HDD causing mini freezes in GTA V?

[Frankidor]

Hello,

 

I recently had to move GTA V to my HDD (F:) from my SSD (C:), due to not having enough space for the giant game. The game ran perfectly fine on the SSD, but now I'm experiencing constant around 1 second mini freezes (1-5 right after another) at seemingly random times. Though, it seems to happen most often in crowded city areas, but it does also happen in remote places. Computer specs below:

 

CPU: i7-4770K

GPU: GTX 750 Ti

RAM: HyperX 2 x 8GB DDR3

SSD: Samsung 850 EVO 2.5" SATA III 250GB

HDD: WD Black 2TB Internal 7200RPM 3.5"

MB: Asus Z97-A

 

Changing all of the graphic settings to the lowest doesn't seem to make any difference. Disabling V-Sync and all AA doesn't help either. Here are some things I've tried to fix this:

• Re-installing the game
• Using WD Data Lifeguard Diagnostic Software to do a Quick (SMART) and Extended Test, both passed.
• Defragging the drive
• Disabling Windows' Balanced Power Plan
• Updated GPU drives

Below is a screenshot from a GTA V becnhamrk test, notice the minimun fps in Pass 3 & 4:

 

The fact that the game is having these freezes on a WD Black makes this even more perplexing for me. With my limited knowledge, I have no idea what to try next. Suggestions?

[Cigano]

I wouldn't suspect the HDD personally because it would really only effect the original loading of the map from what I understand. 

[Tristerin]

20 minutes ago, Frankidor said:

-snip-

Use Task Manager to monitor CPU/GPU/HDD utilization (easiest on second monitor to watch it live) and see whats working/not working.  If the HDD is being accessed (though it shouldn't once things are loaded however, as new things come into view or online it has to access the HDD to bring up the "sprites" to load them on the screen if they aren't available on the RAM or VRAM yet)

 

Is your GPU spiking to 100%, CPU, HDD?

[Guest]

Have you tried disabling the file paging on that HDD? 

[Frankidor]

14 minutes ago, Tristerin said:

Use Task Manager to monitor CPU/GPU/HDD utilization (easiest on second monitor to watch it live) and see whats working/not working.  If the HDD is being accessed (though it shouldn't once things are loaded however, as new things come into view or online it has to access the HDD to bring up the "sprites" to load them on the screen if they aren't available on the RAM or VRAM yet)

 

Is your GPU spiking to 100%, CPU, HDD?

I've been monitoring them as well, I just played for a couple of minutes to get a screenshot. You can see two big drop spikes in CPU (Suoritin) and especially in GPU, that's where I encountered a mini freeze. I just noticed that the GPU is not running at 100% like it was yesterday, that's a bit odd. The HDD is always running at around 0-40%. 

[Frankidor]

18 minutes ago, Lukyp said:

Have you tried disabling the file paging on that HDD? 

I've been looking in to that as well, but from what I gathered, disabling the pagefile is not recommended? I did see a post somewhere telling to try setting minimum and maximum to 1024mb. 

[Guest]

4 minutes ago, Frankidor said:

I've been looking in to that as well, but from what I gathered, disabling the pagefile is not recommended? I did see a post somewhere telling to try setting minimum and maximum to 1024mb. 

Yes but make sure it is on the SSD, even if it will wear it a bit. Actually it's not 1024 but half of your RAM 

In my situation it improved performance

[Tristerin]

2 minutes ago, Frankidor said:

I've been looking in to that as well, but from what I gathered, disabling the pagefile is not recommended? I did see a post somewhere telling to try setting minimum and maximum to 1024mb. 

So this is still happening at lowest settings...hmmm cause even I can run GTA5 lowest settings in 720p no problem on an i5 3470 + HD 7750 1gb GPU with zero spikes in frames that matter.

Is this happening in Online play only or in single player mode as well?

[Frankidor]

2 minutes ago, Tristerin said:

So this is still happening at lowest settings...hmmm cause even I can run GTA5 lowest settings in 720p no problem on an i5 3470 + HD 7750 1gb GPU with zero spikes in frames that matter.

