Destiny 2, is Gsync the cause of stuttering over time?

Talk about NVIDIA G-SYNC, a variable refresh rate (VRR) technology. G-SYNC eliminates stutters, tearing, and reduces input lag. List of G-SYNC Monitors.
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fluidz
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Destiny 2, is Gsync the cause of stuttering over time?

Post by fluidz » 29 Jun 2018, 07:17

Does anyone here play Destiny 2?

My 60hz, non Gsync monitor plays Destiny fine, hours on end. When I say fine, I mean, a smooth experience even though its at 60hz max.

However, my 144hz Acer xb271hu is fine for about 10 minutes in Destiny, then there's lots of micro stutter, even when the fps counter reads 100fps+.

Ive tried Gsync + Vsync Nvidia control panel, capped and no capped fps in Destinys options.
I've tried Gsync + Vsync off in both Nvidia control panel and in Destiny.

Only difference being one is a high refresh rate Gsync monitor, the other isnt.

Same pc hardware, drivers.

I also owned an Acer x34a, which was Gsync, and ran at 85hz. The same thing happened with that screen. I actually thought the monitor was faulty and sent it back. Now I've this Acer xb271hu I see the x34 wasn't solely the problem.

The thing is, Once I plug in my 60hz 8 year old monitor, and turn on Vsync, no microstutter, I enjoy the game for hours on end.

These Microstutters happen when I'm doing public events, after 2 or so events its a judder fest. Googling around all I see is people saying its a memory leak with not much mention of what I've said here.

To give an example of how it looks. When you select 144hz and move your mouse on the desktop, that smooth motion you see, thats how Destiny 2 is to begin with, even in the menu, its very smooth. After 10 minutes or so, that mouse cursor looks like its bouncing back and forth from 144 to 60 within milliseconds, over and over, the screen appears to wobble slightly as if the game forgets it has produced a frame and repeats it, and the mouse cursor/game appears to be running at a much lower framerate than displayed.

Can anybody relate? Thanks.

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RealNC
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Re: Destiny 2, is Gsync the cause of stuttering over time?

Post by RealNC » 29 Jun 2018, 09:11

Sounds like the game has frame pacing issues. Have you tried a 60FPS cap? That is, run the monitor at 165Hz (or 144Hz if you don't use the 165Hz option) but set the frame limiter to 60FPS. See what happens.

Also, try disabling the game's frame limiter and instead use RTSS to cap the framerate. Does that improve anything?

But to answer your question: gsync is not the cause of stuttering over time, unless the game itself is incompatible with gsync. That is very rare though. What happens if you just disable gsync completely? Does the game have the same issue then?
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sfbb2
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Re: Destiny 2, is Gsync the cause of stuttering over time?

Post by sfbb2 » 01 Jul 2018, 10:58

I was having a terrible time with Destiny 2 if I ran it in windowed mode g-sync. If that is what you are doing here are my best-results settings:

Driver version 390.65
In-Game: disable FPS cap, disable v-sync, windowed fullscreen
NVIDIA Inspector: Frame Rate Limiter 141 fps, Limiter V2 - Allow All

fluidz
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Re: Destiny 2, is Gsync the cause of stuttering over time?

Post by fluidz » 01 Jul 2018, 11:06

Thank you both for your replies and suggestions.

I tried turning both Gsync and vsync off, yet the same problem with stuttering still occurred with the refresh rate fluctuating around at 60 - 120, so this rules out Gsync as the cause. I have been playing with the game set to fullscreen, not borderless/windowed. I will try the other suggestions such as capping at 60hz and using Nvidia Inspector to frame limit v2 and see how I get on.

I've found quite a few people have complained about this issue yet not much response from Bungie on the matter other than to file dxdiag reports.

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Re: Destiny 2, is Gsync the cause of stuttering over time?

Post by jorimt » 02 Jul 2018, 08:28

^ Sounds like plain old frametime spikes caused by regular background asset loading, along with server-side network activity to me.

This sort of thing is much more noticeable at higher framerates + refresh rates, as a plummet from 100+ FPS to sub-30 FPS during spikes is going to be a lot more noticeable than a plummet from 60 FPS to sub-30 FPS.

It's the same reason frametime spikes are much less noticeable on console versions of games that are running at 30 (and often sub 30) FPS when compared to their PC counterparts running at a much higher framerate; the higher the average framerate + refresh rate, the more obvious the drops are when they occur.

It probably doesn't help that while Destiny 2 does run "uncapped" on PC (200 FPS max), the engine was still likely optimized (or at least, more optimized) for a max of 60 FPS.
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open
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Re: Destiny 2, is Gsync the cause of stuttering over time?

Post by open » 04 Jul 2018, 01:05

I havent played it in a long time but when it came out it had really bad issues with stuttering like you talk about. where public events and playing for extended periods would cause framerate to suck. The only solution was to restart the game every half hour or so. They fixed it with a patch then messed it up again with the next patch then i quit playing.

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Re: Destiny 2, is Gsync the cause of stuttering over time?

Post by sharknice » 13 Jul 2018, 10:07

You can edit a Destiny 2 config file to set the cap to any value. Use that to set it just under your maximum refresh rate. RTSS or any other external tools seem to cause problems. Make sure you're running in true fullscreen.

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