Halo 3 MCC and Splitgate. My experience. Need Help.

[ImBIGJEFF]

I mainly play halo the master chief collection, specifically Halo 3. These issues I’m having aren’t limited to Halo, (Splitgate has similar issues as well) but that's what I play 99.99% of the time. I don’t play anything else to be honest. I have experienced these issues on 3 different PCs in my house and on 2 different ISPs. They come and go.

Halo on my PC used to run flawlessly. I rarely would even get a microstutter and this was with no optimization on my pc. The only setting I ever changed was disabling game bar DVR background recording. I would have multiple web pages open with videos buffering and OBS recording and the game would run perfectly smooth. H3 at 240hz feels amazing by the way. I just want to clarify that.

I started experiencing this issue about a year ago. It started after I experienced some very weird in-game bugs which I reported to the developers. I have some videos recorded via OBS of these issues happening live, such as: sound effects being delayed and then playing 8x in rapid succession. Extreme rubberbanding (which is not normal for me), grenades blowing up 10 seconds after I threw them and being thrown a second or two after I actually threw it. (At one point I rubberbanded off the map and suicided!). One game was like this but the next was perfectly fine. It was very strange. It was a matchamade game of 2v2s. My teammate said he wasn’t seeing any lag. Someone on the other team messaged me and said I was walking in to a wall most of the game. You get the idea. These issues went on off and off for a couple of weeks but eventually went away completely. But after they went away I started noticing these following issues which I suspect are electrical-related (Btw I’m not saying the aforementioned bugs are related to these current issues, but they started happening around the same time):

The issues I currently experience:

- It’s like the physics engine of the game just breaks. Enemy players, player animations, and weapon projectiles/grenades feel desynced ever so slightly. Everything has a weird vibration to it. Enemy players feel much faster and sporadic. They're animations feel like they're playing at 30hz and clashing with the engine of the game. Nothing appears fluid despite my FPS being fine. My game is running at 240hz, >240fps uncapped. Everything feels noticeably unstable. There’s especially a noticeable delay when enemy players throw down bubble shields. Enemy player animations are so extremely choppy. The timing of everything feels completely off. It’s as if the animations of players skip frames and I cannot react to it. One moment they aren’t facing me the next I’m being shot at but I didn’t really see them turn around. Everything just feels completely broken and out of sync. Enemy hitboxes feel like they are half the size they should be. No one else I play with experiences anything like this and I think they think I’m making excuses or going crazy, so I just stopped playing for the most part.

- The other issue I have is the game has frametime spikes (stuttering). I always get one right at the start of a game when I start moving for the first time. This happens every single game (assuming my game is having issues.) I also get these frametime spikes when I see an enemy on my screen or get into a fight.

When my game isn’t acting weird I do not get these frametime spikes. I can replicate them very easily, having observed them with RTSS. They also happen with my PC disconnected from the internet offline in custom games.

None of these issues are present in the Halo 3 campaign which I find strange. Everything runs perfectly smooth there.

These issues are present for me pretty much every time I play now so I’ve pretty much stopped playing my favorite game as a result. I tried playing it on my xbox and experienced similar problems and MCC has VSYNC on Xbox so the input lag kind of irritated me if I’m being honest.

I also play Splitgate a little bit. That game used to run perfectly smooth as well. The issue I experience with splitgate is the noticeable frametime spike when I see an enemy, sort of like Halo 3, only way more noticeable. Actually I haven't checked in a while it might not be a frametime spike. In my memory it feels like they player stutters not the entire game. Like it feels like an issue with players specifically, but I could check again because I'm not sure. This stuttering happens damn near every gunfight of every game too. The last night I played it worked for a couple hours then broke. I've tried playing a couple times since and the stuttering was present on my first game and it was unplayable.

I’ve tried both these games on multiple PCs and they all have these problems. At best halo will play smooth for an hour or so and then just break completely.

In halo I match a lot of the same people pretty often. Many of these players are well below my skill level. But when my game is broken I am in a fight for my life and most of the time I cannot kill anyone. And anyone who is anywhere near close to me in skill? Not happening. No point in trying. It’s just a headache. When my game is working fine it's like playing on easy mode. The hitregistration makes me feel god-like. I will routinely hit crazy noscopes and flick shots all night.

These issues happen on 2 different ISPs, 3 different computers, possibly my xbox series x. (not entirely sure on that, the VSYNC really irritated me) Multiple monitors, controllers. I’ve tried different drivers, tweaked all the main settings, disabled power saving features, etc.

I bought an UPS and currently have my main PC and monitor plugged in to it. Some days I’ve noticed the UPS switches to battery briefly. (it makes the clicking sound like a breaker being tripped.) It seems to happen at night when I'm on my PC. Some days it doesn't trip at all but some nights it trips pretty often. For example in the hour I've spent typing this it has tripped 3 times and one time the lights dimmed when the UPS tripped. Our lights also dim when the AC turns on daily. The UPS keeps track of how many times it’s switched to battery power and it’s currently at 90 (edited 92!) in the few months we’ve owned it.