Is this happening in Online play only or in single player mode as well?

This is why I'm still thinking there must be something wrong with the HDD. I've only tried single player mode so far.

[Tristerin]

4 minutes ago, Frankidor said:

This is why I'm still thinking there must be something wrong with the HDD. I've only tried single player mode so far.

Yeah - the only reason its 720p and not 1080p (and I know it wouldn't have issues on low) is that the GPU in my HTPC is only 1gb and GTA5 wont let you run the resolution higher if your VRAM cant support (and its downloaded onto a 7200rpm WD 1tb HDD).  Looking at your specs that cant be the issue. 

 

Have you tried another game on the same HDD?  Did you re-download onto that HDD or did you migrate the game from the SSD to HDD?  Has the HDD got a ton if info on it and has it been defragged in a while?

[Frankidor]

7 minutes ago, Tristerin said:

Yeah - the only reason its 720p and not 1080p (and I know it wouldn't have issues on low) is that the GPU in my HTPC is only 1gb and GTA5 wont let you run the resolution higher if your VRAM cant support (and its downloaded onto a 7200rpm WD 1tb HDD).  Looking at your specs that cant be the issue. 

 

Have you tried another game on the same HDD?  Did you re-download onto that HDD or did you migrate the game from the SSD to HDD?  Has the HDD got a ton if info on it and has it been defragged in a while?

I've tried playing a couple of games, but I haven't noticed anything similar of the sort. Although at the moment I don't have any games that are as heavy as GTA V. It's been a while and I can't remember for certain, but I believe I migrated the game from the SSD to the HDD. I did re-download it on to the HDD this morning however. I also performed a defragmentation this morning. I can still try playing more games to see if the mini freezing occurs on other games. The HDD is around 30% full. 

[Tristerin]

10 minutes ago, Frankidor said:

I've tried playing a couple of games, but I haven't noticed anything similar of the sort. Although at the moment I don't have any games that are as heavy as GTA V. It's been a while and I can't remember for certain, but I believe I migrated the game from the SSD to the HDD. I did re-download it on to the HDD this morning however. I also performed a defragmentation this morning. I can still try playing more games to see if the mini freezing occurs on other games. The HDD is around 30% full. 

Fresh download...HDD basically empty...defragged...What resolution are you playing at?  Is your HDD hooked to a Sata III port for full data bandwidth?  (taking guesses here to try to figure this out lol)

[Frankidor]

38 minutes ago, Tristerin said:

Fresh download...HDD basically empty...defragged...What resolution are you playing at?  Is your HDD hooked to a Sata III port for full data bandwidth?  (taking guesses here to try to figure this out lol)

I always play in 1080p, although I did see the mini freezes in 720p as well. I checked and yes, the HDD is hooked to SATA III. 

 

I did find this Profiles folder under Users -> Documents -> Rockstar Games -> GTA V -> Profiles -> C80F0614 on the SSD, and it has some files from way back 2015. I assume these are the save files for the story mode? Should I delete the old ones? Would it make any difference?

[Tristerin]

1 minute ago, Frankidor said:

I always play in 1080p, although I did see the mini freezes in 720p as well. I checked and yes, the HDD is hooked to SATA III. 

 

I did find this Profiles folder under Users -> Documents -> Rockstar Games -> GTA V -> Profiles -> C80F0614 on the SSD, and it has some files from way back 2015. I assume these are the save files for the story mode? Should I delete the old ones? Would it make any difference?

Im not informed enough to comment on the software side of things.

 

Can you try Online play and see what happens with the freezes?

[Frankidor]

42 minutes ago, Tristerin said:

Im not informed enough to comment on the software side of things.

 

Can you try Online play and see what happens with the freezes?

I played online, and the freezing started immediately. After that I was able to play story mode for a good 10 minutes without freezing while in 720p before quitting, but then again, I also managed to play yesterday a full 20 minutes after I encountered the first freeze in 1080p, so maybe another coincidence. 

