Does anyone have any advice for dealing with the Bethesda Stutter?

[Purr4me]

alright, so I've made what I think is a pretty significant discovery.

 

it seems it's not actually the static meshes that are causing the problems - but the materials. here's what lead me to believe that:

 

this time, instead of deleting the game's textures, I deleted the materials. when I load into the game, mostly everything is purple and blue. one of the first things I noticed was that distant buildings looked normal - they weren't blue or purple, they had their proper texture and appearance. now, when I move closer to them, their materials load in and they become purple like everything else. and this moment, when their materials load, is the precise moment the stutter occurs.

 

so, the stutter is occurring at the exact moment that materials are being loaded in. this doesn't necessarily mean that material loading is the root cause of the problem - but it does suggest it rather heavily.

 

now, another thing I noticed that supports this theory: objects that do not cause stutter when they're loaded, for example; trees, rocks, cars, various terrain decoration etc... all of these objects appear to be in a perpetual material state. Trees and rocks are all purple no matter how far away they are, cars are all normally textured no matter how close they are.

 

so this means that when I load the game, it basically just loads the materials for trees and rocks and leaves those materials either in RAM or VRAM, hence why it doesn't cause stutter.

 

 

So, this all suggests a few possibilities:

 

 

 

-There is an error causing the game not to load in building materials properly (I don't know, is the game supposed to cache all materials? or is my game performing this task normally, loading in the materials only when I get close?)

-For some reason, the game is unable to communicate with my SSD properly, causing large "pauses" each time it needs to access a large file from the disk

-There is something wrong with the material files themselves (unlikely, since reinstalling doesn't fix the issue.)

-The game is using a page file when it's supposed to be using RAM

-Windows is enforcing some kind of "idle state" on my disk, causing background loading to fail

-There is some kind of overhead somewhere, a "middle man" between the game and my SSD

 

 

I'm really lost as to what I should to do test any of these theories above.

ok..isolate logged in setups and test, you may not be aware of downloaded "qualifying data *.dll's" that come in to play.

 

I am wondering if your issue is tied into the current patched date? Bethesda , when logged into their system, will download hidden files during game run time and editing files for the ck as well, in both cases, steam is involved.

 

IF the current now nonfunctional game, requires these missing files? a missing file might cause the issues. What the video shown indicates are assets trying to load but can't or are trying to dump while in ram and can't.

 

But, there are many things that can cause stuttering issues.

 

so are you aware of these files?

[Purr4me]

please provide manufacturers specs for the ssd drive.

[BipolarOne]

It's just a theory. But I think that Bethesda put an auto frame rate control inside the application somewhere. Anything that conflicts with that will make the screen go to s*** randomly. You can get a smooth 24/25/30 FPS, but it will cause stutter sometimes. Incorrect Vsync settings will also cause stutter, namely the ones that don't agree with Fallout4.exe, which is probably all of them except letting the game do whatever the hell it wants to do. These tests and the process for an end user to get it running smooth is enough to make a sane person go mad. It's short term tests under a very specific, launch the game load the game condition, it's not a very good testing procedure. It's not very fun either.

 

Then in my experience unless you are really lucky, it means letting Bethesda handle it which means 40-60 FPS variable rate, but which doesn't stutter. FPS clamp was gone in this game, turned off, which means something else was added to handle what that used to do, there was a auto framerate high/low settings of 40/20. But no real way to tell what it is that it does. If FPS clamp is turned on without turning of whatever is handling it now, gravity will reverse an timescale speeds up which is fun to watch. The controls we have for frame rate are Vsync 0 1 2 basically, an they all suck except for 1 which is letting Bethesda handle it. But one would have to "let the 3D application decide" on a Nvidia profile to get it to work.

 

That's Intel & Nvidia PC builds as a starting point. There was one person that insisted on a steady 60 fps, but they had to lower settings & optimize in order to do that. We have a significant amount of players claiming the game is poorly optimized. We know that's what happens with licensed commercial tools and/or industry speed/habits/demands vs civilian community time/tools and open source. It could very well be that some author already did the work here, but we ignored it from lack of time and/or pride. If you ask me I say go psycho in a settlement, start a battle, see how tough it is, practice fighting, let it reload over an over. Blow off some steam and test that ish like that long term, stress, or go wild.

 

[Bruhmis]

 

ok..isolate logged in setups and test, you may not be aware of downloaded "qualifying data *.dll's" that come in to play.

 

I am wondering if your issue is tied into the current patched date? Bethesda , when logged into their system, will download hidden files during game run time and editing files for the ck as well, in both cases, steam is involved.

 

IF the current now nonfunctional game, requires these missing files? a missing file might cause the issues. What the video shown indicates are assets trying to load but can't or are trying to dump while in ram and can't.

 

But, there are many things that can cause stuttering issues.

 

so are you aware of these files?

 

I don't think so. when I ran the game outside of steam on an older game version, the problem was still there.

 

 

my SSD: http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820721107

[Purr4me]

reading the link reviews, they claim, other customers ,at least a few of them..say there are issues with windows 10 + there are issue with firmware updates from the manufacturer.

