Re: Game randomly freezes for up to a second

Hi,

I've moved my documents folder to the SSD and disconnected every other storage device, including the HDD, the SSD is now the only storage device in the system. I've also disabled fullscreen optimisation for bfv.exe as recommended.

The issue still persists. I've noticed that it often occurs at a certain events, such as:

- an explosion going off

- zooming in / aiming

- the start of round timer reaching zero

- the bleedout completing

- jumping

However, the temporary freezing also occurs at random moments when nothing seems to be going on. It also doesn't always occur at any of the events above, it only seems to be more likely to occur on those events.

This leads me to believe that the issue is caused by too many things / events / whatever going on in one frame, or the game trying to load too many objects into the scene at once due to a quickly changing perspective. To verify this I've played a few rounds of squad conquest in which generally not much goes on because of the low player count and limited (if any) number of vehicles. In squad conquest the freezing rarely occurs. I've only played for a few rounds though, so this should not be taken as conclusive evidence.

I've also noticed that I get much more frequent than normal but smaller (40 - 70ms) frame time spikes when playing breakthrough on devastation. However, freezes of up to (and even once over) 1 second still occur on that map as well as other maps.

All of this may however be just by chance, as previously the frequency of these freezes varied quite a lot over time. Sometimes it would only happen twice in a round, sometimes ten to twenty times per minute.

I will try to reinstall the game with only the SSD attached, but doubt that this will have any effect. EDIT: I have now reinstalled it with only the SSD in the system so no files could have been installed on any other device, the problem remains the same.

Is there any way to prevent origin and Battlefield V from abusing my documents folder? I would very much like that to be moved back to the HDD and to use it exclusively to store documents. At the same time I also want all of the game's and origin's files to be on the SSD.

I'm not sure if this is helpful or even related, but I've also attached a file containing every crash I've had so far (since I started keeping track, that is). EDIT: updated crash collection as the game crashed once more.

Can you check out the solutions in these threads for me? 

• https://answers.ea.com/t5/Technical-Issues/FPS-and-Refresh-rate-warnings/m-p/7221635/highlight/true#M4190
• https://answers.ea.com/t5/Technical-Issues/Game-stuck-at-59hz/m-p/7274320/highlight/true#M5535
• https://answers.ea.com/t5/Technical-Issues/Is-there-a-way-to-set-frame-limiter-manually-console-command-BFV/m-p/7350807/highlight/true#M8241

Seems like others are having success after making some adjustments to a monitor's refresh rate or setting a limit for it in console.

I've applied the NVidia control panel settings as well as limited the framerate to 70 using the recommended command. This did not resolve the issue.

I was unable to set the refreshrate to 144Hz because I do not have a 144Hz monitor, and the problem described in that post is completely unrelated to mine.

The two other posts were related to bad framerates. My framerates are fine when the game runs normally, that is not the problem.

The problem is that the game either randomly or at certain events, as described previously, freezes for up to a full second. This is measurable in CPU time, not in GPU time (GPU time is very stable), so changing any graphics settings or messing with the monitor / graphics card is unlikely to resolve the issue.

I've also disabled anything origin related, which also did not resolve the problem. I'm pretty confident that this is not an issue caused by bloatware running in the background, as I haven't installed anything that runs in the background on this PC except for Steam and Origin. I've also disabled every windows service that is save to disable that I know of. On top of that, I would expect to see similar issues in other games if this was some sort of misconfiguration of the system and/or a starvation of the CPU. Opening taskmanager reveals 0.2% - 1% CPU usage with chrome open as the only application.

My connection is also stable and fast. I never get a ping above 12 ms unless I manually select a server from across the ocean. This is consistent with other multiplayer games. I've never seen my ping go outside the 8ms - 12 ms range through normal matchmaking. I have monitored the games network usage with taskmanager, which revealed that the game used at most 500kb/s of bandwidth, which is far below my maximum download or upload bandwidth.

My guess is that this is a performance bug in the game itself that occurs when too many things happen on the map in one frame, or something along those lines. This is somewhat consistent with my observations, although I can never be sure because some freezes that seem completely random may have been caused by something that happened on the map that was offscreen.

I've now tried turning off DXR and turning on the low latency preset again, so using the lowest of the lowest possible settings. This resulted is very high framerates and somewhat seemed to limit how often the game would freeze. This could be coincidence as the frequency of freezes varies a lot as described earlier. It could also be that with more frames per second the likelyhood of too many things going on in one frame is reduced, therefore reducing the chance of a freeze.

@arizakaa 

Thanks for the specific details. Any way you can try this to see if it fixes this for you? Even though the thread is related to crashing, I have a hunch it will help. 

"So after one hour roughly no crash... 

If this helps anyone, I've had to download Zotac Firestorm, to be able to remove the manufacturer's default OC. Went down to 1350Mhz (base clock)... I'll test some more, but seems good enough for everything in Ultra DXR and all... 

To EA CM : This is not normal, we shouldn't have to do all this..."

https://answers.ea.com/t5/Technical-Issues/Game-Keeps-Crashing-don-t-know-what-to-do-HELP/td-p/7164680/page/16

I've used aorus engine, which is the gigabyte variant of zotac firestorm (my card is from gigabyte), to set the boost clock equal to the base clock (1410MHz).

