Micro-stuttering / hitch & Frametime spikes issue

[Chief Blur Buster]

The RAM solution is only if you don't have your hands on an Optane drive, like the 905p then correct?
Another means to an end to reduce hitching, so to say?

You can do all of it -- Optane and extra RAM. It's like adding extra moats to your castle. Bigger safety margin.

But extra RAM will be as good (or better) than Optane anyway, especially since extra RAM sticks is cheaper than a terabyte of Optane anyway. The main extra difficulty is configuring the cache preload of your game, but there are many ways to do this that are easy and already published all over the place.

It will still improve big games -- because it will load savegames faster and your 2nd playthrough of a level will have shorter loading screens and fewer hitchings. A single level will be easily cached in 64 GB of RAM, with today's GPU RAM sizes and disk sizes.

Those 16GB+ GPUs and humongous 80GB games, means a 16GB RAM middleman between GPU & game is no longer enough to prevent repeat-reload texturestreaming disk hitching, especially since PC texturestreaming is not as optimized as PS5 texturestreaming.

A 80 GB game will still have less texturestreaming hitching on a 64 GB RAM system than a 16 GB RAM system. Throwing the RAM overkill is a workaround for PC texturestreaming inferiority over PS5.

[depatere]

A 80 GB game will still have less texturestreaming hitching on a 64 GB RAM system than a 16 GB RAM system. Throwing the RAM overkill is a workaround for PC texturestreaming inferiority over PS5.

Gotcha - makes perfect sense to throw an overkill of RAM on it - but I never thought of it.
I remember people saying you can't notice 60+ frames back in the day.
This feels the same, as people will constantly mention to not go to high in RAM, but little do they know it can help with hitching if approached right.

I also didn't know this, so thank you for that Chief.

Preferrably, I'd love to get the Optane, not because I'm not willing to throw extra ram at my system, but currently I have my 32 GB RAM manually OC'd pretty good and only have 2 slots on my motherboard, haha. Would be the easier solution if it wasn't for the supply shortage.

You mentioned the bash script you use for preloading cache, are there any other ways you find good to use? Like DIMMDrive?

[Chief Blur Buster]

A 80 GB game will still have less texturestreaming hitching on a 64 GB RAM system than a 16 GB RAM system. Throwing the RAM overkill is a workaround for PC texturestreaming inferiority over PS5.

Gotcha - makes perfect sense to throw an overkill of RAM on it - but I never thought of it.
I remember people saying you can't notice 60+ frames back in the day.
This feels the same, as people will constantly mention to not go to high in RAM, but little do they know it can help with hitching if approached right.

I also didn't know this, so thank you for that Chief.

Preferrably, I'd love to get the Optane, not because I'm not willing to throw extra ram at my system, but currently I have my 32 GB RAM manually OC'd pretty good and only have 2 slots on my motherboard, haha. Would be the easier solution if it wasn't for the supply shortage.

You mentioned the bash script you use for preloading cache, are there any other ways you find good to use? Like DIMMDrive?

The refresh rate race makes it necessary too.

Overkill RAM is more useless with 60Hz + NVMe SSDs because texturestreaming often only added 4ms or 6ms or 8ms here and there. That's less than one 60Hz frame (1/60sec = 16.7ms).

But with today's 240Hz monitors, that's a full framedrop or two. We definitely can tell when 240fps falls to 239fps and then back to 240fps. Single framedrops are visible. and the disk stutter error margin can be big enough to punch a stutter through VRR (G-SYNC and FreeSync) too.

Most YouTubers and reviewers (not even TomsHardware or AnandTech) don't know about this yet, but as Hz has creeped up to average laypeople. High Hz is no longer just for esports. Even 240Hz helps web browsing too (smoother scrolling). So as high Hz hits the stutter-videophile users instead of esports users, we have an increasing number of complaints about microstutters during high-Hz.

Oh, and don't forget to upgrade your mouse to 2000Hz. Too much hitching with 1000Hz mice nowadays on 240Hz+ displays. Few choices exist, but the Razer Viper 8KHz is the favourite, even if you downclock its poll to 2000Hz (a Goldilocks to lighten CPU load, as 8KHz has killer CPU spikes in certain games). For non-esports, try 3200dpi and ultralow sensitivity, to make your slow mouseturns perfectly TestUFO-smooth (same smoothness as keyboard strafe left/right). Goodbye steppy-steppy mouseturns with highHz+highPoll+highDPI+lowSens, with perfect TestUFO-smooth mouseturns.

TL;DR: Hitting weak links (RAM, mouse, etc) helps more on high-Hz than low-Hz systems, because high-Hz makes microstutters easier to see. Disk microstutters, mouse microstutters, etc.

[depatere]

The refresh rate race makes it necessary too.
more on high-Hz than low-Hz systems, because high-Hz makes microstutters easier to see. Disk microstutters, mouse microstutters, etc.

