Traversal Stutter Has Gotten A Lot Worse Lately?

@realstyli

Series S. Not a problem for me

I personally was going to make a post about having issues with freezing in menus, like when changing settings. Could be related? Are you seeing that as well?

It is new in last sessions for me. Same as you describe, short freeze then evens out.

PC, windows store version. Midrange setup.

Series X, no issue

I’ve not been playing on my other setups recently enough to comment on their performance.

@calicorsaircat said in Traversal Stutter Has Gotten A Lot Worse Lately?:

I personally was going to make a post about having issues with freezing in menus, like when changing settings. Could be related? Are you seeing that as well?

It is new in last sessions for me. Same as you describe, short freeze then evens out.

PC, windows store version. Midrange setup.

I'm seeing the brief settings freeze when existing the settings menu after tweaking something, and I've already put in a bug report about that. I don't think that's related to the traversal stutter I'm getting as the settings freeze has only been happening since the hotfix patch last week and I've been experiencing the traversal stutter for about half a year.

I'll wait for more replies but this is looking like a PC only issue, or it's just less noticeable on console due to lower frame rates overall.

@realstyli Thanks for the reply.

I should note that I have been playing a lot less recently than I used to so the issue with menu freezes could have been an issue for longer and I didn't notice because I generally stayed out of the menu and played closed crew.

I have not yet experienced issue with stutter at large islands, but my thinking as a non-programmer is that it could be some kind of issue with textures or other large game files not smoothly getting loaded off SSD into RAM. Could impact us all a bit differently depending on our settings. My water is mythical but other textures / settings are just Rare quality. I'm not getting island stutter but I certainly get a freeze when trying to exit the menus whether I changed a setting or not.

@calicorsaircat said in Traversal Stutter Has Gotten A Lot Worse Lately?:

@realstyli Thanks for the reply.

I should note that I have been playing a lot less recently than I used to so the issue with menu freezes could have been an issue for longer and I didn't notice because I generally stayed out of the menu and played closed crew.

I definitely didn't have the menu stutter before last week's hotfix. I'm always in and out of the settings (primarily turning off the Milestone notifications that keep enabling themselves!). I've also see other folks mentioning that stutter issue.

I have not yet experienced issue with stutter at large islands, but my thinking as a non-programmer is that it could be some kind of issue with textures or large file systems not smoothly getting loaded off SSD into RAM. Could impact us all a bit differently depending on our settings. My water is mythical but other textures / settings are just Rare quality. I'm not getting island stutter but I certainly get a freeze when trying to exit the menus whether I changed a setting or not.

Yeah, I've just dropped down the textures to Legendary to see if that improves things. If it's not affecting consoles or everyone on PC then it's probably something to do with quality settings, alright.

Early days to be able to say for sure, but I got on for a couple of hours this evening and it seemed to be improved. But I'll see when I get to play more and sail around the map more.

I'm not ruling out system issues yet though, not enough responses here to conclude either way, but could very well be something wrong with my GPU or RAM.

same here, last few weeks were getting extremely rough. Running a brand new PC and every game (including SoT) runs at smooth 144+ FPS. Yet in SoT myself and the group of usual crewmates are being plagued by rubberbands and other micro stutter when

• a crewmate or enemy returns from the ferry
• a new wave of enemies spawns in at the FoTD, FoF or siren treasuries
• ships are merging onto our server, even worse when it is two ships emerging for an hourglass battle
• someone completes a world event / FOTD / gold hoarder vault and opens the treasure vault
• a sunk ship despawns (not always but quite reliably) and gets merged away
• a LotV final fortress spawns in

I'm not talking about the usual server "freeze" when someone starts the Shores Of Gold TT or a galleon joins the server, I'm talking about the entire world and wave physics bugging out for at least half a second and enemy ships teleporting from wave crest to trough (or vice versa), often turning tides of galleon broadsides whenever it happens. We are usually playing on galleons on EU servers with ping average about 60. Whenever these lags happen, we ask around if it is only us or the whole server. Turns out it is the server without any drops in FPS on our side. And server ping also does not increase a lot. It just stutters. It is not a very new thing but the server performance gets increasingly worse from update to update it seems.

Back in the days the Arena servers had 5 galleons fighting on a small area and 10+ cannonballs flying through the air at any given time. Sure PvE was turned off but the servers could handle that smoothly, especially during earlier Arena days. Fast Forward to 2023 and some hourglass battles with only 2 galleons feel like a powerpoint slideshow compared to 2020. And it is not only hourglass. Just try to play the game, try a ghost fleet, try a FOTD, it seems to be everywhere :(

Game stutters OFTEN for me. In menus like @CaliCorsairCat said, i'll change something or press escape to go back and i have to wait. Approaching big islands i'll drop a few frames. Running after being stationary for a while, stutter, ship approaching, stutter, player respawning, stutter. It is getting a little tiring! I'm on a Ryzen 7 1700 and GTX 3060ti, and even on my old inferior GPU, the game ran better.

@heyltsmetc

If it's traversal stutter, it's more down to the CPU than the GPU. It's basically hitching as the game tries to move assets from system RAM into VRAM, which is controlled by the CPU. But the game is very CPU bound, doing most things on just two cores.

You can see this with the game running where only 4 of 16 threads on a Ryzen 7 are saturated. But this is why you will still see the CPU reporting a low usage overall as well. On a game making proper use of multithreading (called SMT, simultaneous multithreading, on AMD), you should see a better spread across all cores and higher overall CPU usage. This is a known issue with a lot of poorly optimised games on PC, and a lot of them are Unreal Engine games.

Rare have so far leaned into LOD culling instead of looking at optimising the CPU usage (maybe they're hoping DirectStorage will be the magic bullet in future), which is what has led to a lot of pop-in of textures and shadows at short distances. It's probably also why they increased the mistiness on the horizon to hide LOD pop-ins further away.

Just commenting again to say I am now definitely experiencing / noticing the stutter.. At large islands for sure, but sometimes now even just sailing.

Might be a time of day thing when servers are more heavily loaded.

PC Windows Store Edition
Ryzen 7 2700x
GTX 1660ti
32GB DDR4 Ram
Playing at 2K resolution

Settings: Rare except for water detail at Mythical
Vsync at 100 fps and quadruple buffering