I also came across this post: https://answers.ea.com/t5/Technical-Issues/bf5-random-freezes-on-high-end-system/m-p/7319669/highlight/true#M7277

This describes the same problem, on nearly the same hardware with exception to the card being a RTX 2080 instead of RTX 2070. So it might be due to a faulty graphics card.

I don't know how I'm supposed to know if my graphics card has bad VRAM though. I've tried turning down the memory clockspeed of the GPU as far as possible, as was suggested in a video linked to by that post, but this together with setting a lower boost clock did not solve the problem. I'm not sure if this setting actually had any effect on the memory clock though, as according to GPU-Z it did not change at all, and is always at 7000MHz.

I've also noticed that whenever the game freezes, one CPU core has a sharp spike in usage (usually they're all around 60%) while the others have a sharp dip. I'm not sure what this means exactly. It is clear though that one thread in the game is doing something that the rest of the game has to wait on, but I don't know what. There is also a sharp dip in GPU load (usually around 90%) that can be observed through the GPU-Z utility. I should probably clarify at this point that I'm always running with VSync and FFR turned off, as I'm sure this has some effect on the GPU utilisation of the game.

I've switched to MSI Afterburner. Aorus engine, as it turns out, not only has the least responsive user interface since last time I used a windows XP machine, it also does not even work.

With MSI Afterburner I was able to turn down the memory clock by 502MHz, which could have fixed the random freezing if it was due to bad VRAM. This did not solve the problem however.

I've also tried turning down the memory clock together with underclocking the card so that its boost clock is equal to the normal base clock, but this also didn't help.

I have contacted NVidia's customer support just in case it is a graphics card problem after all, but since underclocking the card did not fix anything I highly doubt it is a graphics card stability issue. If this leads to anything useful I'll be sure to post it here as well. NVidia customer support did not turn out very useful, and reiterated that this is likely a issue with the game rather than the graphics card.

This once again makes me believe this problem is in fact a bug in the game. To summarize the symptoms are:

- Freezes up to one second, usually in the 100ms to 300ms range.

- High usage on one CPU core at the time of the freeze, low usage on the rest. Usually all cores are at 60% utilisation.

- Low graphics card load at the time of the freeze. It drops to about 50% whereas this is usually 94%. This and CPU usage characteristics where measured while running in windowed mode.

- Freezes seem to coincide with certain in-game events.

- The graph enabled through the PerfOverlay.DrawGraph command reveals a spike in CPU time equal to the length of the freeze, GPU time always remains stable an within reasonable bounds.

I might have overlooked this. Try turning off Origin Overlay. 

https://help.ea.com/en-us/help/origin/origin/how-to-use-origin-in-game/

Wow, I can't even get 100 FPS with DXR enabled. I get like 60 FPS, sigh. After removing 4 core CPU affinity, I am getting very playable frame rate higher than 60FPS on DXR low. I have the same problem. Only when DXR is enabled, I get random 1 second stutters. This freeze or stutter is game breaking. I died before because I had a stutter, and someone was shooting at me while I could do nothing. I have the RTX 2070. I disabled Origin in-game, and this still happens.

I was getting stutters every 20 seconds in DX11, but did not happen in other servers.

@groundedjet  

Are you getting this with Raytracing disabled?

With ray tracing disabled, this does not happen.

@EA_Blueberry 

I have disabled origin in-game, it didn't work. I've also tried turning off DXR, and switching to DX11, none of which solved the freezing / stutters.

@groundedjet 

100 FPS was with everything including DXR quality set to the lowest setting and at a 1680x1050 resolution, so it's not like I'm getting 100 FPS on high settings with DXR.

I use the ultra preset with DXR low at 1080p for 60 FPS. This is not satisfactory as you need an idle FPS higher than 60. I can't wait for DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sample) as that will increase your DXR frame rate even higher. Hype!

I was getting stutter every 20 seconds in one server in DX11 while it did not happen in other servers.

@EA_Blueberry (or just anyone from EA / DICE): is there any news on this issue? It's been two weeks since I've last heard from you, and the bug is still present in the latest update.

Is DICE aware of this issue? Is it being worked on? Is there anything I can try in the meantime? Any info on what I can do / what DICE is doing to make the game run smoothly would be highly appreciated.

I'm afraid there aren't any updates to share around this right now. Below you'll find the Quality of Life Commitment where you can see what issues are being prioritized going into the next update. 

Quality of Life Tracker

@AidanClaimon 

Can you attach a DxDiag? Thanks!

@Dystopique 

Can you post your DxDiag?

@EA_Blueberry 

My specifications:

Threadripper 1950X CPU
MSI X399 SLI Plus MB
16+GB Ripjaws V RAM @ 3000Mhz OC
EVGA RTX 2070

@EA_Blueberry @arizakaa 

There are stutters with DXR with BFV 4/30/2019 update.

This happens to me a lot of times when there's an explosion on screen. See here.

Plane explosion freeze

And here

Plane explosion freeze 2

Happens with tanks, c4.

Dx11 or dx12, Ray tracing on or off. Turned down post processing to low. Streaming or not, still happens.

i7 6700K

32GB Ram

2080 Ti

Installed on SSD

Really doesn't make sense to me. I don't remember this happening in my 1080 either