PC and Consoles stuttering improvement feedback from a QA analyst
Greetings. I worked for a long time as a QA analyst, and did pretty much Digital Foundry level of analyzing on EA PGA Tour and wanted to give some feedback to EA if possible.
First, I would like to acknowledge that the game looks gorgeous no matter te platform. However, believe that some crucial improvement to performance needs to be made to have smoother gameplay.
I tested the game on PS5, XSX and PC (Ryzen 5 5600, RTX3070 32GBRAM), and found that the frametime is really bad on all 3 of them, even when 30FPS or 60 FPS is maintained and when system resources are not really used, meaning no evident hardware bottleneck. However, this is generally not a major issue.
The most pressing issue I think is the stuttering induced EVERY time the ball lands after the first drive, and every time during the first put on the green. This issue appears even when setting the game at 720P at lowest settings, meaning it's either CPU limited during that time or there is a function not being called fast enough (or something else in the game code causing this). This issue is clearly visible on all 3 platforms I testes, but is more visible at 60FPS on consoles and even more on PC.
I also think shader compiling on PC would be a big improvement to the overall smoothness of the game.
Please don't hesitate to reach out or let me know if you need aditionnal information. From what I could gather on all different forums, this issue is apparent across the board on all PC, but some people are less prone to noticing the stutter / hitching induced. This issue should be fairly easy to tackle and reproduce by the EA studio QA, as it is really obvious.
Thank you
EDIT: Found some info to make it easier to reproduce for QA:
When the ball lands on the green and you put instantly after (before the put read is done reading), there is NO stutter!
If you wait until the put reading is done, then there is stutter EVERY time!
This should make it easier to identify the issue!
EDIT 2: Not so sure about the previous finding concerning the put read. It still seems to happen 90% of the time regardless, but mostly on full play (not challenges). Augusta is a good example of it, it stutters about 98% of the puts there. I again tried at the lowest settings, 720P with internal resolution set to 80%, and no difference. It really is coming from the game code, and after trying a bunch of different Frosbite 3 commands as well, I think it is unfixable without an update from EA.