FPS Drops and Stuttering

I noticed the game micro stutters when you scroll in and out. This also occurs when you scroll around on the map. If I don't move I get a very solid 100-120 fps. The second I start scrolling I get drops all over the place from 22 fps to 40 fps or so. Goes right back up to ~120 fps the second I stop. Very strange. CPU usage is around 60% and gpu usage is around 50-70% during this behavior. GPU memory never goes behind 1.3 gb so it's not that. I have 16 GB of system ram so it's not that. Something not right is going on here. I suspect it has something to do with how textures are loaded and unloaded and the game is not efficiently utilizing the larger memory size on the video card.

I also noticed moving my mouse around drops my fps 10-15. There is some really poor coding going on here.

Is there anyway to take it out of fullscreen borderless? I could be wrong but it seems like fullscreen isn't true fullscreen but just borderless window. How do I change the resolution or turn of vysnc? Where are all the normal features you'd except in a PC release title?

Do you have an amd graphics card by any chance? Because I had essentially the same issue before I updated my drivers.

Something to try to see if we have similar cases or not, could you try moving the camera around with keyboard and checking the fps drop for that?

Something i have noticed is PA tends to not play nice with High Refresh rate monitors.
Both playing and casting when scrolling around on a 120hz Monitor i get some stutter or
sharp dips in frame rate that only last a second.

I don't think poor code on the game side when most others run it fine.
What kinda specs and monitor/Resolution and refresh rate are you running.

Nope, nvidia card. Moving with the keyboard produces the same issue unfortunately

It's a 120 hz monitor. I doubt it's the monitor but it's very easy to test by dropping to 60 hz. I think it's very odd a modern game like this doesn't have resolution or frequency settings.

I think it has something to do with textures. I notice a lot of texture pop when I scroll around the planet. The stuttering is exactly like when you don't have enough vram to fill all the textures.
.

Further tested. I was right, it's unrelated to monitor frequency but tied to virtual texture. Switching from high to medium lessons the problem dramatically although micro stutters are sill there just not as prevalent. It's like Uber has capped texture memory and it's constantly buffering, not taking advantage of the extra vram on my card. Anyone else want to test this to see if they have the same issue? Scroll around on a planet fairly zoomed in while running fraps or something. This issue has definitely worsened since I last played in february. A recent patch as made it worse. This game is still a buggy mess for me.

Uber wrote their own virtual texture streaming tech, the total size of the texture generated for the planet is huge so it has to be streamed. that said I was noticing issues which turned out to be cpu throttling. Frame rate is fairly consistent since then.

Have you tried disabling your mods and re test?

Yep, uninstalled mods. If that was the case you described above then why is Uber not utilizing my full 2 gb of VRAM and instead only 1.3 gb?

It's may use more VRAM depend on geometry complexity and amount of details on planet surface. Also game of course keep some low-quality textures in "cache" almost all the time, but it's pointless to try utilize all your VRAM.

Any huge planet in PA may have hundreds GBs or even TBs of textures for highest quality so game always attempt to use highest possible texture resolution for areas closest to camera while other areas using low-quality textures.

You can see visualization of texture streaming process using "viz VTMips" command in debug console. Just go to system editor, create some planet, press F12, use the command and enjoy.

No, unless someone make patched SDL2 DLL that toggle modal fullscreen. It's should be quite easy. There is some chance it's won't work properly of course as developers never planned to implement modal fullscreen.

Borderless fullscreen does not work with multi gpus. Pretty bad call on their part. How about vsync? Anyway to disable that?

It astounds me that these basic options are not changeable in the game.

Lots of other games stream textures just fine without any stuttering. Something on ubers end weird is happening here. Anyone else notice this?

You have multi gpu? That would explain it... PA doesn't support multi gpu officially. Create a profile for pa that sets it to run on single card will improve things. You can also control vsync in graphics card manager easy enough.

This isn't true. Nvidia SLI does work with borderless fullscreen.
AMD CrossFireX didn't at least half year ago, but it's only AMD problem.

As far as I aware (keep in mind I wasn't around for last half year) PA don't enforce VSync by any way. So it's just use settings of your desktop, e.g Nvidia Control panel.

Lack of modal fullscreen support is intended and was developers decision from very early.

Though back then game didn't use SDL2, but own code for every platform and who knows may be it's what was a problem. I suppose it's possible that Uber may reconsider this now if SDL provide this feature for free.

I suppose @jorgenpt can comment on that.

Simple "Streaming" isn't really correct term in case of PA. There is several games using tech named "megatexture" (RAGE, Wolfenstein: The New Order) that basically stream textures from HDD on the fly depend on distance, but it's not what PA doing.

