Forum Discussion

ttvHonk_69420Po's avatar
ttvHonk_69420Po
7 years ago

[PC] Constant microstutters every 3 seconds - driving me nuts

I am at a loss at this point and it is driving me absolutely mad that I can't figure it out. It appears to have started a couple weeks ago. In short, when I am in Apex (and this only happens in Apex), my frames will be pegged at 144fps, but every 4 seconds to the T, the game does this little microstutter. Audio, graphics, everything hitches for a fraction of a second. It's almost not noticeable if you are just running straight, but the second you get into a battle and drag your mouse a good distance, that tiny little hitch will throw my tracking off.

When tracking performance with MSI Afterburner, the one thing I noticed that was different from other games I would run (CSGO, RoE, etc...) is that my frametime would constantly be spiking to 40-50ms in very consistent patterns that pretty much matched the hitching. Other games average like 5ms. This is all the while my frames were pegged at 144fps with pretty much everything turned down to low.

CPU temps never get over 60C, GPU temps hover around 62C. CPU usage sat around 25-30%, GPU usage fluctuated as usual, normally between 50-80%.

I have tried just about everything I can think of at this point - lets go through some of what I have tried:

  • Run game completely on low/high

  • Disabled/uninstalled all overlays

  • Turned off Windows game bar

  • Disabled NVIDIA Shadowplay

  • Disabled full screen optimizations

  • Lowered polling rate on mouse to 500/125Mhz (I play at 500Mhz anyways)

  • Uninstalled/reinstalled ALL system drivers to latest manufacturer provided ones

  • Uninstalled/reinstalled numerous different versions of NVIDIA drivers

  • Updated Windows 10 to the latest optional patches each week.

  • Moved Apex to different drives - a mix of SSD and 7200RPM drives

  • Updated all third party peripheral software

  • Uninstalled all third party software and drivers

  • Underclock/overclocked the CPU

As a tech myself, it's driving me insane because I can't fix it. Again, this only happens in Apex and I'm thinking there is no fixing it. Oddly, the hitching has been mitigated by pushing my texture streaming budget to the max - seems to cut the severity of the hitch down a tad. If I lower it to like High, the hitching gets worse.

My system for reference:

  • ASUS Maximus IX Hero

  • Intel i7-7700k @ 4.5GHz

  • NVIDIA GTX 1080 FTW+

  • 2 x 8GB Corsair Vengeance RGB DDR4 2400

  • OCZ 256GB SSD + Samsung 860 EVO 512GB + Seagate 2TB 7200RPM

  • Corsair H100i v2 CPU Cooler

1 Reply

  • Rammonon's avatar
    Rammonon
    7 years ago

    Going through a similar issue, posted it here, Shameless plug:

    https://answers.ea.com/t5/Technical-Issues/PC-Apex-Legends-S3-Update-Frametime-Frame-skipping-Framerate-FPS/m-p/8289912#M53110

    Seems I've narrowed it down to CPU spikes on my i7 8700k, at least that's the most reasonable guess so far. I'm slowly doing more testing too see if there is a correction for the problem.

    If you think your CPU utilization is good. I'd suggest making sure your MSI Afterburner Monitoring is set to 100ms and the two updates rates for RivaTuner are also either st 100ms or 0ms. After doing that see if you can get MSI to log a monitoring history.

    If microstutters are happening that often you might be able to get a whole match done and see if you get sort of random spikes on CPU usage.

    The interesting part about this is the FPS, nor Frametime graphs or monitoring show it happening. No spikes on those just CPU usage.