Product: EA SPORTS™ WRC
Platform:Steam-PC
Summarize your bug Still huge stutters, sometimes no frame generated
How often does the bug occur? Often (50% - 99%)
Steps: How can we find the bug ourselves? Check the engine, why stops the frame generation
What happens when the bug occurs? Just driving
What do you expect to see? No stutters
https://www.youtube.com/clip/UgkxiLEcYWbedg9Wks7y4eAhnZlgkevs8CSj
What can we see, is not a stutter, the game render stops for a while. If you check the bottom right, there is my sys monitor, the gpu runs fine on 2040MHz, 65-ish temp, 250-280W load, and suddenly the power drops below 160W, the temp is 53celsius, the load is about 28%, and there is a TEMP and POWER double warning, which is normal. Every time, the render suddenly stops, for example in any game push the esc and the render engine stops, the card should lower the voltage/frequency but this huge loss triggers the monitoring for a second. So actually there was no generated frame goes to the gpu, and suddenly drops power. this double alert always there at stage end of DR2.0 where the 144fps drops to 60fps in menu and suddenly not need much power
@DomiMaglod wrote:https://www.youtube.com/clip/UgkxiLEcYWbedg9Wks7y4eAhnZlgkevs8CSj
What can we see, is not a stutter, the game render stops for a while. If you check the bottom right, there is my sys monitor, the gpu runs fine on 2040MHz, 65-ish temp, 250-280W load, and suddenly the power drops below 160W, the temp is 53celsius, the load is about 28%, and there is a TEMP and POWER double warning, which is normal. Every time, the render suddenly stops, for example in any game push the esc and the render engine stops, the card should lower the voltage/frequency but this huge loss triggers the monitoring for a second. So actually there was no generated frame goes to the gpu, and suddenly drops power. this double alert always there at stage end of DR2.0 where the 144fps drops to 60fps in menu and suddenly not need much power
That looks more severe than the average shader stutter, possibly UE4's traversal / asset / level streaming stutter?
If it happens in the same exact spot that when playing the same stage, it's definitely from that. Even if it's not that in your example, pretty much every stage in the game has those replicable loading stutters. More of them on the longer stages, of course. There's really no way to get rid of it, unfortunately. One of the other major downsides of the Unreal Engine, and one that's not talked about enough. There are also microstutters which seem to be related to when crowds and dynamic objects up ahead pop-in and get loaded / rendered, but that's another issue.
These tile streaming stutters occur even in the replays in WRC, when you hit and rewind / scrub back far enough, it will happen again when play it back or fast forward and cross the invisible boundary on the level that triggers the load for the next map tile on the fly.
There's no way to eliminate those fully on our end, only they can rework how much the game streams in things on the fly, and maybe try to put it all into memory up front instead (presuming consoles and the average PC could have enough memory to handle that), but it's always been a major issue in Unreal.
Even with the fasted NVMe drive, even with all the RAM in the world and running UE4 games which exhibit this behavior via RAM Drive, those hitches will still happen. They'll be quicker and less severe if your storage is a faster SSD and your CPU+RAM is also fast, but will always incur a visible pause and loss of render like that.
