Community ManagerI tested this with the 3 most recent NVIDIA drivers (making sure to allow for any supposed shader compilation work to take place) mostly because they've all been perfectly stable for me, and I wanted to rule them out as a possible cause. I also tested the game at every single graphics settings "Grouping", meaning low, medium, high etc, and in windowed mode, borderless fullscreen, and fullscreen. I also tested having my Shader Cache size set to default, and unlimited in NCP, just to see if that made any difference.
My results didn't differ, regardless of which driver I used. The stuttering was also present regardless of the graphics settings, though it does seem to be location related. Running in Sweden I saw very minor stutter, unless I hit something solid, and then there's a spike in CPU usage, and a massive frame drop to the high teens. Running in Mexico saw massive frame rate and frame time spikes, regardless of speed, or impacts with solid objects.
Testing the difference between borderless, fullscreen etc yielded no notable improvement. Obviously borderless fullscreen, and fullscreen do seem to suffer less than windowed mode, though that shouldn't be a surprise. The final thing I tried was to open up NVIDIA Control Panel, and in the "Manage 3D Settings" menu, go down to "Shader Cache Size" and set if from the default to "Unlimited". I did this at the direction of someone on the EA forums, and though I cannot be certain, this did seem to alleviate some of the worst stuttering, regardless of location.
All-in-all it seems as though this patch did very little beyond possibly fixing some of the minor issues the game has. Codemasters need to do a thorough assessment of the Shader Compilation issue, and put out an ACTUAL fix, not whatever it is they claimed was a fix. The CPU usage issue would also seem to me to be an issue of serious importance, given that it very clearly has an impact whenever there's a collision for the physics engine to process.
I've given them more leeway here than I would give almost any other studio, not because I'm a fanboy, but because this is the first time Codemasters have tried making a game like this in Unreal Engine, and coupled with the apparent loss of a large number of the original Dirt series developers during the EA buyout, there are bound to be issues. I sincerely hope, however, that these issues are short-lived.
System specs.
R7 5800X
RTX 4070 Ti
32GB DDR4 4000
X570 Aorus Master
WD Blue 1TB NVMe SSD for games
All hardware at stock speeds, no over-volting, all drivers and OS are up-to-date and stable.
