Re: Game randomly freezes for up to a second

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