Been doing some more testing. And I don't know at this point. Sometimes I think the system it's self has a fault, other times, I think there are just tweaks you need to make on a game by game basis, to fix these issues. Kinda feeling a bit overwhelmed to be honest, as i'm trying to understand the feedback i'm seeing in testing the rig, but I think maybe i'm just not smart enough to intuitively understand what all the little quirks you see in testing mean.
Anyway. l4d2 "seems" to be better now, although i've been at this point before where I think i've fixed issues, but then it turns out the problem is still there after much more testing.
What I did was add these steam launch options:
-novid -high -nojoy -heapsize 1572864 -threads 4
(not even sure what some of them do, but they popped up a lot as fixes in other forums)
Add this console command:
cl_forcepreload 1
(force's pre-loading of many level components at start rather than on the fly)
Set FPS limit to 119 for l4d2.exe in rivatuner. 115 limit increased the stutter in normally stutter free area's. 119 seems to be the best level over all, but it doesn't eliminate stutter when there are lots of zombies spawning.
The most effective fix for the stuttering, especially when that are lots of zombies spawned is to set core affinity to the bottom 4 cores (cores 4 to 11) in task manager, as I figure any background processes running will usually default to core 0 and/or core 1, so that way the game can have it's own set of 4 core's as it were.
I don't know whether it's a combination of all these tweaks together or just the core affinity on it's own, but the stuttering has been very much reduced and it's a very much playable now. The only stutter that remains now is the normal "whole frame" tiny micro stutter that, as I understand, is a normal level of stutter for g-sync. This tiny micro stutter is best observable whenever you are close to and facing a 3d object in a game and you use the keyboard and mouse to rotate around the object, whilst moving the mouse in tandem to keep the object in the center of you field of view. V-sync did the same thing, although triple buffering reduced it.
I don't want to jinx it, as knowing my luck, i'll think this has fixed it, but then tomorrow it''ll have issues again. What I don't fully understand is why reducing the number of cores the game can use gets rid of stuttering. Surely giving the game less resources to work with would only make things worse ?
Anyway, looking forward to going back to shooting some zombies in the face again
and not dealing with stutter.
