The game has become impossible to play as it sttuters even on champion screem. I skip frames in fights. Cant even play arenas.I am on origin. I repaired the game with lastest nvidia drivers.Season 9 has been bad and this update made it even worse.I tried adding and remove frame rate limiter via launch paramters and its still terrible.My ConfigIntel i5-7300HQ Processor, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060, 8GB RAM.Please help

this is ridiculous. how does this bug always come back? i literally cannot run the game past the startup screen because my cpu and gpu instantly get pushed to 100%.No my hardware isnt broken at all, yes all my drivers are up to date, yes my pc is perfectly capable of running this game at max settings, yes apex is the only game where i have ever had this problem.ive tried everything, the best i can get is firing range with 10 seconds lag spikes constantly.

@EA_Illium Regardless of the FPS cap I choose, I keep on getting +90% CPU usage ever since this patch, causing the game to stutter and crash after character selection screen.I'm running on Windows 10 LTSC thro Steam, on a i7-2600k. I have not had these issues before this patch, I have streams that show this as proof. I'm not the only one experiencing this, even console players are experiencing worse performance. And not even that, the above 190fps bug that has been a thing since the launch of this game also wasn't fixed, even though the developers mentioned it should be.

This !@#$ again... Last time I fixed this by:1.) Uninstalling the game2.) Wait 3 months3.) Check forums for community provided solution4.) Game fixed.I'm so glad I don't pay for this game... I feel sorry for all the folks that have invested actual $$ into it and get this experience as a result..Stay strong salty my brothers and sisters... see you in 3 months.

@SpectreFang alright i haven't tried one thing out and it was changing the affinity of the game launchers themselves......so open origin/steamopen up task managerclick on origin/steam then click on go to detailsright click on origin/steamclick on affinityso here according to how many cpu cores you have you should uncheck <all proccessors> and then check cpu 0 and the highest cpu you have (mine was 7)i really hope it works for you guys too have a great day/night

