GTA 5... a stuttery mess, kind of.

[Hieb]

Hello

 

Was hoping someone might have some insight into why GTA 5 is behaving a certain way among my friends...

 

I have an i5-4690K, 8GB 1600MHz RAM, GTX 760.

Friend #1 has i3-4150, 8GB 1600MHz RAM, GTX 560.

Friend #2 has i3-4150, 8GB 1600MHz RAM, R9 270.

 

For me GTA 5 runs smoothly as you'd expect it (for the most part), however every so often (usually once every minute or two) my game will freeze for about a quarter of a second. CPU isn't maxed out when this happens, RAM isn't maxed, so I can't figure out why this is happening.

 

Friend #1 with the i3 + GTX 560 while playing at lower settings has ZERO problems. The game runs smooth as silk and ~50 min FPS, and he doesn't have the occasional freezing that I have.

 

Friend #2 with the i3 + R9 270 the game runs terribly... it fluctuates between 25 and 55 fps. I understand overall lower performance since AMD cards require beefier CPU to run (didn't realize at the time of suggesting parts for him, unfortunately) well in DX11, but it feels rubber-bandy (like i said constantly fluctuating), it freezes a lot, and 25 fps is way, way too low.

 

Anyone have any ideas? I tried malware scan, played around with settings, played around with application priority in task manager, shut down background programs, updated drivers (he was previously using a pre-GTA 5 driver with similar results)... his CPU isn't totally maxed out (of course with a hyper-threaded CPU, core usage isn't super representative since the time spent on each thread varies a lot) and core usage displaying between 70-85% typically during GTA V. Also not maxed out on RAM.

 

I get the feeling it's a hard drive related problem since friend #2 has only 150GB of free space on his 1TB drive left, while friend #2 has ~700GB. And this is a new problem, when he first installed and played the game this problem didn't exist... so I can't imagine it being anything but a driver, software or hard drive filling up problem (since when we started he had ~600GB free, and now he's got a ton new games and has only 150GB).

 

Anyone played around with having the game on both an SSD and HDD and noticed any difference in stuttering? Or anyone else experienced similar issues and found a solution?

 

UPDATE:

My stuttering magically disappeared.

 

I managed to fix my friend's stuttering by uninstalling the AMD drivers, using DDU to remove any leftovers from the drivers (in safe mode), and then install the latest ones. I'm not sure why the drivers were causing a problem since he hadn't previously updated the drivers, and they didn't cause problems when GTA V launched... but nevertheless this solved the issue. Performance also improved slightly by uninstalling Garmin applications, oddly enough.

[Panzer003]

Lower the setting abit/ See if that helps.

[Goldensapling]

Interesting problem, pagefiling? 

btw Friend #2 should be getting better performance. I run a R9 270 and a 8320 (Which I understand has worse singlecore performance than an i3) and get ~60 FPS almost always

[Nineshadow]

I have a 4670k and a 560 and it runs at smooth 60fps on low settings as well.

[Nergale]

Did you try to install the 15.4 Beta / 15.5 Beta drivers?

[GamingTim]

I have the exact same problem,

 

I have a 750 ti oc and an i5-3470 and it has stutters every few seconds but now after I did the steps it doesn't stutter anymore.

This was what I did

• Turning off all background apps
• Setting the GTAV or GTA5.exe to high priority in the task manager
• Setting the GTAlauncher to low priority in the task manager
• Using the recommended settings from Nvidia Experience, having v-sync turned on.

That was what I did and it improved,  60fps, if it still does stutter, try lowering down your settings and make sure to  have v-sync turned on.

[Hieb]

Lower the setting abit/ See if that helps.

 

Played around with the settings... normal (low) textures, no AA, no AO, reduced scaling, V-Sync on and off, etc.

 

 

Interesting problem, pagefiling? 

btw Friend #2 should be getting better performance. I run a R9 270 and a 8320 (Which I understand has worse singlecore performance than an i3) and get ~60 FPS almost always

 

Thanks for the numbers. More specifically, what about page filing? I don't think I'd want to disable it entirely since then if he runs out of RAM he's pretty well borked.

 

 

Did you try to install the 15.4 Beta / 15.5 Beta drivers?

 

Yep.

 

 

I have the exact same problem,

 

I have a 750 ti oc and an i5-3470 and it has stutters every few seconds but now after I did the steps it doesn't stutter anymore.

This was what I did

• Turning off all background apps
• Setting the GTAV or GTA5.exe to high priority in the task manager
• Setting the GTAlauncher to low priority in the task manager
• Using the recommended settings from Nvidia Experience, having v-sync turned on.

That was what I did and it improved,  60fps, if it still does stutter, try lowering down your settings and make sure to  have v-sync turned on.

 

Did all this, aside from the GeForce Experience for friend #2 since he has AMD card.

[Goldensapling]

Tell friend #2 to use DX10. I got terrible performance on DX11 as well.

