Doom 2016 hangs up when on loading screens, Ctrl+Alt+Del fixes it

[nightmarevoid]

So this is a fairly weird problem, but then again I have a fairly weird gaming setup right now. I'm running a Spectre X360 with an i7 and a GTX 780 3Gb in an external enclosure. All of my large games, like Doom, are installed on an external 1TB SSD. My drivers are currently up to date, and I know that all of my programs are set to use the Nvidia Graphics card and not the onboard graphics, but I still get this crashing problem whether I have Vsync enabled or whether I have it completely turned off (even in Nvidia control panel) where doom will freeze at the end of or the beginning of a loading screen. What's even weirder is that I can stop the game from crashing if I Ctrl Alt Del my way out of there and then click on Doom's icon in the icon tray, at which point the game continues loading normally. It's like the game has stage fright and doesn't want to perform while I'm watching it load. Just changing the window focus doesn't seem to help. Has anyone else experienced this? It's completely bizarre to me.

[Sauron]

Are you using vulkan or opengl?

[nightmarevoid]

8 hours ago, Sauron said:

Are you using vulkan or opengl?

openGL. Isn't Vulcan AMD only?

[Sauron]

13 minutes ago, nightmarevoid said:

Isn't Vulcan AMD only?

No! Try running that.

[nightmarevoid]

55 minutes ago, Sauron said:

No! Try running that.

That seems to have fixed the hang up, but now the game cranks itself down in frames like crazy during any kind of action. If it's not one thing it's another I guess.

[Sauron]

3 minutes ago, nightmarevoid said:

That seems to have fixed the hang up, but now the game cranks itself down in frames like crazy during any kind of action. If it's not one thing it's another I guess.

That's weird, try checking your cpu usage during those dips

[nightmarevoid]

27 minutes ago, Sauron said:

That's weird, try checking your cpu usage during those dips

CPU usage is pretty low at around 75%, %65 of which is for Doom. I have the laptop set to high performance mode.

[Sauron]

2 minutes ago, nightmarevoid said:

CPU usage is pretty low at around 75%, %65 of which is for Doom. I have the laptop set to high performance mode.

It might have something to do with your external enclosure - do you have performance issues in any other modern game?

[nightmarevoid]

On 12/11/2018 at 10:47 AM, Sauron said:

It might have something to do with your external enclosure - do you have performance issues in any other modern game?

I'll double check that right now. As for disk performance Crystal disk seems to report everything as running fine.
 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 6.0.2 x64 (C) 2007-2018 hiyohiyo
                          Crystal Dew World : https://crystalmark.info/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s]
* KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes

   Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) :   435.702 MB/s
  Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) :     0.000 MB/s
  Random Read 4KiB (Q=  8,T= 8 ) :   155.076 MB/s [  37860.4 IOPS]
 Random Write 4KiB (Q=  8,T= 8 ) :     0.000 MB/s [      0.0 IOPS]
  Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) :   154.380 MB/s [  37690.4 IOPS]
 Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) :     0.000 MB/s [      0.0 IOPS]
  Random Read 4KiB (Q=  1,T= 1) :    31.263 MB/s [   7632.6 IOPS]
 Random Write 4KiB (Q=  1,T= 1) :     0.000 MB/s [      0.0 IOPS]

  Test : 1024 MiB [A: 16.0% (148.7/931.5 GiB)] (x5)  [Interval=5 sec]
  Date : 2018/12/01 13:27:21
    OS : Windows 10  [10.0 Build 17134] (x64)
    External USB 3.0 860 EVO

[Sauron]

29 minutes ago, nightmarevoid said:

I'll double check that right now. As for disk performance Crystal disk seems to report everything as running fine.
 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 6.0.2 x64 (C) 2007-2018 hiyohiyo
                          Crystal Dew World : https://crystalmark.info/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s]
* KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes

   Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) :   435.702 MB/s
  Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) :     0.000 MB/s
  Random Read 4KiB (Q=  8,T= 8 ) :   155.076 MB/s [  37860.4 IOPS]
 Random Write 4KiB (Q=  8,T= 8 ) :     0.000 MB/s [      0.0 IOPS]
  Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) :   154.380 MB/s [  37690.4 IOPS]
 Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) :     0.000 MB/s [      0.0 IOPS]
  Random Read 4KiB (Q=  1,T= 1) :    31.263 MB/s [   7632.6 IOPS]
 Random Write 4KiB (Q=  1,T= 1) :     0.000 MB/s [      0.0 IOPS]

  Test : 1024 MiB [A: 16.0% (148.7/931.5 GiB)] (x5)  [Interval=5 sec]
  Date : 2018/12/01 13:27:21
    OS : Windows 10  [10.0 Build 17134] (x64)
    External USB 3.0 860 EVO

Wait, you have the ssd sharing bandwidth with the graphics card...? That sounds like it might go wrong...

[nightmarevoid]

16 minutes ago, Sauron said:

Wait, you have the ssd sharing bandwidth with the graphics card...? That sounds like it might go wrong...

Where are you reading that? doesn't thunderbolt have a separate controller from regular USB 3.0? All I can gleam from this is that the usb 3.0 controller is going through sata 6Gb

[Sauron]

11 minutes ago, nightmarevoid said:

Where are you reading that? doesn't thunderbolt have a separate controller from regular USB 3.0? All I can gleam from this is that the usb 3.0 controller is going through sata 6Gb

Since you posted the ssd's benchmarks I assumed it was also in the enclosure.

