Jump to content
  • 0

Stuttering

LukeLattimer

Asked by LukeLattimer,

 Share

Question

LukeLattimer

LukeLattimer

Posted
Posted

Dear community

I have a serious stutter problem in pz. The game stutters from time to time. Mostly when im running around outside. I tried all settings changes and turning details, lightning updates etc. down. Nothing works. Here are my specs

2x Gigabyte Gtx 980 (I just use one for pz)

I7 4770k @ 4,5Ghz

8 Gigs of RAM

I really hope you can help me because its pretty much the best game out there :)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

24 answers to this question

Recommended Posts

Marinus

Marinus

Posted
Posted

Same here. Sort of. My computer is fairly old, and I never got a spectacular amount of FPS with PZ, but it ran at least somewhat smooth all the time consistently between 15-30 FPS. But lately I experienced stuttering and even 1 second freezes. However I did update java and the graphic card drivers and in the latest play-through the game ran as it used to. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites
EnigmaGrey

EnigmaGrey

Posted
Posted

Just to save you some time in the future, Marinus: The game uses its own version of Java, shipped with it. Unless you modify the game's files directly, it'll use that version. There's no (easy) way to update the version of Java included with it.

What's your graphics card and driver version? (you can get both this from running dxdiag.exe from the Start menu.) If it's related to a recent driver update and a specific set up hardware, it'd be great to know.

You can also try running the game through the ProjectZomboid64.bat to see if there's any difference.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Marinus

Marinus

Posted
Posted

Nvidea GeForce GT 440

 

I updated the drivers two days ago, so it should be up to date

 

The CPU is a Intel2 QuadCore 2,4 Ghz

And then there's 4 Gb RAM

 

The problem didn't return, however my latest play-through happened in North Muldraugh which is prob. easier on the system than downtown WP.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
EreWeGo

EreWeGo

Posted
Posted

As I wrote in some other threads, I have a small freeze after X seconds of playing.

It started from build 30.10 (I think, or 30.9) , but I remember a similar problem with build 28.x when visiting the mall; however in that case reducing player models setting helped a bit (but didn't solve completely the problem).

In this case I am not sure what setting I am supposed to change, I tried a lot of different settings with no significant changes.

Sounds very similar to my experience with the recent builds. My system:

AMD Athlon II X4 630, 2.80 GHz

8Gb Ram

Nvidia GForce GTS 250 1Gb, driver version: 340.52 (latest)

 

I vaguely remember a similar issue that happened to many users quite a while ago, I think that was to do with the "garbage collection" code, and was resolved. Not sure if this is a similar issue or not, but it can make the game a little unplayable at times, (and can nearly get you killed when you have one of those "micro-pauses" when in combat).

 

Might try messing with the settings again and see if I can get any improvement...

:)

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Svarog

Svarog

Posted
Posted

This is strange, I never experienced any stuttering and PZ runs at stable 55-60FPS, everything maxed out. And my PC is very budget.

Intel Pentium G2030 2x3Ghz
Integrated Intel HD Graphics <--- Yup It handles everything maxed out at 60FPS
4GB DDR3 RAM --- Only about 3GB MAX can be used by anything at any time.
Ancient (5+ years of use) HDD with occasional read issues.

That said, I don't think the problem is in hardware.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
KyousukeAzai

KyousukeAzai

Posted
Posted

Having actually encountered the problem myself and finally losing my mind about my FPS being ruined today, I decided to storm the forums about it, I see I'm not the only one...now I'm a quite a digger and a tinkerer having a system where anything in it, is customized by yours truly in some way for max performance. To sum up the issue: Every so often framerate drops/stutters from 60 to mid 50ish, on the last build 30.12 that is, I was using 30.10 till yesterday with no issues at all.

Now I was running several monitoring programs while playing to see if it was hardware related as well(Everest and afterburner), nothing ever maxed out on my system, which is slightly above average at best, so there were plenty of resources for the game to breathe in.