I'd love to hear some advice on what I should do. I've tried so many potential fixes. At best the game works good for an hour or 2 after changing a setting then it stops working. I've reinstalled windows a lot too. But it's at the point now where nothing helps at all. The game just feels broken all of the time.

The UPS is an APC Back-UPS 1500 Pro. I also own a Furman RP-8 power conditioner. Can anyone recommend what an ideal set up would be for all of this equipment so I can test everything?

My pc spesc (primary PC):
Fractal meshify case (black)
Asuf tuf 3070 ti oc
ryzen 5600x
g.skill 3600mhz ddr4
nvme ssd
Benq Zowie XL2546K 240hz

I’ve tried multiple motherboards, an intel set up, all different peripherals, etc. I have 3 pcs currently set up that all have this problems. One pc I've never played Halo on or gamed on at all. I downloaded it, the first 2 games felt smooth (despite running at very low fps on a 30hz monitor), but the 3rd game half way through I started experiencing these problems. At best I can get an hour of Halo gameplay before everything breaks. Splitgate seems to just never work right off the rip. F in the chat to splitgate. That game is pretty fun tbh.

Also once these problems start they don’t really go away. I generally wait a couple days or a week or 2 before I try to play again.

I would honestly love to get a high speed camera and see what my Halo 3 gameplay looks like on my monitor slowed down but I’ve spent so much money and time trying to fix this I’m about to just quit.

Any recommendations? A lot of stuff I have already tried of course, but I’ll be sure to update the thread if anyone has any ideas. Also I’m based in East Coast USA. My ping times to Halo are often less than 20ms. Ping has absolutely nothing to do with these issues. I'd rather play west coast or Europe servers and deal with lag than these problems.

[Chief Blur Buster]

When my game isn’t acting weird I do not get these frametime spikes. I can replicate them very easily, having observed them with RTSS. They also happen with my PC disconnected from the internet offline in custom games.

Weird!

What happens when you unplug the UPS from the outlet to try to play the game offline, whenever these problems appear in offline games? Don't forget to unplug the Ethernet cable too, and make sure your power cables/bricks are far away from your data cables. Nothing touching a power outlet, for a few minutes.

Your UPS battery is small, so try to turn off unnecessary components temporarily, and dim your screen's brightness if needed, in order to be able to do a quick offgrid verification test with no computer accessory (no router, no monitor, no computer) touching a wall outlet.

Some people use a big battery (e.g. Jackery Power Station) to play offgrid for a few hours.

Not sure if your problem is electricity related but when 100% ignoring online play and focussing only on offline-play glitches -- the offline play glitches are the ones I'm most interested in understanding better, and seeing if those improve when you play offgrid (nothing copper touching Internet nor power outlets)

Big electricity problems exist in lots of parts of the world, e.g. South America or Eastern Europe, but it can be Internet servers, Internet connection, etc. So simplifying to only offline+offgrid troubleshooting initially.

If the offline problems are solved by going offgrid, then consider a big battery (power station) + fiber optic network (to avoid any copper touching the computer, a conduit for interference/ground faults/etc) + FTTH ISP with router running on battery. Media converters and OM3 fiber (between router and computer) instead of an Ethernet cable. Even WiFi6 and WiFi6E can occasionally outperform interference-ridden Ethernet (in bad EMI regimes). Etc.

This may not solve your problem. Caveat emptor. But big clue is offline problems and UPS weirdnesses. Still more than a 50% chance it's just coincidental and not external electricity related. But focus on your offline glitching first before troubleshooting offline.

Too big a fog of possible causes, so temporarily eliminate the copper touching the world (unplug UPS from outlet to go offgrid, yank Ethernet), eliminate the power outlets, and test offline (to rule out Internet server weirdnesses for now), and work your way up.

[ImBIGJEFF]

The stuttering at the start of the game is still there with the UPS on battery and my PC offline.

Also, the UPS is going absolutely crazy when I'm in-game and it's on battery. The screen just rapidly flashes characters chaotically and it beeps every couple seconds, but doesnt report any errors in the software. I'm almost afraid to run it on battery again lol.

What I could probably try is running a custom game offline with RTSS running and document how prevalent frametime stutters are and compare that to with my PC connected to my home.

[loltakoo]

welcome to the world of those who don't have fun with games for these factors.

apparently it's the same case for me and other big threads here.

nothing related to electricity will help you for more than 2 weeks, people have tried business power generator and also a solar panel system.

what people are currently testing (on discord and via faster communication) are large toroid ferrites, t400-26, several of them in different places from the pc wires to the surge protector.

I haven't tested it, not enough time and patience yet to do it, but some old users of this problem have had good results as already 1 or 2 months of games working well and consistently.

This is the most up-to-date information on this, basically all possible variables about electricity have been tested, and the rest you already know, the basics like changing pcs, equipment and thousands of things.

gl