Frametime issues and stutter in COD Cold War

[ForensicRug]

Recently playing through the campaign of Cold War I have experienced periodic stutter. It is not at a level which overall affects my ability to play the game, however it is frustrating that ever 3 or so seconds my game has a millisecond stutter because sometimes it throws your aim off. My components are not being maxed out at all, my framerate is capped at 141fps and my framerate rarely drops below this, hitting at its lowest around 138. However my frametime is extremely unstable as seen in the attached image. I have tested all my components several times before for issues with other games (severe freezing in Far Cry 1, constant stuttering in the Witcher 1 (however I have found this to be a result of a single core maxing out), however most games play relatively well; the Battlefield 2042 Beta barely had any stuttering on my system outside of framerate issues identified community wide), however all of my components seem to be error free and healthy.

 

Any ideas or knowledge would be appreciated, thanks.

 

NOTE: The top reading is my framerate, the bottom is frametime

[Charri40]

I also had this same issue in Call of Duty Cold war, one of the best games out at this time, and found a solution i want to share. Even though I am using a good system with liquid devil 6900xt 16gb dedicated and 32gb total available thanks to AMD smart access memory [SAM]. Frame delivery timing was harshly inconsistent like in the graph above you show, anywhere between 1ms and 50+ ms delivery time. This ruins the experience and hurts the eyes and eventually gives you a headache. In my case the issue was not due to thermal throttling thanks to the cooling tower I designed which uses 4 pumps and 8 480mm copper radiators to cool all the way down to 64 ~ 71 degrees fareinheight depending on ambient and no fluctuation under max load, allowing the 6900xt to run @ 2700 mhz all day and max out VRAM to 2150mhz fastest timing and max power. So the system has plenty power, no thermal limiting, runs @ anywhere between 180 - 220 fps max settings (no ray tracers). So what is the problem?

 

The solution is to reduce the target VRAM usage to 70%. This is found in graphics settings in game. For whatever reason, increasing this VRAM target value past that point will cause frame stuttering or delayed/inconsistent frame delivery timing. Even with all the benefits I mentioned above in my system the issue still happens, this is the solution. Contrary to what I used to think, average frame rate, 1% lows, and 1% highs are not as important as the moving average target for framrate delivery timing. yes average frame rate is part of the delivery timing, but they are still different in important ways.

 

Another intersting thing I am mentioning since I have not seen anyone else talk about it yet is the VRAM timing, even though we can clock the heck out of the graphics chip to 2700MHZ and higher all day long this is great for bragging on LTT but there was not much of a noticable difference other than central die temp. I noticed the best improvements with the system, gaming and other uses of the system after overclocking the VRAM on the graphics chip from 2000mhz default timing to 2150mhz fast timing. No one talks about this I found this to give the best improvements. Hopefully AMD raises the max VRAM clock rate to 3ghz in radeon master.

 

My guess is that there is huge overhead for graphical information transfer in Cold War. Like in other electronics a certain amount of "headroom" is required for things to run good. Even though in my case I have only Cold War running and VRAM reports as about 92% with 90% selected in settings this does not give the application enough headroom to deliver a good experience. Changing the setting down to a 70% VRAM target lowers actual VRAM use down only to 84%. This is an interesting observation and not what I would expect as it does not pull it down to the expected 72 ish percent after accounting for windows DWM.exe and other svchost,exe.

 

Let me know if this helps you.

[ForensicRug]

On 10/29/2021 at 6:01 AM, Charri40 said:

I also had this same issue in Call of Duty Cold war, one of the best games out at this time, and found a solution i want to share. Even though I am using a good system with liquid devil 6900xt 16gb dedicated and 32gb total available thanks to AMD smart access memory [SAM]. Frame delivery timing was harshly inconsistent like in the graph above you show, anywhere between 1ms and 50+ ms delivery time. This ruins the experience and hurts the eyes and eventually gives you a headache. In my case the issue was not due to thermal throttling thanks to the cooling tower I designed which uses 4 pumps and 8 480mm copper radiators to cool all the way down to 64 ~ 71 degrees fareinheight depending on ambient and no fluctuation under max load, allowing the 6900xt to run @ 2700 mhz all day and max out VRAM to 2150mhz fastest timing and max power. So the system has plenty power, no thermal limiting, runs @ anywhere between 180 - 220 fps max settings (no ray tracers). So what is the problem?

 

The solution is to reduce the target VRAM usage to 70%. This is found in graphics settings in game. For whatever reason, increasing this VRAM target value past that point will cause frame stuttering or delayed/inconsistent frame delivery timing. Even with all the benefits I mentioned above in my system the issue still happens, this is the solution. Contrary to what I used to think, average frame rate, 1% lows, and 1% highs are not as important as the moving average target for framrate delivery timing. yes average frame rate is part of the delivery timing, but they are still different in important ways.

 

Another intersting thing I am mentioning since I have not seen anyone else talk about it yet is the VRAM timing, even though we can clock the heck out of the graphics chip to 2700MHZ and higher all day long this is great for bragging on LTT but there was not much of a noticable difference other than central die temp. I noticed the best improvements with the system, gaming and other uses of the system after overclocking the VRAM on the graphics chip from 2000mhz default timing to 2150mhz fast timing. No one talks about this I found this to give the best improvements. Hopefully AMD raises the max VRAM clock rate to 3ghz in radeon master.

 

My guess is that there is huge overhead for graphical information transfer in Cold War. Like in other electronics a certain amount of "headroom" is required for things to run good. Even though in my case I have only Cold War running and VRAM reports as about 92% with 90% selected in settings this does not give the application enough headroom to deliver a good experience. Changing the setting down to a 70% VRAM target lowers actual VRAM use down only to 84%. This is an interesting observation and not what I would expect as it does not pull it down to the expected 72 ish percent after accounting for windows DWM.exe and other svchost,exe.

 

Let me know if this helps you.

Seemingly this is reducing the issue. I haven't had a chance to properly test the game as I have been busy however over the coming week I should be able to put some more time into it and see what the result is. Thanks for the suggestion, definitely not something that I would have considered.