 

whether or not it applies to your situation, there is enough doubt posted there to draw a conclusion it's windows 10 and the device it's self.

 

" Thousands of small <20kb files? The thing crawled to a halt, sometimes doing less than 5KB/s, then ramping up to 200 or so KB/s and then back down again. My velociraptor beats the pants off this thing and it's 7+ years old!"

 

 

The only reason I side with the bad "cons" reviews is the reviews point to hardware faults that do fit this conversation.

So, what I'll do is just order one my sellf, the same exact model and just test it...though being differnt machine, the hardware based and OS based and game based issues will be pretty much the same.

 

I'll take a trip down to the local warehouse and see about picking up or place an order for a machine Identical of that which you own.

this I did find interesting too:

Pros: Fast, quick boot times, faster than advertised, just keep this in native ide in bios ahci lowers its read and write and sata is different for all boards )i got three pcs). Ran right out of thw bxf 8-10 stars what ive only had it 2 weeks I have to see if it holds up to time. good price. recommend OS on this and everything else on the gpt TB hard drive

 

 

Now Ido understand some of these so called reviews may be false, might be place by people not familiar with the tech or just kids.

But, you have mentioned a Bios Flashing event here, under direst of painstakingly attempting to solve an issue.

 

It does bring us back to windows 10 again. where one might look would be windows updates on your system, under hardware drivers / ?is there any device driver updates that might have been installed that are conflicting with this drives performances?

 

The issue has been also stated the problem started right after such an event...so, this all correlates.

The price of that drive is not even pocket change for me so I have ordered it.

 

Every week, I buy at least 2 Toshiba 32 and 64 gig white flash drives for my work as transportable storage. Label them for what they are used for, they replace habits of using floppy drives for business purposes and they are cheap.

 

It does point to a hardware issue vs. software issue.

Why this game with you is what shows up the issue? it can be NMM or windows version /signature controls. Reads and writes come into a questionable play here.

you have said the issue took place too on a standard hardware.

 

No wonder your perplexed.

[Bruhmis]

right now I'm benchmarking the SSD with crystaldiskmark. so far, the results don't look very good. I'm skeptical of the read/write speed being responsible for the stutter, though - since plenty of people play the game on mechanical hard drives. plus my loading times in the game are still always under 25 seconds.

still, if nothing else I might be able to speed up my SSD by changing the bios setting.

Edited October 27, 2016 by Bruhmis

[Purr4me]

1. Windows 10 introduced File signature integrity checks and balances, 10 forces strict policies now.
2. Bios flashing a drive with firmware programs can alter the Equation here. Should be done prior to installing an OS.
3. File signature for drivers may be whats wrong, windows 10 can alter the software if it is found not signed. Gets disabled.
4. 3 pieces of the code have to work in together.
5. Bios, Firmware ,signature licensed Driver code for all.
6. Process of events "what took place and when" in what order.

All of that can seem very intimidating too. It's a lot to consider. It takes very little to foul up things.

windows 10 is not as robust as past operating systems.

 

Fallout 4 ...lol, what a ginormous mess this game has become. But that glitch is real, I have not seen it except with bad mods.

Controlled Environments must be set, and ran. Steam is limited to a data base Image and it controls only the files seen in that image.

 

An issue seen, thought to have been tricked and seemed to have gone comes back under both circumstances points to the OS and or steam.

 

read and writes control the data. software controls where and when read and writes occur.

"Policies"

 

A test:

1. create a new partition on the drive, for mat the partition, make it active.
2. install windows 7 64 bit and fully update it, make sure all .net software is installed from 2.0 and onward's to 6.5
3. DO not reinstall steam, directly run steam from it's current location in windows 7 and allow steam to update it's self.
4. reboot back into 10, stabilize and wait, reboot back into the new system 7
5. run steam, run the game. watch how the game will access the graphics driver changes, know that a new system will cause this to take place,
6. Note graphics driver changes and Note the versions provided = may need to update the graphics drivers On 7.
7. make sure windows 7's updates and remote desktop addmin controls are disabled prior to connecting to the internet.
8. post results.

[Bruhmis]

well, here's what I've found with the SSD:

according to the benchmarks, my read/write speeds are pretty shitty in AHCI, and even shittier in Native IDE. the game still has the same stutter in Native IDE.

it's strange, because at no point have I ever felt that my SSD is underperforming. windows boots in about 15-30 seconds and like I said, any game I put on the SSD still loads almost instantly.

I was actually considering making a new partition and installing windows 10 on that to see what happens. the only problem is I don't have enough space on the SSD to do that, so I'd have to do it on the HDD.

can you explain what you mean by "note graphics driver changes and note versions provided"?

[Purr4me]

Registry : each system talks to the games verify *'dll and config files on boot Game boot. If the new OS has no registry keys for games graphic settings, it will then cause the game to reset it's config files.

 

a raw install will have only a standard graphic VGA driver provided by Microsoft.

[Bruhmis]

so you're saying that I should install nvidia drivers before I test the game? or that I shouldn't.