 

Even if that's not the case though, as far as I know Intel chips only have 16 free pcie lanes, so unless that usb port is going through the chipset it might be taking up some of the gpu's bandwidth. Just to make sure that's not a problem, try running the game from your internal drive and unplugging everything that isn't the gpu.

[nightmarevoid]

6 hours ago, Sauron said:

Since you posted the ssd's benchmarks I assumed it was also in the enclosure.

 

Even if that's not the case though, as far as I know Intel chips only have 16 free pcie lanes, so unless that usb port is going through the chipset it might be taking up some of the gpu's bandwidth. Just to make sure that's not a problem, try running the game from your internal drive and unplugging everything that isn't the gpu.

I checked with the game on my system NVMe SSD and there was no change; the game still dipped down as low as 15 FPS during heavy combat. What's strange is that the game was running perfectly fine (with the exception of the crashes) just a little while ago and it started slowing down even on OpenGL. I think something update related is causing these issues, or maybe the fact that the gtx 780 isn't technically "Compatible" with external enclosure operation might have caught up with it. 

 

I feel that I should also point out that my laptop only has 8GB of system ram and it's usually ~86% used while gaming. could this do it?

 

Thank you for all your help so far Sauron. For a dark lord of middle earth, you're a pretty swell guy

[Sauron]

5 hours ago, nightmarevoid said:

I feel that I should also point out that my laptop only has 8GB of system ram and it's usually ~86% used while gaming. could this do it?

Not very likely... ram only really becomes a problem when it's full and you start paging on the ssd.

 

You could try reverting to an older driver to see if that makes a difference. Also make sure nothing is overheating.

5 hours ago, nightmarevoid said:

Thank you for all your help so far Sauron. For a dark lord of middle earth, you're a pretty swell guy

I do my best ^^

[nightmarevoid]

14 hours ago, Sauron said:

Not very likely... ram only really becomes a problem when it's full and you start paging on the ssd.

 

You could try reverting to an older driver to see if that makes a difference. Also make sure nothing is overheating.

I do my best ^^

Actually, Paging seems to be the answer! After reading you're comment I remembered that the last time Doom was acting like this was when I first got the game, and that was because I had disabled Paging. The game seems to throw a hissy fit when you do this. I tested this by reducing virtual texture paging size to low, and this fixed the issue of the game dropping frames in large areas. Telling the game to suck it up and fit as much onto the RAM as possible also made gun textures load in faster while switching weapons. That being said, increasing the paging file size on my system drive and enabling it on the external SSD only netted me an extra 10 frames or so, which leads me to believe that paging on an NVME SSD still isn't fast enough and the answer to my problems is more system RAM. I'll add that to my Christmas list. In the meantime setting VTP to medium gives me a good compromise of texture quantity to speed. Thanks for your help Sauron! Good luck finding the one ring and all that.

[ShizzenDizzen]

Topic is old, but this was the only site where I found someone with the same problem. So that's why I am still writing here. After finishing Doom Eternal, I wanted to play Doom (2016) again (had played it on a PS4 some years ago).

I had the same Issue as you did. And after researching a little, I found a fix, that at least is working fine with my system:

 

GTX 1660 Ti (Mobile)

Intel i7 8750h

32 GiB RAM

And an SSD (not so important, I guess)

 

So Sauron's assumption was right. Vulkan did the thing for me. But when you are monitoring your FPS or any other data with GEFORCE Experience or any similar program, something's off. This is what I'd found from the devs:

 

https://steamcommunity.com/app/379720/discussions/0/359543542243503468/

 

So I have turned off my GEFORCE in game overlay and am using the advice from the devs to show the fps counter you can use in the advanced settings in Doom. Compared to Doom Eternal the loading is still slow, but I don't have to ctrl + alt + del all the time when I am dying or so.

 

Hope this still is helping some...

[nightmarevoid]

On 4/27/2020 at 7:03 AM, ShizzenDizzen said:

Topic is old, but this was the only site where I found someone with the same problem. So that's why I am still writing here. After finishing Doom Eternal, I wanted to play Doom (2016) again (had played it on a PS4 some years ago).

I had the same Issue as you did. And after researching a little, I found a fix, that at least is working fine with my system:

 

GTX 1660 Ti (Mobile)

Intel i7 8750h

32 GiB RAM

And an SSD (not so important, I guess)

 

So Sauron's assumption was right. Vulkan did the thing for me. But when you are monitoring your FPS or any other data with GEFORCE Experience or any similar program, something's off. This is what I'd found from the devs:

 

https://steamcommunity.com/app/379720/discussions/0/359543542243503468/

 

So I have turned off my GEFORCE in game overlay and am using the advice from the devs to show the fps counter you can use in the advanced settings in Doom. Compared to Doom Eternal the loading is still slow, but I don't have to ctrl + alt + del all the time when I am dying or so.

 

Hope this still is helping some...

That's actually really interesting. I didn't manage to find this info when I had my problem, but I can definitely believe it. I don't remember having GEFORCE Experience installed though, as I didn't want to deal with the notifications and overhead.