makes much easier to figure out what is happening.

Do you have discord or other messaging software running? Does it happen without such running? That is just to eliminate potential causes outside the game.

I'm quite certain that I have not experienced such hiccups since I moved game back to ssd from hdd, but on HDD those were common.

 

It happens more when I've just started the game but that is understandable as it needs to load assets, but it also happens after driving full loop multiple times, for example that clip was taken after driving around the entire map to make sure all the assets had loaded.

I usually have discord running in the background but I tested without it running and that had no effect. I also tried running the game with Avast antivirus in game mode rather than windows defender and made sure it was not running any checks but that had little affect as the game still stuttered.

I also had the game installed on HDD but that was a pain due to the first 5 minutes of gameplay being a literal slideshow (not even mentioning the load times). After reinstalling the game on my SSD that issue went away, but shortly after it was replaced by this.

As I previously stated the low (30-ish) framerate in cities was remedied by lowering shader quality but it didn't affect the stuttering much if at all. The game just seems unstable for me, the framedrops are inconsistent at best and are hard to replicate consistently. Sometimes the game works fine and other times it stutters for no reason. The only kind of consistent area that stutters is the one shown in the beginning of the video. Around that building the framerate lowers to the high 50's and the stuttering becomes more frequent.

 

I can see from the video how everything just stops for a several frames.

Here is how it is for me without vsync, with vsync I get butter smooth 60fps but without it game just stutters even over 100fps for some reason, but that is same for almost any game running in windowed mode for me, some work smooth with vsync, but some just don't work smooth unless in full screen and no vsync or using fast vsync:


However I don't get such hiccups of lag spikes.

Why your framerate lowers to high 50's on that spot is also odd, certainly 1070 is capable of running map perfectly fine at 100fps, also your CPU should not have single core performance more than 15% lower than mine on stock clocks and that is what limits my FPS, so you still should get 85fps at least.

I have 16GB 2666Mhz CL15 DDR4 in dual channel mode though, which of course has some affect, but at WCUSA 8GB should be enough and spiking is still odd behavior.

CPU powerstate switching can sometimes cause such, but that should not happen there as there is enough CPU load constantly.

One test could be unplug computer physically off from the net and run game without steam from installation folder, that would eliminate everything net related syncing etc.

Other than that hardware or power settings related could have spiking effect, however that still leaves lower than excepted fps issue.

I did run game SSAO and dynamic reflections off, but graphics on high. From Nvidia control panel I have set power management to Adaptive instead of default Optimal power as Optimal power was not quite optimal, I found things smoother with Adaptive. I would run full power, but that is bit much heat and power consumption when surfing the net.

Does your GPU gets full clocks and it does not flash bright leds on card when running the game? If PSU struggles to deliver power, that could cause some odd issues, but I guess those would be more severe than what you are seeing.

Not sure what else to try or guess that would help to get closer to actual cause of issue. Often lot of completely unrelated tests are needed to find out where actual issue resides, so it can be frustrating and annoying at times.

 

I thought of this too but my clocks never drop below 4.5ghz so that couldn't be it

Now this was the single weirdest thing about the whole ordeal. I set my settings to the ones you specified and that did the trick. With dynamic reflections and SSAO off I now get 85-100 fps around that area with no framedropping. Even with SSAO on and dynamic reflections on it still hovers around 70fps consistently but there's no sign of stuttering. I played for about 30 minutes and saw only two hiccups due to asset loading. After all the assets loaded it didn't stutter once.

I guess the lower settings aren't as well optimized as higher ones, because GPU usage now hovers over 80% at all times. I suppose the one core that is being used to calculate physics for the car couldn't keep up with the GPU and caused random stuttering but increasing GPU burden helped that. I also did change the power setting for the GPU to "Prefer maximum performance" but changed that back to "Optimal" and that had no effect.

Thank you so much for helping me with this!

 

Great that you got it fixed with that

Hmm, at WCUSA there is less LODs than on other maps, so lower details might have bit higher hardware requirements, it still should not cause stutter or hiccups and your hardware should be easily capable of run lower details as it does with higher ones, but who knows maybe there is some bug related to lower details then, needs perhaps checking out.