High ping and a lot of stuttering

turn off shaddowplay

Shadowplay is in the Nvidia App. If it's on, you would see it pop up when you start the game.

I don't think that's the issue. I'm having the same problems and I've always had Shadowplay off.

I have the game capped to 120FPS at 1440p with VRR and I still notice a lot of dips and hitches, particularly when interacting with barrels or other UI elements - which would, to me, suggest a streaming issue. But the game is only utilising 70% of VRAM, only about 25%-30% peak on CPU, (and the game is on a fast enough M.2 NVMe drive), so it shouldn't be having issues there.

I've already updated my drivers to the latest and the game supposedly re-ran the shader compilation step when I booted it afterwards. Though I wish there was a way to do a full PSO step manually.

I'm going to investigate (next time I manage to get time to play) whether lowering Stream DVR settings or switching on hardware acceleration for it helps.

After that, the inevitable next step is to go down to Direct3D 11, which apparently has less issues - but it's leaving a lot of performance on the table (I can get almost locked 120FPS on Port Merrick with D3D12, whereas D3D11 struggles to stay above 70FPS).

The high pings seem to be on a server by server basis, but Safer Seas (which I probably spend 20% of my time on when I just want to chill in the world) is worse for spikes than High Seas. This may be down to them not wanting to dedicate the better servers for that mode - which I can understand, but still kind of annoying. Base ping is much lower on Safer Seas though, so swings and roundabouts.

So, after testing for a few days, I've come to the conclusion that the stutter is a result of the Direct3D 12 not being optimised. For DirectX 12, including the Direct3D API, it's up to developers to optimise their games, including updates, and I don't think Rare have done that adequately in this case.

While Direct3D 11 doesn't have the same performance benefits and has a lot of framerate drops (I mentioned Port Merrick being an obvious example in my previous post), overall it's more stable and less prone to stuttering and crashing, it seems.

It's a shame because my PC (3070ti and 7700X) is more than capable of handling DX12 well, just not in this game.

So my recommendation for anyone experiencing a lot of stutter and instability is to switch to D3D11, even if your machine can handle 12.

@d3adst1ck said in High ping and a lot of stuttering:

@realstyli I don't know if that is the same issue that OP is experiencing. High ping + teleporting sounds a lot more like packet loss than localized video stutter.

Yeah, I read it as two separate issues and the stutter, from my experience, isn't always related to the online connectivity.

It's still worth a shot switching to D3D11 to see if that irons out some problems.

If it doesn't, then I would say it's the OP's internet that's the problem and I'd recommend they at least run a cable to their router rather than use WiFi, if they've not already done that.

The high pings are annoying but they seem to be dependent on the server health and are more common on Safer Seas.

The high pings are annoying but they seem to be dependent on the server health and are more common on Safer Seas.

Can def confirm rubberbanding is much more prevalent on SS. I'm like 65% there, 35% HS. Almost always at least a little bit of rubberbanding on SS, if not even some severe ones (getting tp-ed around, vendors lagging badly, unresponsive UI, and some other weird glitches).

I don't experience that at all on HS.

I can also confirm D3D11 being more stable on my end at least (and I'm AMD team, 16 GB 6900xt, 5700x3d, 32gb 3600 RAM, fast nvme disk). Def more (and some super specific) crashes in DX12 mode, even though generally better performance. Also, I more often get file corruption errors on DX12 than on DX11.

Also can confirm more occasional stutters (not shader related) when on DX12 - and doesn't matter if multithreading on or off.

Safer Seas (which I probably spend 20% of my time on when I just want to chill in the world) is worse for spikes than High Seas. This may be down to them not wanting to dedicate the better servers for that mode - which I can understand

My conclusion as well, absolutely agree 100% on this. Although, another reason may be just getting sent to servers that are more far away than the ones you'd usually be sent to if on HS. Who knows (Rare ofc, but yea)...