Long post warning.Just like everyone else here, I've been investigating the CPU and stuttering issues with these last couple of seasons that never existed before with Apex. I've discovered several different things that Apex is doing now that it didn't do in the past seasons. Some are related to the CPU issues y'all are having and others are just other problems that are not directly related, but will pile up and make all your problems worse. I'll detail the issues below, but for just the CPU issue, the main problem is that Apex is not multithreading CPU evenly across all cores like it did in the past. I own my own IT Engineering business, so I treated this problem like any other problem customers pay us to fix.#1 CPU Issue:The high CPU issue mainly happens when you are capable of high FPS (+180) and you have a less powerful CPU whether that is less GHz or less than 8 cores. You should be able to run Apex fine like in the past, but what happens is that if you look at all your cores while running the game, you will see one core is at 100%. On my son's i9-9900KS, it is his 2nd core. All other cores are sleeping at less than 25%. He has a 2080ti, so easily does 240FPS, but if he looks at certain parts in the firing range, or during intense fights, that 2nd core goes from around 50% to 100%. When the core hits 100%, his FPS drops as low as 180+. As soon as the core goes below 100% (even like 95%), his FPS goes back to a solid 240FPS. Since the rest of his specs are also top of the line, he doesn't feel any stuttering in game. He has dual PC for streaming though, and every time that core hits 100%, his stream stutters. What I did to fix that is I set the affinity for the NDI ScreenCaptureHX software/process from "all cores" to "all cores except the 2nd core". Now the capture software on his gaming PC runs happily and doesn't get affected constantly every time the 2nd core hits 100%. People with high FPS GPUs, but lesser CPUs than a i9-9900KS will have higher than 50% usage on that one core, so in turn will more easily hit the 100%. With like a 4-6 core CPU, I would imagine your base would almost be 100% for that core and doing anything in the game would just blast it at 100% constantly which would dip it a lot more than the 180+ FPS minimum he gets. With lower FPS cards, your problem gets "better". My PC has a good 4/8 core CPU (i7-4790k) at 4GHz. If I had his 2080ti, my CPU would've melted down already because of the Apex CPU core issue. I could probably only get 100FPS out of the 2080ti, and the game would feel like crap. "Fortunately" or not, I have a GTX 760SC which only does about 75 FPS in Apex. This is not enough FPS to "stress" my less capable CPU versus his i9-9900KS, so the one core sits at around 70% max no matter what I do in game. My initial "band-aid" for his stuttering stream problem after discovering the non-optimized process was to limit his FPS to 144. That "worked" by keeping that 2nd core at a max of about 70%, but he did not like that because he could really "feel" the missing 100 FPS. The final band-aid of moving the capture software/process off of the 2nd "hot" core keeps it from stuttering the stream and keeps him happy at 240FPS. In summary, if you have a powerful CPU and a dinky GPU (less than 100FPS) like me, you probably won't have any issues. If you are backwards and have a powerful GPU (+200FPS), but a dinky CPU, the "Apex CPU Bug" will be bad for you. Unfortunately, since spreading processes across cores (multithreading) is handled by Windows depending on how the software/process tells it too, there is nothing we can do to fully solve the problem until Apex Dev correctly code Apex to fully or at least more evenly spread workload across all CPU cores. Once they do that, Windows will happily obey and spread it across all the cores it is allowed to. Obviously, in the last couple of seasons since around Genesis, Apex Dev has changed and messed up that part.#2 Memory Issue leading to disk usage:As I said initially, this is an unrelated issue, but if you also have this, then adding the CPU issue on top of it will be rough. What I discovered here is that when you load up Apex, it loads a huge amount of the game in system memory (not GPU memory) from your hard disk (see #3 also). On the different systems I tested, it always added up to about 6GB-7GB of memory. This is a lot more than what Apex used in the past. This is total committed memory and not just the working memory. To see this you need to use something like process explorer or even the built-in resource monitor. You will see that Apex usually uses 1GB-3GB of working memory (what you see when you just look at task manager). Since it actually commits/reserves 6GB-7GB, then everybody who only has 8GB in their PC gets screwed (I was one of them and upgraded to 16GB). It wasn't necessary before, but now is, bottom-line. When I just had 8GB of system memory, while digging into the CPU issue, I noticed that Windows was running the page file hard in the 2GB+ range, constantly swapping Apex data back and forth from my SSD to system memory since I was truly out of 8GB of memory. I couldn't believe it, but when I dug into the offending process, it was Apex. Then I saw how much Apex was reserving and it made all the numbers true. Obviously, programs and games have to load used parts into memory, but Apex looks like it loads EVERYTHING into memory at start. To not have this issue, move to 16GB. They might be doing this at Apex startup to avoid long read times from people who have mechanical/spinning hard disks versus SSDs. This would be an issue since you would still be reading map data and other things while already in the lobby and queuing into a match. Starting a match without having read all the data to system memory from your hard disk would suck. Your GPU would not have enough data yet to begin modeling your world.#3 Disk usage even with 16GB and up:As I started to explain in #2, Apex loads EVERYTHING to system memory when you first start the game. You need more than 8GB of system memory to be able to fit it all and not swap. The problem with reading those 4GB-5GB of data off your hard disk is that it takes time. We are not talking about some word document or even a 500MB video. From my testing, Apex takes about 1 minute on a good SSD at about 200MB/s. On a really fast PCIe SSD it takes about 30 seconds at around 400MB/s. I don't have a fast PC using an old spinning/mechanical hard disk, but they are so slow compared to an SSD, I could only guess it would take at least 4-5 minutes for Apex to finish loading all the behind the scenes data needed by the time you start a match. You can easily see this by starting Apex while having your Task Manager open on the first tab/processes. Sort by the disk column and you will see that the Apex process uses a huge amount of disk for a long time relative to the speed of your hard disk. If you still have an old spinning disk, you will suffer pain greatly. Upgrade to an SSD and avoid at least this #3 pain. There are several good SSDs out there, Intel, Samsung, Micron, etc., but even the cheapest $20, no name, flea market SSD is 20 times faster than your old tech spinning disk. Lifespan might be an issue with the cheap stuff, but for $50+ you can get a very reliable brand. An SSD will cut down the Apex loading time to 1 minute, which will make your Apex gaming experience so much better. Still loading Apex 4-5 minutes after start, and 2 minutes into your first match still will suck from a graphics, FPS, and lag point of view.Sorry for the long post, but I spent a lot of time diagnosing this CPU issue that never existed before in Apex and caught us all off guard. Along the way I discovered a few other things not directly related that will add to your headaches also. This is not an exhaustive list. Some people will have totally different types of issues if the health of their PC and/or Windows is not the best. If y'all are having issues similar to the ones I discovered, then raise your hand to Respawn so that they get pressured by this and continue to make these issues a Dev priority. I've seen some of the Dev things and they "supposedly" do have this as one of their action items they are working on. Not sure why it has been more than 2 months, but it is what it is. If you need help, reach out and I'll do what I can to get you band-aided meanwhile.

Stuttering issues after genesis update

921 Replies

SpectreFang
4 years ago
@SpectreFang Video of this happening

https://www.reddit.com/r/apexlegends/comments/oaqnxm/severe_stuttering_game_unplayable_please_help/
NuclideZ
4 years ago
Hello!

As the topic suggests, I'm having very frequent stuttering and freezing while playing Apex on my XBox One S. These freezes are extremely short in duration, maybe fractions of a second to a second at most, but are extremely disruptive to game play.

They cause disruptions in every way imaginable, but most annoying are the times where I go to shield swap, begin to move my cursor to the shield in the box, and then have a brief stutter that -- when it snaps back to real time -- has caused my cursor to overshoot the shield slot in the box. Other examples include moving to slide jump, only to briefly stutter just before hitting crouch which then causes me to act as if I simply let go of my joystick to stop running. These freezes happen approximately every 30 to 45 seconds, so they're often present in gunfights where the tiniest freeze is resulting in me getting fried or having my crosshairs overshoot/undershoot my target while trying to aim and track.

