Stuttering

[Ron]

Hey guys,

Over the last five or six months, I have had intermittent client crashes. What happened was the screen would freeze for about a second, and then I'd get dumped to the desktop. My computer would pop up a message saying the display driver had stopped responding and had recovered.

I kind of lived with it because I didn't really know what else to do (I had updated my driver to current). But it seemed to have been getting steadily worse. The other day I crashed twice while creating a new character (very frustrating), and I decided "that was it".

So I updated my driver again (a new release had come out, only about a month old). I deleted my preferences.ini file, and I logged in and hit the "Detect Optimal". I have a pretty good system, so I think all the settings were maxed. It also asked me if I wanted to run DX11. I said "yeah, go ahead".

Well, I played for a few minutes, and crashed again. Worse than ever this time, it took out my entire system (blue screen of death). After a reboot, I dropped down to DX10.

And so far, I've played for a couple of days and not one crash. Yay! That's the good news. The bad news is this: Since I did that, I've been getting noticeable lag problems. Not huge spikes or anything. Really, more like stuttering when I am moving. Every couple of seconds my character pauses for a fraction of a second. It's almost unnoticeable, except it makes it hard to mouse-look (and therefore steer). I keep running into obstacles as I move, which I never had a problem with before.

I've tried lowering the graphics from Very High to High to Medium. No luck, same problem. I tried playing with the mouse sensitivity and mouse smoothing thinking maybe it was just a setting I wasn't used to. But no, it's definitely the stuttering that is causing it.

So my question is this: Could there have been something in that ini file that I set long ago that might affect this that I've forgotten about? Or is this just coincidence that I did a reset when the expansion came out and it's just regular old server lag? Any suggestions on a fix?

[trashcanhands]

I haven't been suffering from crashes like yourself. I do get the occassional server drop. My biggest issue, as of MoTU, is definitely lag. The game has become almost unplayable. I did everything I could to make sure it wasn't on my end. I've updated my graphics drivers, etc. Even setting my graphics to low or very low doesn't fix the problem. The reason I'm responding to you is because you mentioned using 'Detect Optimal Settings'.

Prior to MoTU, Detect Optimal would put my settings to Very High but I could run the game smoothly on Ultra. Post MoTU, I get severe lag and I only get between 5-18 FPS. It isn't just spikes of lag. It is constant stuttering while moving and the game comes to a stand still during large battles (especially with lots of AOEs, blade barriers, etc)
Another thing I noticed, as of yesterday, was when I clicked 'Detect Optimal Settings' it now sets my graphics to Medium. This did boost my FPS slightly, getting between 15-27, which is still not enough for me to be able to enjoy the game. I'm not sure if I was just spoiled from the years of smooth, lag-free gameplay and this is just the current state of the game or if there is something I or Turbine can do to fix this issue. I never tweaked any .ini files so deleting and letting the game rebuild one would be pointless for me, I believe.
It just feels like there is some hidden issue with a graphics setting that I'm missing that will make the whole problem just go away.


Side Note, I used to run DX11 with all the fancy extras just fine. Now, I have tried using DX9,10,11 and still get terrible performance.

I realize I haven't answered your question and sadly I don't have an answer. I am just hoping maybe we can get a few more people with similar issues to start posting and perhaps be able to find some sort of solution.

[ZeebaNeighba]

Every once in a while, like about once to twice an hour or so, my client freezes up for a minute from not responding. It usually happens in places I would expect (coming off a loading screen, loading the feats/enhancement page, completing a level, a few things that cause the game to recalculate/load a lot of stuff) but sometimes it just randomly happens when I'm running through a quest or something.

[Phoenix-daBard]

Two things come to mind:

1. Disable stenciled shadows. They really cause issues.

2. When you experience the stuttering check your hard drive indicator. If it is going nuts then you may want to try a readyboost drive. Another player on the forum mentioned a marked improvement. Saved my sanity when I tried it.

[Perikeles]

You might want to check the temperatures your graphics card goes up to under heavy load. Heat issues are known to cause that type of issues. Another one might be the psu not providing enough power for the graphics card.

[crystalhazards]

If you exhaust any 'quick-fix' ideas and are ready to pull your hair out, try this: (but keep in mind this will consume hours of your compy's time)

1) Go to Add/Remove programs in the Control Panel and remove DDO.

2) Run a disk defragmentation, then restart your computer.

3) Reinstall DDO, allow it to patch, then give 'er a try.

If DDO's files become fragmented simply doing a defrag won't fix them, and severly fragmented files can and will cause lag as your hard drive has to jump all over the platter to retrieve the requested info. If you are noticing heavy lag in very specific areas then you may be suffering from this problem.

I don't guarantee this will work as it will only fix fragmented file related issues. So, because of the large amount of time involved only do it as a last resort. Good luck to you.

[Ron]

Thanks everyone for the advice.

I've kind of figured out the issue, if not the solution. It's definitely client side lag. My client's frame rate is simply atrocious. Like in the single digits bad. Which explains why I was stuttering and having trouble controlling the steering.

I can bring it up by turning all the graphics way down and lowering the resolution to minimum (800 x 600) to around 20-25 fps, which gives me fairly smooth gameplay, but the game looks pretty bad compared to what I'm used to, heh.

Something is wrong, because I was running at full resolution (1920 x 1200) at high quality graphics settings (using the high resolution textures) before I did the reset, and it ran silky smooth. Which it should. I have a pretty beefy system which should be able to kick this game's rear

I can try crystalhazards nuke/reset if need be, but anyone have any less drastic ideas first?

[Phoenix-daBard]

Check the driver version? Maybe windows update gave you a driver not quite compatible. If that is the case then you should be able to download an older version to test with. Also if the driver has become corrupted you should be able to click reinstall driver in the driver properties panel.

[McFunzel]

i had the exact same problem on a laptop
it was running a nvidia quaddro fx onboard card. it has some strange feature which allows it to use ram
from your computer.

in my case the grafix ram was 512 mb, and it would take up to 3,5gig ram from the pc (if available)
it does that by somehow addressing it and mapping it for use by the grafixcard

i tried to change it or restrict the card from doing that, the driver didnt even have an option to do so

so i pulled 6 of the 8 gigs ram from my machine, which left the grafix with the available (hardware) 512meg it had
and the 1 min pauses with 1 fps were gone for good.
i was using dx10 and dx9 to test, didnt make a difference then
i tried to find a technical explanation on the manufacturers website, found nothing

i hope that helps you or points you in the right direction

[samthedagger]

This might not help a whole lot, but I am experiencing virtually no lag (server side or client side) even since the MoTU xpack came out and I am running the high res version on ultra high. So I doubt it is a server side issue. You may actually want to go back to a previous version of your GPUs drivers and see if that helps.

[AZgreentea]

A lot of people are having the hitching and stuttering problem post U14. I would say if you fixed the crashing problem, you are back to being in the same boat as the rest of us.

[Ron]

I did a full nuke (deleted DDO, did a defrag, and reloaded). I figured it couldn't hurt, since it's been quite a while since I'd done that. Sadly, it didn't appreciably help things.

So I just did a driver rollback. The result was amazing. I had (by turning off various options) gotten the framerate up to about 22 fps. When I rolled back the driver, it immediately jumped to max (62 fps, since I have it vsynched).

So yeah, it was the driver. Apparently the new one sucks. Thanks NVidea.

Now I just have to put all my settings back As long as I don't start crashing again, it's all good (maybe just keeping it down to DX10 will keep it from the dreaded crash).