Very well explained, Chief, thank you for that.

I've taken immediate action and searching for a RAM Disk solution as you mentioned.
I've come across https://rog.asus.com/technology/republi ... s/ramdisk/

This should be the preloading cache game that you mentioned that is on par with Optane right?

[depatere]

The refresh rate race makes it necessary too.
more on high-Hz than low-Hz systems, because high-Hz makes microstutters easier to see. Disk microstutters, mouse microstutters, etc.

Very well explained, Chief, thank you for that.

I've taken immediate action and searching for a RAM Disk solution as you mentioned.
I've come across https://rog.asus.com/technology/republi ... s/ramdisk/

This should be the preloading cache game that you mentioned that is on par with Optane right?

Small update, I went ahead and installed old software called DimmDrive on Steam.
It allowed me to create a RamDisk - so I went ahead and did so for Sifu.

I tested the very noticeable hitches for disk access in this game, and even on a ram disk, they were still the same on my frametime graph as without the ram disk..

Not what I expected - doing anything wrong?

[jorimt]

Small update, I went ahead and installed old software called DimmDrive on Steam.
It allowed me to create a RamDisk - so I went ahead and did so for Sifu.

I tested the very noticeable hitches for disk access in this game, and even on a ram disk, they were still the same on my frametime graph as without the ram disk..

Not what I expected - doing anything wrong?

Interesting...

Assuming the RAM disk is configured properly and working as intended, it's possible what we're seeing in Sifu is primarily due to real-time shader compilation, and if so, I'm not sure if a RAM disk covers that scenario.

With consoles, there's fixed hardware, allowing all game shaders to be pre-compiled, so they don't have to load in real-time; they're just ready for use whenever.

On PC, however, due to an almost unlimited amount of hardware configurations, unless the developers implement a pre-compilation process that runs on each unique PC, shaders instead have to load on-demand in real-time, which causes unavoidable stutter.

Below is an insightful article on the subject with more details on the issues. It applies to PC games as well:
https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2017/07/30/ubershaders/

Again, Sifu is a UE4 game, and UE4 is famous for shader compilation stutter, so...

[depatere]

Interesting...

Assuming the RAM disk is configured properly and working as intended, it's possible what we're seeing in Sifu is primarily due to real-time shader compilation, and if so, I'm not sure if a RAM disk covers that scenario.

...

Again, Sifu is a UE4 game, and UE4 is famous for shader compilation stutter, so...

Yeah, I think I could use an alternative to DimmDrive as the website has been long down - but it takes syncing back into account.
I could probably use some pointers to a better solution in 2022 for preloading.

And yeah, like you said before, Sifu has got it pretty bad. Everytime you open a door or something, it has to load the level in.
TBH, this minor hitching due to disk access makes games pretty unenjoyable for me, Dying Light for example too, since it is such an open world.

Or Lost Ark, just has hitching for me all round if you go different places.

[jorimt]

And yeah, like you said before, Sifu has got it pretty bad. Everytime you open a door or something, it has to load the level in.

Way back, they used to hide this with load screens between areas (Half-Life 2, etc); well, if "hide" means pausing the game for several seconds and showing a "Loading..." message.

[Chief Blur Buster]

Not all game inefficiencies can be fixed through this method -- different games will behave differently depending on where the inefficiency is.

Be noted that creating a RAM disk will starve your memory that could be assigned to the game -- less RAM for running the game. But if you have lots of memory, this would not be it.

You can graph things through software like MSI Afterburner and try to find the weak links -- e.g. game inefficiencies. A good system monitor that monitors all concurrently, can help you if your bottleneck is memory related, disk related, CPU related, or GPU related, and help you decide whether it's at least partially fixable or not.

If you can, post the graphs.

[depatere]

Not all game inefficiencies can be fixed through this method -- different games will behave differently depending on where the inefficiency is.

Be noted that creating a RAM disk will starve your memory that could be assigned to the game -- less RAM for running the game. But if you have lots of memory, this would not be it.

You can graph things through software like MSI Afterburner and try to find the weak links -- e.g. game inefficiencies. A good system monitor that monitors all concurrently, can help you if your bottleneck is memory related, disk related, CPU related, or GPU related, and help you decide whether it's at least partially fixable or not.

If you can, post the graphs.

I'll make sure to try and record the hitching I'm talking about.
Pretty sure it is asset loading related - always happen when you enter a new area on whatever game really.
Some games do more asset loading than others I suppose.

I'll see if I can record it.
For now @Chief, if Optane drives weren't in shortage. Which one would you actually recommend?
The 905p m.2 drive combined with another SSD? Or Optane 32GB Memory?

I've seen you recommending Optane a lot, but would be helpful to elaborate what you mean by it as there are some options out there.