[Hieb]

Tell friend #2 to use DX10. I got terrible performance on DX11 as well.

 

Tried that. Surprisingly it was worse. Dropped to 10 fps at times in DX10/10.1

[GoldSrc]

I blame the hard drive, I just installed the game yesterday to see how well it would run on my 1st gen i3 and GTX-650.

First few minutes (10-50min) all good, then the damn thing starts to stutter lol, all at the same rate as the HDD activity led .

After that, the game turns into a stuttery mess and as soon as I quit the game and wait for the HDD led to turn off, I go back to the game and smooth again, and the story repeats itself.

[Monarch]

For me GTA 5 runs smoothly as you'd expect it (for the most part), however every so often (usually once every minute or two) my game will freeze for about a quarter of a second. CPU isn't maxed out when this happens, RAM isn't maxed, so I can't figure out why this is happening.

 

Cap your framerate to 60/70 or 80 fps. I've noticed micro-stuttering occurring with high framerate, which is evident in game menus and map.

 

Friend #1 with the i3 + GTX 560 while playing at lower settings has ZERO problems. The game runs smooth as silk and ~50 min FPS, and he doesn't have the occasional freezing that I have.

 

No micro-stuttering cause of low framerate, and Nvidia's DX11 driver has less CPU overhead.

 

Friend #2 with the i3 + R9 270 the game runs terribly... it fluctuates between 25 and 55 fps. I understand overall lower performance since AMD cards require beefier CPU to run (didn't realize at the time of suggesting parts for him, unfortunately) well in DX11, but it feels rubber-bandy (like i said constantly fluctuating), it freezes a lot, and 25 fps is way, way too low.

 

High DX11 CPU overhead with AMD's driver. 

[randy hutajulu]

Hello

Was hoping someone might have some insight into why GTA 5 is behaving a certain way among my friends...

I have an i5-4690K, 8GB 1600MHz RAM, GTX 760.

Friend #1 has i3-4150, 8GB 1600MHz RAM, GTX 560.

Friend #2 has i3-4150, 8GB 1600MHz RAM, R9 270.

For me GTA 5 runs smoothly as you'd expect it (for the most part), however every so often (usually once every minute or two) my game will freeze for about a quarter of a second. CPU isn't maxed out when this happens, RAM isn't maxed, so I can't figure out why this is happening.

Tearing and stuttering are things that packed with GTA V buddy

Try to turn on vsync, good luck with huge framedrops and still stutter sometimes.

It's even crashed with every overclock profile that i have which works on every game.

I dont say that this is a bad game

This a very good game and i love it very much

Nice gameplay, nice story, i love almost everything in this game.

But when it comes to performance, to be honest, this is one of the worst graph quality per performace game i've ever played.

It doesnt look so "next gen" anyway but has a bad performance.

My suggestion is, if u have console, just play it on console. I think u wont have these problems on console

[ColourShift]

I'm running the game fine and I'm running it at High/Ultra settings across the board. 

 

Try lowering your graphical settings.

[Hieb]

Cap your framerate to 60/70 or 80 fps. I've noticed micro-stuttering occurring with high framerate, which is evident in game menus and map.

Happens at every framerate to me. Happens whether I play at 100 fps or at 50-60 fps (tried with dif graphcis settings). The occasional freeze isn't a huge deal for me, I only really mentioned it in case it's related to my friend's problem because I would really like to get the game running smoothly for him.

 

 

No micro-stuttering cause of low framerate, and Nvidia's DX11 driver has less CPU overhead.

 

 

High DX11 CPU overhead with AMD's driver. 

 

 

 

I'm aware. I expected lower framerates than the GTX 560 due to this, but someone else here with FX-8320 (which most benchmarks show performing worse than i3 in GTA V) and R9 270 is getting much better performance. Furthermore, dropping down to 20-30 fps when the minimum my friend with GTX 560 gets is ~50 fps typically, there's something else going on there besides the driver overhead.

 

 

I blame the hard drive, I just installed the game yesterday to see how well it would run on my 1st gen i3 and GTX-650.

First few minutes (10-50min) all good, then the damn thing starts to stutter lol, all at the same rate as the HDD activity led .

After that, the game turns into a stuttery mess and as soon as I quit the game and wait for the HDD led to turn off, I go back to the game and smooth again, and the story repeats itself.

 

Thanks for sharing your experience. I'll look into playing around with background applications and also target HDD usage... might get him a new drive anyways since he's almost out of room and move GTA to the empty one.

[Hieb]

Alright got an update from my buddy on the situation. Apparently his disk usage is almost constantly at 100%. He's seeing a pretty consistent 10-20MB/s disk usage coming from "Service Host: Local Service". I'm gonna go over and look into Windows index, update, superfetch options.

