5 years ago
TS4 Stuttering
Hello there. After upgrading my G210 to a 1070, the game stutters like hell at ever given occasion. I tried clean driver install, game repair, game reinstalling, internet disabling, different graph...
@DanSherwind The clean boot plus shutting down all nonessential apps might still help if you pair it with everything else you've tried. Sometimes the strangest things can interfere with a game, for example an RGB program can lower performance by a significant amount for no apparent reason. MSI Afterburner also prevented Sims 4 from loading at all for a few months. So it's worth shutting down even a simple monitoring app just to see what happens.
If you don't get anywhere with that, you can try some more thorough hardware monitoring. Download hwinfo from here:
https://www.hwinfo.com/download/
You don't need to install anything if you don't want to; just choose the Portable version, unzip it, and launch it from Downloads or wherever you want. (If you would like to install, be sure to click the green button, not the orange one.) Restart your computer, and don't open any other apps. Launch hwinfo, choose "sensors only," and click the icon that's a sheet of paper with a + sign to start logging. Save the file to your desktop for easy access later.
Wait five minutes, then launch Sims 4 and play for at least 20 minutes. Click the same button to end logging. Then upload the log to a third-party free filehosting site and link it here. Please leave it in .csv format, or if you use OneDrive to share, please compress it in .zip format instead.
Turning off MSI and RivaTuner didn't help.
It crashed at the end, lol. My Sim went away for an audition.
HwInfo file: https://mega.nz/file/TUUhFaAZ#9xHFt4huh6YhSTVPnZfgzyLvTqMezqNYf9BvX5FhCMk
@DanSherwind There's a lot here worth commenting about, so I apologize in advance for the wall of text that's about to come at you.
First, the simple part: I can see in the log where the crash happened, and it was accompanied by a large spike, more than 4 GB, in virtual memory usage. Physical memory was steady until it dropped a few seconds later, as the game crashed. Unless you had another program running, that's Sims 4 reaching for an unreasonable amount of virtual memory, for some unknown (to me) reason. If you'd like to poke at this particular issue more, let me know. This might just be the game in all its messy glory though.
More urgently, your Toshiba drive is at 22% remaining life, and hwinfo picked up a drive warning and eight reallocated sectors during the run. (The log also contains a couple of values for that drive that should only increase as you're logging, but instead they reset to zero. I mention this because it's odd and a sign that something is not working properly with the drive.) This essentially means the drive is in danger of dying, although that could be months away. But it could also happen soon, so now is a good time to back up any essential data on that drive, and you probably want to start shopping for a replacement.
You could run chkdsk on the drive, which will flag and reallocate bad sectors, in addition to giving you an overall count so you get a better idea of what you're dealing with. However, at this stage, there's a small but nonzero chance that running the scan will cause further damage, so back up your essential data first. If you do decide to run it:
To the main point, that your computer's Sims 4 performance is far below where it should be: there's no other obvious reason why this would happen. Your processor and graphics card temperatures look fine, the power supply is fine, and I didn't see any other red flags. While the stuttering may be partly due to the game itself, it's clear that the GPU is actually being underutilized to a significant extent. It wasn't even running at its expected clock speed for most of the time you were playing. Hwinfo picked up your framerates, which were all over the place but clearly not capped, which would account for the low readings, so there's some other reason your card isn't working harder.
From the drive activity, it looks like you have the game installed on the Toshiba drive, which could in theory account for the problem, at least indirectly. However, I think the issue might be more about Sims 4 not being optimized for higher-end hardware. This is not to say that it always runs like this on faster graphics cards, and in fact I think this is the exception. But I've seen it happen before, and in the most recent case, running the game at a higher resolution increased the workload for the GPU to expected levels and made the game run somewhat better.
So if you're up for a bit of an experiment, there are a couple of settings to play with. First, open the Nvidia Control Panel's Program Settings tab, and for TS4_x64.exe, set Power management mode to "Prefer maximum performance" if it's not already using that setting. See how the game runs. You don't need to run another hwinfo log—your in-game fps (leave it uncapped) will let you know whether this makes any difference.
If that doesn't help, again in the Control Panel, under Global Settings, set DSR - Factors to 2.00x, or as close to that number as is offered. Then choose the highest in-game resolution available (it's with the other graphics settings). Please try playing like this, again with fps uncapped, and use hwinfo to log the session. This should at least clarify whether the low workload from Sims 4 is in fact contributing. Rendering four times the pixels should max out your card or come close.
If you want, you can try the lower DSR settings as well; perhaps the game would run better with a factor of 1.2 or 1.5. But I'd like to see what happens at 2x first.
So, I've tried everything and nothing changes.
I reinstalled the game on my other HDD and GPU utilization is still very low in the 30s.
I've tried DSR x4.00 and utilization only got up about 20-25%, so GPU was still at 50-60% at best.
@DanSherwind Have you tried this in a clean boot, with zero nonessential apps running? I realize you wouldn't be able to track GPU utilization or the other stats you're keeping an eye on, since you need an outside app for that, but it's still worth trying. You can use the fps on cheat and use the in-game framerates as a stand-in for GPU use.
About the clean boot: I know of one RGB app that tanked someone's GPU utilization in another game and also didn't get disabled in a clean boot. I'm not saying you specifically have this app or one exactly like it, but it's important to disable absolutely everything to be sure.