FPS Drops and Stuttering

Cdrfk, I appreciate you testing this. Try setting texture to high as it is A LOT more noticable. I have forced vsnyc on both my windows 8.1 and windows 7 machines. I have double and triple checked driver settings. Nadda. Very strange it is not forced for you.

The shuttering while scrolling has always been noticable for me but it has definitely gotten worse since my return. I can see a lot of texture pop in while scrolling around with arrows. I am pretty certain it has something to do with this. Hopefully there is something on ubers end they can do to smooth this out a bit.

Was Vsync forced off or set to application controlled? It may make a difference, but it seems unlikely. I'll test it later with my 780 since I can run on high every thing like blightedmythos.

Please let me know if you get the same stuttering. I am curious.

I can say that, without a doubt, PA forces Vsync. I have my control panel set to "use the 3D application setting" and on low settings I get 60FPS and at Uber settings with 175% supersampling I get 60FPS and only 83% GPU usage ~6.5GB of RAM while only using 1270MB of vRAM. This is on Forge.

With Vsync set to "off" in the Nvidia Control Panel my FPS goes up to 115 zoomed out and 86 when zooming it, stabilizing around 90-95 when not moving. I'm guessing that this is because the game is just rendering new textures rather than displaying previously (instantly that is) rendered ones. This might be more noticeable if you're just barely getting 60 FPS or if you're in between 30 and 60 so you may feel it drop below 30 or get near it.

Edit: without Vsync, PA uses basically 100% of my GPU and nearly half of my vRAM.

Also, I don't know if SXX or cdrkf explained, but the supersampling is like Nvidia's DSR, only this is application controlled. The game automagically scales to the desktop resolution, and from there you are basically anti-aliasing it and using higher resolution textures with a few other options to disable stuff that is hard on low end GPUs.

I also tried different presets just to see if only the top ones enable Vsync, but that's not the case either. You mentioned that you weren't getting Vsync, so either it's because PA is waiting for 120FPS (which is silly) rather than 60, or you have disabled it in the past OR you have a program setting that you created for PA in the past.

Vsync is definitely forced as I suspected. Everyone else must have turned if off at driver level and forgot or something. To clarify, I never said Vsync wasn't on. It's always on for me unless I force it off in the nvidia control panel. I just get 120 because I have a 120 hz monitor.

So if you pan from one side of the planet and do a whole 360 rotation a few times you don't notice a LOT of micro stuttering while doing it? I get dips down to 22 fps and I am not using super sampling. Just everything set to high.

None. Sometimes I get a 1-5 FPS drop when zooming in, but that's just higher resolution textures. I know you've posted one before somewhere, but what is your dxdiag? I'm more curious about the hardware rather than the drivers here.

Well, this is correct behaviour.
According to the OpenGL specification of WGL_EXT_swapcontrol (<- yeah, that's the part which controls vertical synchronization on the Windows platform, there is a different specification for Linux called GLX_EXT_swapcontrol which even if it sounds similar behaves completely different) there is no default value. (If someone wants to get a headache, here is the specification on opengl.org)
This means that every OpenGL driver may specify it's own default value for wglSwapIntervallEXT, or use a user provided value through the driver settings, or even better, a driver may choose to override the application completely: This is the ominous "Force VSync off/on" setting, which basically tells OpenGL to ignore any value that the application provides by wglSwapIntervallEXT.
I suspect that all modern drivers use 1 as a sane default value (that means that VSync is turned on) but there is no guarantee for that, it this may vary from vendor to vendor or even from driver version to driver version.

I have a pair of 680 GTX in SLI, i5 2500 OC to 4.5 ghz and 16 GB of ram. Running Windows 8.1

After playing around with all sorts of settings, the issue is definitely lessened with SLI turned off. With it on the stuttering is much, much worse. I still get some micro stuttering, or jerkiness when scrolling around with wsda. It's almost like a minor vibration at the edge of the screen. It's hard to describe but it feels like my framerate is lower then it is actually reading and things just don't feel "smooth" when scrolling. Everything looks great if I don't pan around. I don't know if you have any multi-gpu rigs in the office, or if any of your employees have a setup at home, but it might be worth checking out. I know it's pretty niche and maybe not worth the resources to look into but maybe it could be passed own to nvidia or something.

I would suspect that it comes from the streaming part.
If you stream textures, more graphics cards will cut your throughput on the PCIe brigde. Instead of streaming a texture to one GPU you end up of streaming it multiple times (once for each graphics card), since every card needs the all the textures. This is simply a technical limitation of SLI.

Guys seriously stop using this "streaming" term because PA generate textures on GPU using shaders. Generated textures never stored anywhere except GPU memory (at least they shouldn't as long as total memory usage fit into VRAM) so they are not using PCIe bridge.

Also the way SLI/CFX work guarantee that even if multi-GPU going to be used for PA all cards would just do duplicate job and won't use PCIe or any other bridge too.

Do you have evidence that the planet surfaces are rendered on the GPU side?

The question of the day is how much lessened is it? With that hardware, assuming sufficient cooling, you shouldn't run into any reasonable issues in PA. From my limited SLI knowledge, I've read that it can cause micro-stuttering in games that don't support SLI or simply because the driver isn't perfect. PA has also had major issues with SLI throughout its entire life, often causing way bigger issues, so I'd just disable it for PA, or go into Nvidia Control Panel and try to make a Program Setting that disable's SLI whenever you run the game. (You'll have to "Add" PA).

Addition: @crizmess It seems that SXX is probably right here. I just ran a game on Forge with max settings and the main menu used more of my PCIe bus than anything else. On the loading screen, there is one moment of my bus usage jumping up quite high (50%) and after that it stayed below 25% even when scrolling all over the planet, with looking at the lava being the highest usage. I used HWMonitor to check, and it's fairly accurate.

I'd certainly remember that developers was talking about something like that. I'll try to find it.

For me main evidence is fact that there is heavy glitches within terrain texture while PA running on LLVMPipe.

Don't bother to search for it. The PCIe utilisation @websterx01 reported is evidence enough for me.