 

If anyone has any other ideas for why disk usage would be so high, I'm all ears. His RAM usage is also quite high. We both have 8GB of RAM and 2GB video cards, yet when playing GTA 5 for some reason his game uses 2-3GB of RAM pushing his total usage to about 90% while for me GTA V only uses 1.5-2GB and I'm usually under 80% usage. His settnigs are even lower than mine so I can't fathom why GTA would be using MORE RAM for him.

 

Any ideas on disk usage and surprisingly high RAM usage in GTA 5?

[GoldSrc]

Alright got an update from my buddy on the situation. Apparently his disk usage is almost constantly at 100%. He's seeing a pretty consistent 10-20MB/s disk usage coming from "Service Host: Local Service". I'm gonna go over and look into Windows index, update, superfetch options.

 

If anyone has any other ideas for why disk usage would be so high, I'm all ears. His RAM usage is also quite high. We both have 8GB of RAM and 2GB video cards, yet when playing GTA 5 for some reason his game uses 2-3GB of RAM pushing his total usage to about 90% while for me GTA V only uses 1.5-2GB and I'm usually under 80% usage. His settnigs are even lower than mine so I can't fathom why GTA would be using MORE RAM for him.

 

Any ideas on disk usage and surprisingly high RAM usage in GTA 5?

You should try to move the game to your SSD and see if the game stutters again.

As for the high ram usage, I don't know.

[Hieb]

You should try to move the game to your SSD and see if the game stutters again.

As for the high ram usage, I don't know.

 

I don't have enough room on my SSD. 128GB does not go far...

He's gonna be getting another hard drive soon anyways for his other games (probably a 2TB Barracuda) so we'll def move it to the new one, since it being such a big game loading quicker will be more important anyways... plus if it eliminates the stutter that's a huge bonus.

[GoldSrc]

I don't have enough room on my SSD. 128GB does not go far...

He's gonna be getting another hard drive soon anyways for his other games (probably a 2TB Barracuda) so we'll def move it to the new one, since it being such a big game loading quicker will be more important anyways... plus if it eliminates the stutter that's a huge bonus.

I doubt you could completely eliminate the stutter in gta v in a hard drive, unless you made a smaller partition which is at the center of the disc.

 

I'm not 100% sure of that though, but if you make a small partition let's say 100GB and then a larger one with the space left, and install the game on the smaller one, the game should have less stutter due to the read speed being faster on the center of the platter than they are on the outside.

But even doing that, I don't think you could eliminate the stutter 100%, you don't lose anything trying though. 

[.spider.]

It's running super fine but I have to turn vsync off and on again every time I start the game.

[shodne]

I have an R9 290X and I also have the stuttering... Been a huge pain in my BUXt! Iv'e tried everything! The only thing that proved to have any effect was using radeon pro! But it's incredibly complicated and few users now that they stopped developing for it:( My stuttering went away almost 100% the other day, but something got changed somewhere and now i fail to get the settings right... I do believe this could potentially be a lifesaver for alot of people, as there are only tips and guides and speculations as to what the problem is... Sick and tired of this whole mess! You read page after page on people having this issue and then alot of people that don't have the issue... Appears to happen more often on higher specced rigs... I'm not saying my rig is good, but i would have expected more from my system... Hopefully someone with a relatively similar card/setup could share their profile:)??? Would be greatly appreciated:)

[Hieb]

I have an R9 290X and I also have the stuttering... Been a huge pain in my BUXt! Iv'e tried everything! The only thing that proved to have any effect was using radeon pro! But it's incredibly complicated and few users now that they stopped developing for it:( My stuttering went away almost 100% the other day, but something got changed somewhere and now i fail to get the settings right... I do believe this could potentially be a lifesaver for alot of people, as there are only tips and guides and speculations as to what the problem is... Sick and tired of this whole mess! You read page after page on people having this issue and then alot of people that don't have the issue... Appears to happen more often on higher specced rigs... I'm not saying my rig is good, but i would have expected more from my system... Hopefully someone with a relatively similar card/setup could share their profile:)??? Would be greatly appreciated:)

is it happening just in GTA 5 for you or all games? What kind of drive do you have and how much free space? Have you tried with and without hyper-threading?

[shodne]

Haven't tried with or without hyperthreading. But I did fix my issue;) Bought the gtx 970:) Solved everything! Never buying AMD again...

[Hieb]

I fixed his issue by uninstalling the AMD drivers, then running Display Driver Uninstaller in Safe Mode, then installing the latest drivers. No problems. Guess there was just something funky in the registry.

[shodne]

Well, now I'm a sad panda:( My 2 week old ram sticks were giving me bsod's and had to do a full recovery... Using my 8gb stick now. But... the STUTTERING returned:(!!!!!!!!!

Used DDU as you did and still... STUTTERING! Iv'e tried EVERYTHING! I'm seriously going out of my mind! Now Iv'e even posted my first youtube video! Showing my drops! It drops from 60.0fps to 57.6 fps for about a second...

 

 

Hope someone can help:)!

 

shodne@hotmailcompany52.com