Sound issues and game lag

CPU needs to be faster, not more cores, but each core need to work harder as sounds, cpu graphics and LUA is competing from same limited computing power.

Your map taxes CPU much, all added LUA competes from same limited CPU power, so that adds to issue.

Physics are mainly what gets spread over many cores.

So it is fairly easy to overload capabilities of modern hardware.

Especially with sbeam sounds this lag seem to happen quite easily in recent versions of game, when playing with traffic mod, it is kinda easy to get this thing to happen.

 

Oh, CPU is very much being taxed, you would be surprised of how much one of your cores peaks at 100% within 100ms time, it is like banging against the rev limiter, but to see that you need some tools other than task manager.

You have 12 threads, that is 6 cores, like I have (we have 8th gen intel both), difference between 4.8Ghz and 5.0Ghz is pretty much nothing.

70W of CPU power is about where game starts dropping under 60fps on light maps, on heavy maps happens already at 60W of CPU power and GPU is not even close to limits in either case.

With more vcore wattages can be higher, but always far from maximum CPU can do, it is just how things work.

 

For me, it only happens if there is enough load on single core that fps drops from 60fps.

Same condition could theoretically happen at 120fps too if fps is limited by that single core, fps itself does not matter, what matters is if sound process has to wait. Now if they have changed how sound is being synced for example, that can cause more issues in such situation.

Does it happen when you have 60fps capped by vsync? For me, in that situation it does not happen.

Then again, I have not chased bandits over 6 hours in current version, on previous version has done that though and sound issue did happen only when getting fps drops.

I find it amusing when people state they have been involved with computers since 90s, I have had two intel 8086 CPUs, should of kept that original one, might of been more valuable than this current one

 

8086 orignal one did not have k designation, only this new useless piece of junk has, I mean at least original 8086 was best they could do at that time, while this is kinda "getting it to perform left to end user", well you probably know as you run your 8700k overclocked, stock performance is kinda meh.



I have not noticed such sound issues though, need to test more, but I'm mostly running with AI cars now that there is traffic app, would need more time to clock to test properly, but if you run without vsync or some kind of freesync or equivalent, that can get to same situations like lower end machines get when having performance limited by CPU.

Issue which I noticed from your video is that movement kinda stops every now and then, which kinda leads to think it is performance limit related, but it can be something in recorder too causing that, usually that is performance related though.

Record with this performance thing on, you can see with it quite well what is happening, when having mouse pointer over graph, it can reveal things, it can show sfx delay for example:


Your sound in windows is set to 24bit and 48khz or less? From some reason with some games setting that to higher makes all sort of issues, for example I had Full throttle adventure game lagging really bad when set higher, considering how simple such game is and what kind of computing power I have, it would not make sense that such game would lag, but it was taxing CPU really hard until changed to that setting.

Anyway you might need to test with base content only mods disabled to see it is absolutely game related.

Should not, might not, yet still can

 

Yeah, everything other than physics appear to compete from same resource, so it gets affected by a lot of things, LUA being just one of them, which makes it pretty annoyingly hard to know what is one causing the thing to happen.

Currently I'm running 4.3Ghz only as I'm playing with AIO setup and need some baseline figures, but I though I show my test setup for BeamNG, maybe it is useful.

2nd monitor setup, running Hwinfo at 250ms update rate can show some things, but it is still bit slow, anyway with that setup it is kinda easier to tell what happens and why


One car less and not much changes:


Turning shadows off allows to run 3 cars more while maintaining 60fps, what changes is preRender from CPU graph has gone:


That is still far from taxing GPU or all CPU cores to max, tricky thing is though that you will not see 100% even CPU is limiting framerates (CPU load is like sawtooth, lot of quick spikes and frequency of those 100% spikes is that limits what CPU can do in this game, from some reason), but change CPU load or speed and there are changes in FPS. What I don't know is where limits of DDR4 bandwidth would come to play, I have 2666Mhz CL15, but at some point I will upgrade to 3200Mhz CL13, which might tell then something about that, but 32GB of that is not exactly cheapest thing on market.

However running different cars, using map that is heavier, those bring number of cars I can run at 60fps down and a lot, while on gridmap with D15's I can get pretty good usage on CPU, it is because there is less stuff competing from single core, turning shadows off reduces load on that single core and that allows to put more load on other cores.

I'm running vsync on 60Hz monitor, so that most of the time I'm not facing limits of hardware, what I have learned is that this game don't like it when CPU is limiting framerates, GPU limiting framerates is better, but I try to avoid that too.

If you are running maximum amount of fps game will run, that can introduce issue easier than running game without hitting hardware limits, which is then what kinda needs to be tested out as it can be one key element to trigger the issue.

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Oh and what is your audio hardware? I'm using Roccat Juke 7.1 USB sound card thing as I could not live with onboard audio anymore.

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I need to find a way to get other CPU threads show up on HWinfo when using fully custom grouping, from some reason it shows only 8 and most interesting one might end up to ones that are not showing up.

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Oh and 8086K is completely pointless thing really, 8700K does perfectly the same, but sentimental reasons and there was not much of price difference when I got mine, after that I believe prices have gone mildly upwards, but haven't really paid attention.
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I got sound cutting to happen in less than an hour, it started after situation where I got drop below 60fps as CPU limited performance for short moment (sadly not seen in screenshot):


I was playing with traffic tool, so that does classify as a mod of course, but other than that, it was base game content only.

SFX got up to 0.4 in CPU graph and rapid change in rpm of GM was where sound cutting could be observed.

More testing is needed to say much about that.

Sound gets cutting out quite easily if I get cpu limited condition.

Now with over 10 on SFX graph, it is of course causing cpu limited condition on you, but reason for that is that either sfx code is waiting for something or busy with do nothing loop.

If it would be a memory leak, then it would occur even without driving or any activity, just game running enough long.

But that super high SFX compute time is something I have not seen, highest I have seen has been around 0.5.

Sometimes though sound is cutting out even no longer CPU limited situation on, so it kinda gets bothered or something.

Even if CPU limited situation, I think sound should not cut out like that, because game is kinda bound to be CPU limited with modern quick GPUs, most games are like so (well pretty much all DX9-11 games) at least with 1080p as GPU performance is so insanely high with top end GPUs.

 

I wonder, maybe some sounds are not purged and are left hanging around, so after playing game long time, it kinda runs out of voices, even in game situation would not call more than 64 voices, that then triggers high CPU usage or wait of SFX engine which then makes lag on CPU.

Would that explain over 10 of SFX in CPU graph?

There probably is some other possibilities too.

Amount of voices, if your settings have changed from sound sources = high to sound sources = normal with update, that might also be possibility of change.