In PA each planet type have number of base textures while actual surface texture generated on the fly.

I've not been getting these fps drops when moving (actually I did have 2 occurrences of this as I mentioned... first was because I have an MSI graphics board and motherboard and had MSI afterburner installed- removing that made a big difference, secondly was when I upgraded my CPU I hadn't added any additional cooling into my case, so wound up with termal throttling). Both of these issues were config problems my end, game runs nice and smooth now, although as I mentioned before, if your running dual GPU, that as far as I'm aware isn't officially supported (someone else with Dual 970's was having problems too). Turning off SLI / Crosfire X for PA is the best solution (and a single mid to high end card is fine anyway, my R9 280 keeps up fine with it).

I have tried disabling SLI, doesn't improve things so I don't think it's multi-gpu related. The fact that changing a single texture based option makes me pretty sure it's vram related. Something strange is going on behind the scenes with Uber's coding.

Borderless fullscreen on nvidia doesn't work for most games. A few like BF4 works but in general it isn't really supported. I disabled SLI during my testing though, so that sorts that out. Still, options are always good and pretty much any modern game devoloper supports changing resolution and allows for fullscreen.

VSYNC is enabled by default. If I switch my refresh rate to 60 hz I'm capped at 60 fps, likewise 120 hz is 120 fps. This is definitely not something on inside my nvidia driver nor the game as I rarely enable it.

PA don't have SLI profile anyway and even if borderless was issue it's wouldn't work except Nvidia going to support it. Game developers can't do anything about SLI/CFx.

PA have browser-powered UI that would looks like a crap if non-native resolution was used. So there I'm fully support devs decision to not have traditional resolution option.

As I said PA fully depend on your system settings in this case.

Just because you keep saying it doesn't mean you are right. Vsync in global settings: OFF. Vysnc in PA settings: OFF. Yet it is still on inside the game, therefor being forced on by the application (PA).

Even if resolution isn't an option some thing should be like fullscreen, refresh rate and vysnc. It is lazy development to not have basic features games have had since the late 90's. In fact, this is the first game I have played since playing my Amiga that doesn't support basic graphic options on PC.

PA doesn't force Vsync on either machine I play it on (one all AMD, the other Intel / Nvidia), so I don't think it does this by default. There is something strange going on with that...

Just like to add that with 5 Systems all running copy's of PA with
Either AMD or Nvidia hardware Vsync is forced and i can't even find a option to disable it on either.
Seems like blightedmythos is right on a few points.

Its funny when i complained about the game not running above
20fps and stuttering with really high end specs a year and a bit ago i was the
Same kinda response.

Well there's obviously an issue here. Vsync definitely *isn't forced* on either of my machines. What operating system are you using out of interest? Both my machines are on Windows 7 64 bit, are you guys both on Windows 8.1 by any chance? There has to be another factor here we're missing- if we can get specific details of a repro for this we can put it to Uber for a fix. They are usually very helpful if you can very clearly define an issue for them with steps to reproduce it...

Windows 7 64bit
Windows 8.1 64bit and Pro
Windows Server

For as long as i have being playing Vsync has being forced and i can't find a option to turn it off or
a config file to change it in PA its not even in the options menu for me.

Cards tested with R9 290 GTX 780 and TI HD 7950-7970
GTX 760 GT 750m Quadro k3000m Quadro fx 3800 HD 6870

I would also like to mention that when PA was less optimized network wise
I had huge problems with lower upload speeds so that mite be a issue for the OP.

Yeah network performance is a big one for PA (unless playing offline of course)...

I just wanted to be sure that I'm not making this up, so I've loaded up PA (latest PTE) on my machine (Windows 7 64 bit, Radeon R9 280 on Omega Drivers) to check if V-Sync was on (I have a 1080p 60 hz monitor)... Have a look at the screen shot...

https://www.dropbox.com/s/pufrmuyxb256qjx/fps.jpg?dl=0

77 fps on game start, that's on a 1080p 60hz monitor so defo no v-sync there (had to drop to low settings in order to bump fps up that high, usually sits around 50fps on my machine with everything cranked up, map was Amplus btw).

Edit: In relation to @blightedmythos other comments, I did some experimenting and I can confirm I also see fps drops when zooming in / out, although the frame rate remains smooth on this machine (dropping briefly from 70 ish fps to around 40, then back up). Panning with the arrow keys or middle mouse also drops fps a little, but less so (maybe dropping to 60). This was me running low though to get the FPS as high as possible, I'll have to do more testing to see if it's worse with high textures although I've not really noticed any issues (it could be related to the map size thinking about it... I usually play 1 v 1 so 1 or 2 planets max most games, the fps is noticeably lower on a larger map).