 

Tested on:

Phenom II 960T 3.6ghz OC

GTX 680 20% OC and even an older GTX 550ti 15% OC with FPS being really dead same, and either of the GPUs were practically asleep never going above 20% usage at any point in time with latest drivers of course for each of them

DDR3, Corsair, 2133mhz 2x4GB

 

So I think I can safely assume that no matter how good of a computer you might have it has to game-related issue only, my best guess would have to be the lighting freaking out every now and again, since when I was in the woods the problem rarely ever appeared, but the moment I got into housing areas, it happened every minute or so, I could replicate it by simply running from one edge of town to another and it would drop from 60 fps to about 50-55 for a second or so, but never in the same spot. Also I have started noticing strange artifacting, messed up lights every now and again(as in completely black spots outside during the day for no reason at all)

 

Also, it being java and having played a ton of minecraft, I also know the games running on java like to run out of memory every so often and as expected so does PZ, my PC does drop framerate when fully zoomed out on max resolution to about 40-50 in town, when freshly started, after 2 hours of playing or so, I got back to the same spot and the framerate hovered significantly lower in the same setting, around 25-29 then, so maybe allowing it to use a bit more could fix the issue? But that's just me guessing...

 

Now again, there is no complaint from me, I'm just giving feedback as someone who enjoys the game a great deal, alpha is alpha after all. Haven't tried it but a temporary solution for everyone who would get iffy about the frame rate, try to lock your framerate lower (45 fps), maybe that might circumvent it for the time being.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
EnigmaGrey

EnigmaGrey

Posted
Posted

Framerate dropping 10 points probably isn't going to be something that'll ever be totally solved; Java's garbage collector is quite the fiend.

Feel free to try this by modifying a bat file, but it might it better . . .or worse:

".\jre\bin\java.exe" -Xmn600m -Xmx1G -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC -Djava.library.path=./ -cp lwjgl.jar;lwjgl_util.jar;DJNativeSwing.jar;DJNativeSwing-AWT.jar;trove-3.0.3.jar;uncommons-maths-1.2.3.jar;./ -XX:+PrintGCDetails -XX:+PrintGCTimeStamps -Xloggc:./ProjectZomboidGCLogging.txt zombie.gameStates.MainScreenStatePAUSE

On my  i5 4670k, once fully zoomed out at 1980x, the camera's movement does present a stutter (you can actually see this in ManBearPig's youtube videos). But a lower resolution or just being zoomed in very slightly fixes it.

It's just one kind of stutter, unfortunately: http://steamcommunity.com/app/108600/discussions/1/620702121703700259/#c616198623975261829

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Ryvaeus

Ryvaeus

Posted
Posted

Dear community

I have a serious stutter problem in pz. The game stutters from time to time. Mostly when im running around outside. I tried all settings changes and turning details, lightning updates etc. down. Nothing works. Here are my specs

2x Gigabyte Gtx 980 (I just use one for pz)

I7 4770k @ 4,5Ghz

8 Gigs of RAM

I really hope you can help me because its pretty much the best game out there :)

 

I have the exact same problem and I'm on a computer that runs high detail games perfectly fine.

 

Same here. Sort of. My computer is fairly old, and I never got a spectacular amount of FPS with PZ, but it ran at least somewhat smooth all the time consistently between 15-30 FPS. But lately I experienced stuttering and even 1 second freezes. However I did update java and the graphic card drivers and in the latest play-through the game ran as it used to. 

 

 

What's your hard drive? Next time you run the game, could you please do this:

  1. Set Project Zomboid to windowed mode
  2. Open up Task Manager, click "More Details" at the bottom, and go to the "Performance" tab
  3. Keep an eye on the disk usage of whichever hard drive your PZ savegame data folder is (By default, it's C:/Users/<username/Zomboid)
  4. See if the disk usage approaches 100% at the same time the stuttering happens in PZ

jIUjPek.png

 

I used to have stuttering lag on my very capable gaming machine. It turns out there's a problem with my hard drive (see my thread here). Creating a symlink to the Zomboid folder moved to my SSD instead fixed the problem, though this is only temporary until I replace my hard drive.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Talksintext

Talksintext

Posted
Posted

I'm getting constant stuttering too, and it seems related to zombie count. The more, the less merrier. It's not minor micro stutters either, but half second frames and the like, every few seconds when running outside. I'm guessing this has to do with chunk management or some such.

i5 3350p 3.3ghz

650 ti boost 2gb

8gb 1600mhz cl8

120gb SSD

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Jab

Jab

Posted
Posted

Framerate dropping 10 points probably isn't going to be something that'll ever be totally solved; Java's garbage collector is quite the fiend.