This has been happening for quite some time, but it has seemingly increased in frequency through the duration of Season 9. It is slowly starting to become unplayable for me.

Things I have tried / how my setup is configured:
Power cycling the XBox One S. Holding the power button until it turns off, waiting a few minutes, turning it back on again.

Uninstalling and reinstalling the game. It is installed to the internal hard drive and does not have anything else connected to it while playing (no external devices at all).

Refreshing/renewing the MAC address of the XBox.

I am hardwired to my router and I'm playing on 20ms pings to my nearest server. In-game I'm getting the usual amount of FPS with no alarming or concerning values on the performance tab.

I have NOT taken apart my XBox to give a deep clean (at least nothing more than the typical compressed air into all of the fans and vents). The unit is a few years old at this point and could very likely stand a deep clean, but with this problem not existing in any sort of capacity for any other games I play, I'm reluctant to do so out of fear of screwing up a process that may not produce any results.
If there are any suggestions that might help, I would definitely be willing to give them a try! This is happening more and more often, so it's becoming increasingly frustrating and I don't know what else to do at this point.

Thank you kindly in advance!
greensky25
4 years ago
I am having the same exact problem on xbox one s. I have tried the same troubleshoot steps along with making sure system is updated. I have also removed saved local game files, performed a hard reset, reinstalled profile..nothing is working and this only started after the season 9 update was installed. I have contacted EA tech support and they only provide Xbox articles from their site to make it appear it may be all on our end but this is a problem with the latest update,. I literally cannot not play the game and enjoy anymore and I have also noticed that when I chose certain characters it gets worse. I am being demolished because in the middle of a fight with anyone my character freezes making it appear I'm taken down immediately. I can't fight up close to anyone so I rely on sniping now just to try enjoy the game. I knew something was wrong after this update happen because even at the character select screen sometimes, it does not display the character you chose or even sometimes I can't chose anyone on my own. Sometimes people in my party name does not show in the character select screen at the bottom nor mines. In Duo's, I'm 90% alone because the game no longer matches me with a second player consistently. I am on the South Carolina data center. I believe there is problems with the update and they also should check their nearby server. I'm close to stop playing until they fix this..I'm hoping they see these problems and respond.
timekillerone
4 years ago
A weird trick that worked for me:

I went to the firing range. Stutters, 100% CPU. Then I alt tabbed to reddit to search for help. When I came back to the game, I was timed out. But after reentering the lobby 100% CPU usage was gone!
NuclideZ
4 years ago
@greensky25, Now that you mention it, I have been having LOTS of character select screens that are bugged. At seemingly random times, it either fails to display the names of the users at the bottom of the screen so I have no clue who's picking, or it fails to display the characters available to choose from (or both!). I've uploaded a screenshot example if anyone cares to see it. As mentioned, sometimes the characters don't display, either, leaving me with no clue what's happening at all!

EDIT: Was able to snag a clip of the completely blank select screen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiN3s81gLNU. I know it's in another post down below but I wanted to edit this one to keep everything in one place.
I also took some time to upload examples of the stuttering and freezing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFrum4UueIY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qciBtC-uZsQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPC9K7FdvZw. -- This one is particularly bad. It locks me up for what is around 2 full seconds despite playing the sliding sound the entire time. Not all of them are like this, and this is probably by far the worst I've had. However, one of this magnitude DID occur during a gunfight which caused me to miss the opportunity to capture it. This is only the second of its kind and I'm hoping it's not trending toward the normal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPugQAUPcF8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cgCuiKEGtI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aax-cVDfz84
NuclideZ
4 years ago
Was able to snag a clip of a completely blank character select screen. Yet again something else that seems to be happening more and more often: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiN3s81gLNU.
Tidinhah
4 years ago
Same here. CPU usage going to 100% after playing some matches and my computer literally shuts down because of that. Not risking burning my pc parts with this weird bug. Never happened before I could not imagine a single patch would make something so dangerous.
What if someone is unaware of their CPU usage and then their PC components get broken because of this game???
Taking a break until theres an official fix PUBLICLY addressed. Sad.
R0yMust4ng
4 years ago
This worked like a charm for me! Not for my cousin, but thx anyway!
felza127
4 years ago
I am experiencing this issue as well and have gone through 4 EA advisors with no help. Even with dropping affinity cpu count, the game is still impossible to play with FPS fluctuating between 20 and 60 with stutters and freezes still. This issue isn't even on the dev tracker that the advisor tagged and sent me, is this issue even being looked at?

Intel i7 6700HQ
GeForce GTX 1060 (2GB VRAM)
16gb RAM
HansBurgers
4 years ago
@Tidinhah Lmao you can’t fry your components by having them utilized 100%, this isn’t the 90s anymore. Still sucks though, but it won’t break your computer.

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Stuttering issues after genesis update

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