Stuttering issues - discussion & suggestions

Are you saying you were able to cure the time-scale/shadows associated stutter without having to disable either time-scale or shadows but instead just remove then re-add that d3d9.dll file?

 

I just got the game and got stuttering on some tracks. Imola was one of them.
(When i drive out from pits I could see the crowd stuttering while passing, annoying)

Wheel: on/off same thing. Change time of day, same thing (skies).
Only when racing (cockpit). Replay works flawless, strangley!

I followed the guide on graphics settings on Steam Guide for the game. Not the Nvidia inspector just the Nvidia control panel settings. After this no more stuttering on any track. Have no clue what settings exacly that fixed it though.

Maybe can give some racer out there some help.
Link to the settings (pic no2 i did)
Steam Community :: Guide :: Automobilista: AA & graphics

(Intel i7-5930K / 1080ti @ 4K res / Win10/64).

 

No in both cases time scale set to 'none' worked for me, d3d9.dll seemed to have no effect.

I haven't had a chance to check since the most recent update. Hopefully I will be able to reinstate the timescale.

 

Ya, time-scale set to none or shadows off (either or) should cure the problem completely. It's what I described over a few posts on the first page of this thread.

 

Hey spin, could u try something please (currently away from my pc)?
Fps limit @ 131/120/119, monitor refresh rate @ 120,
Sky Update Frames="120" / "7200"
Shadow Updates="60" / "1"

 

Bump

 

Sure. I will in the next couple days or so.

 

Thx! Appreciated

 

I'm one of those people who thought AMS running on a, ahem, 'mature' gfx engine was an invitation to turn everything up to max, and then suffered the indignity of constant stuttering on an i5/gtx970, regardless of antialiasing settings. At least on my system it's the game's shadow handling that is the culprit. Perhaps some of the below info will be useful to you.

Shadow considerations:

Spoiler

Dynamic shadows are an important component of visual immersion, but asking too much of AMS shadows stresses the CPU (I suspect) / GPU and causes significant stuttering. This is exacerbated during replays, which already ask more of the engine in terms of showing more cars, textures and scenery. The settings which impact on shadows and hence performance are:

Shadow quality
The biggest culprit is max shadows. Max shadows allows objects to shadow other objects rather than just the ground. In particular trees and bridges will cast shadows on passing cars and your cockpit. It looks fantastic and immersive, but can cause massive stuttering, particularly in replays when multiple cars pass into morning/afternoon shadows on tree lined tracks such as Oulton or Cadwell. Dropping this setting to high will alleviate much of the stuttering problem, at the cost of immersive vehicle shadowing.

Shadow blur
Softens the edges of shadows, to a largely unnoticeable degree, but at the cost of extra work for the engine. Setting shadow blur to off will give a performance boost with almost no noticeable quality loss.

Circuit objects
Low and medium significantly reduce the number of trackside objects which can potentially cast shadows, and also reduces the ability of those objects to actually cast shadows. At low/medium settings trees in particular no longer cast dynamic shadows across the track. This can significantly improve performance but again comes with a massive immersion hit, especially on tree lined tracks. High restores tree shadow casting, full adds 3D grass.

Time scaling
Many people report stuttering when time scaling is set to anything other than off, even in cockpit view. As far as I can tell this is also related to shadows, because time scaling causes dynamic shadows to be recalculated for every visible shadow casting object every second or thereabouts. If there are a lot of shadows, and particularly if shadows are set to max so that the shadowing of other objects has to be recalculated, then this causes a frame rate dip. This is a shame since AMS has a full 24 hour lighting cycle and you miss some spectacular lighting transitions if time scaling is disabled.

So at present, unless you run a very beefy system (I don't) you have to decide whether the visual immersion of proper dynamic shadows is more important than the silky smooth performance you'd think the old gmotor engine should provide. You'll need to determine which scenario best applies to you:

If you run max circuit objects, max shadows and time scaling, then expect some degree of stuttering, particularly on tree lined areas, pit lane, and any time there are lots of cars present.

If you drop circuit objects to med then you may get away with max shadows and time scaling. As a bonus if you drop circuit objects to low, you remove the abominable mannequin spectators too . You'll get cockpit and car shadowing from bridges etc, but sylvan circuits won't get that shade dappled look

If you drop shadows to high you may get away with max circuit objects and time scaling. But you won't see your cockpit and other cars being shadowed by bridges and buildings. Most of the time I just go with this setting now.

If you turn off time scaling then you may get away with max shadows and max circuit objects, but in cockpit view only. Replays will stutter with lots of shadows and/or cars. And you miss the lovely lighting transitions.

Judicious shadow wrangling can eliminate a lot of stuttering, but some framerate dips are part and parcel of all racing sims, dependent on track density, car polys and textures, physics and ffb vagaries, other processes on your computer etc etc.

I'm very keen to see AMS's superb core racing mechanics grafted onto a more modern gfx engine that better handles high dynamic range lighting in general and dynamic shadowing in particular, without excessive stuttering detracting from the experience.

 

time scale is very random tho, happens to some and not to others, never had any issue with it but found some guys (with PCs faster than mine) that had it so we turned it off in all our online races, it is not related to system. I run an i3 2100 + r7 360 everything on max just fine, all these issues are random

 

I'm glad that it all works for you Will, but your experience doesn't invalidate my observations and suggestions.

The fact is that a not insignificant number of people experience stuttering with AMS, and at least on my system it is related to the shadowing and its interplay with time scaling.

 

I meant the part about "So at present, unless you run a very beefy system", it doesn't matter if you run a $10k or $100 machine the chances of finding these issues are the same and that's pretty frustrating AMS has day/night cycle and you cant use is not nice

 

All cool mate, I understand what you're getting at now! And yes it is very frustrating. Roll on AMS2!

 

You guys think this is related to the freezes while on track? After some time, I run AMS today (SP only) most settings Full, Shadows=High, Blur=Optimal, locked FPS=83. No issues w/ FPS, and Afterburner wasn't running. Any possible causes?

 

After previously posting that my stuttering had been resolved it turned in to freezing and pretty much whatever I did I couldn't sort it..........yesterday I thought I had improved it somewhat by disabling the prefetch/superfetch but wasn't sure.

Today however I noted there was a Crimson graphics driver update which specifically stated it made improvements to performance under DX9 and DX11..........low and behold I think it is sorted to the extent that I can now run everything on FULL, timescale and movies on and re-instating the sweetFX.

My fingers are fully crossed..this is on my 'work' PC AMD 8320, R9 380 with an XBOX 360 controller..still to try at home.

 

Yup, it's directly related to the combination of shadows (REGARDLESS of wether set to low, medium, high, or full) and time-scale being enabled. Disable one or the other and the issue goes away. The problem happens only in certain scenes (certain parts of track or camera angle) and happens regardless of frames-per-second (even if, for eg., you're pushing 144 or more fps).

 

Hey spin. Did u have the chance to play a bit with the shadow update numbers?

 

Yup: Stuttering issues - discussion & suggestions

 

We'd love to change the shadow system, I looked as recently as this week to try again. But it requires fundamental upgrades to the whole engine which with present expertise in the team and time to update content would be a very risky job for about a months left of Dev. Sorry.

We might be able to look at some settings that refactor how the shadows are culled etc though. We'll see

 

Thanks Alex. Anything you can do would be greatly appreciated by lots of people I'm sure.