Feel free to try this by modifying a bat file, but it might it better . . .or worse:

".\jre\bin\java.exe" -Xmn600m -Xmx1G -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC -Djava.library.path=./ -cp lwjgl.jar;lwjgl_util.jar;DJNativeSwing.jar;DJNativeSwing-AWT.jar;trove-3.0.3.jar;uncommons-maths-1.2.3.jar;./ -XX:+PrintGCDetails -XX:+PrintGCTimeStamps -Xloggc:./ProjectZomboidGCLogging.txt zombie.gameStates.MainScreenStatePAUSE

On my  i5 4670k, once fully zoomed out at 1980x, the camera's movement does present a stutter (you can actually see this in ManBearPig's youtube videos). But a lower resolution or just being zoomed in very slightly fixes it.

It's just one kind of stutter, unfortunately: http://steamcommunity.com/app/108600/discussions/1/620702121703700259/#c616198623975261829

 

It isn't entirely Java's fault. If it wasn't for Java's automatic garbage collection system, You'd have to do it yourself, although that isn't a terrible idea (If java ever got that option anyway). Part of it is due to Java wanting to be easy to use, and another part of it is platform independence. (Also noting Java cannot de-allocate memory until the process terminates, due to platform independency for processors that do not have a call to de-allocate memory.) 

 

That double-edged sword aside, It could be due to the game's draw calls, as I noted the game uses LWJGL for OpenGL. There could be some rough spots for draw calls / functions. I don't think it would be in the 3D portion. It could possibly be due to drawing the map itself. From my own experiences with optimizing java draws as much as I can, I learned that 2D drawing is a pain if you have so many items to draw. 

 

I would suggest possibly caching draw calls for each chunk for certain layers of static-objects. Compiling to a image might consume some memory, and it depends on how big the draw is and the call takes to execute and return. I'm wondering if the game attempts to try caching or some other form of memory storage technique to lighten the weight and time of the OpenGL draw methods. It could also come down to the way the game's physics engine works asynchronous with the graphics engine as far as updating and graphics projection goes. 

 

Also consider Object hotspots. Those are a bastard to deal with. Render engines try to steer as far away from object hotspots as possible when coding in a OOP language, especially Java. It could possibly boil down to all the stackframes and GOTO RETURN in the JVM causing some backup for the render methods because of this. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites
EnigmaGrey

EnigmaGrey

Posted
Posted

More desperation than based on sound reasoning regarding Java's garbage collector and heap size, Jab. :D It's not unlike the 64-bit vs. 32-bit conversations that invariably crop up: though I can't reproduce any performance improvements, others say they're there. Anyway, this is a bit moot now: Tim's recent changes to IWBUMS seems to help.

They'd have to use a custom JVM (they do exist) that'd allow them to handle garbage collection themselves, unfortunately. Part of the problem is likely just that the game wasn't built with Java's unique GC(s) in mind when the project started.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Jab

Jab

Posted
Posted

More desperation than based on sound reasoning regarding Java's garbage collector and heap size, Jab. :D It's not unlike the 64-bit vs. 32-bit conversations that invariably crop up: though I can't reproduce any performance improvements, others say they're there. Anyway, this is a bit moot now: Tim's recent changes to IWBUMS seems to help.

They'd have to use a custom JVM (they do exist) that'd allow them to handle garbage collection themselves, unfortunately. Part of the problem is likely just that the game wasn't built with Java's unique GC(s) in mind when the project started.

 

It's no doubt an interesting problem. You guys chose well when choosing Java, because of Java's goal to be platform independent. 

 

Maybe doing a JNI for the render code could be a possibility.

 

There are also techniques which can be applied to work with the Garbage Collecter in a way that allows it to do it's job better. One way is to define object names outside of loops before declaring an object while inside a loop. I've moved repetitive objects to call to a private field. I noticed a slight difference with memory usage when dealing with very intensive operations. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Talksintext

Talksintext

Posted
Posted

Just want to make sure: do you have 3D models off and have you pressed save after making that change, TalksInText?

i just have the player as a model, and visually I can confirm that none of the zombies are 3d. I prefer this actually, so I wouldn't go to 3d even though my machine can handle t.

Edit: I turned off 3d corpses and turned down lighting update, and the issue seems to have been resolved. I had noticed it got a lot worse as the game dragged on past one or two weeks. Might've been all the dead bodies.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
 Share
Go to question listing
×
×
  • Create New...