[Tristerin]

6 minutes ago, Frankidor said:

I played online, and the freezing started immediately. After that I was able to play story mode for a good 10 minutes without freezing while in 720p before quitting, but then again, I also managed to play yesterday a full 20 minutes after I encountered the first freeze in 1080p, so maybe another coincidence. 

Can you run MEMTEST86?  Or the windows based one typically located at:

Windows -> Control Panel -> System and Security -> Administrative Tools -> Windows Memory Diagnostic is the easiest choice and rarely fails to detect error when a module is bad.

[Frankidor]

11 hours ago, Tristerin said:

Can you run MEMTEST86?  Or the windows based one typically located at:

Windows -> Control Panel -> System and Security -> Administrative Tools -> Windows Memory Diagnostic is the easiest choice and rarely fails to detect error when a module is bad.

Ah yes, I already did that as well. Nothing wrong  on the memory side either.

[Tristerin]

6 hours ago, Frankidor said:

Ah yes, I already did that as well. Nothing wrong  on the memory side either.

Have you tried the drive on a different SATA port?  Do you have another mechanical drive to load the game on and test against?  If you move to SSD does this clear the issue up?  Id try those things in that order - at least with my limited knowledge.

[Frankidor]

On 12/20/2018 at 7:07 PM, Tristerin said:

Have you tried the drive on a different SATA port?  Do you have another mechanical drive to load the game on and test against?  If you move to SSD does this clear the issue up?  Id try those things in that order - at least with my limited knowledge.

Sorry for not replying, I've done a lot of testing and things have changed quite a bit.

 

I freshly installed F1 2018 on to the HDD, the game started freezing even more than GTA V. I then managed to migrate F1 2018 to the SSD, and it turns out the freezing occurs there as well. The micro / mini freezes behave in the exact same way as they do in GTA V. They last around 1 second, and they appear repeatedly from 1-5 times at seemingly random point in the games. So it is not in fact an HDD related issue.

 

Some new things I've tried to fix this:

• Disable WLAN power saving
• Update all drivers through Device Manager
• Disable full screen optimisation for games
• Changed NVIDIA PhysX from auto to GPU

I'm starting to believe some kind of software is preventing games to render graphics properly. The only component that I've added to my computer is a dual-band wireless adapter around 3 months ago. I haven't replaced any other component since 2014. And up until I believe 2016, GTA V was still running smoothly. This might also be a Windows related problem.

 

As you can tell, I haven't been playing that much on PC, but I was planning to start playing more, but this issue is preventing frrom doing so. Any new suggestions?

[Tristerin]

On ‎12‎/‎26‎/‎2018 at 6:27 AM, Frankidor said:

Sorry for not replying, I've done a lot of testing and things have changed quite a bit.

 

I freshly installed F1 2018 on to the HDD, the game started freezing even more than GTA V. I then managed to migrate F1 2018 to the SSD, and it turns out the freezing occurs there as well. The micro / mini freezes behave in the exact same way as they do in GTA V. They last around 1 second, and they appear repeatedly from 1-5 times at seemingly random point in the games. So it is not in fact an HDD related issue.

 

Some new things I've tried to fix this:

• Disable WLAN power saving
• Update all drivers through Device Manager
• Disable full screen optimisation for games
• Changed NVIDIA PhysX from auto to GPU

I'm starting to believe some kind of software is preventing games to render graphics properly. The only component that I've added to my computer is a dual-band wireless adapter around 3 months ago. I haven't replaced any other component since 2014. And up until I believe 2016, GTA V was still running smoothly. This might also be a Windows related problem.

 

As you can tell, I haven't been playing that much on PC, but I was planning to start playing more, but this issue is preventing frrom doing so. Any new suggestions?

Holiday season is among us!  Was away for almost 2 weeks.

 

Perusing through this - so if I missed it sorry! - have you tried a fresh install of the operating system?  If its software related that's the easiest way to "cure" or pinpoint the issue from my seat (its the first thing I do after I troubleshoot the hardware itself and cant figure it out)