I suspect those who find it stuttery are running it in windowed mode or are having the bug where the game runs in pseudo fullscreen mode. FPS is indeed smooother and less fluctuating than in DX9 in proper fullscreen mode.
How can someone diagnose if the game run in fullscreen mode or not? By the way, ALT-TAB has no effect on my part once RF2 is running.
In my case, it is easy. Using a different resolution to the desktop one, the image won't scale to fit the screen. A secondary clue is that you cannot alt tab to other open applications such as hotlaps, motec, teamspeak, remote desktop... A third clue is that I get the same fps as with windowed and borderless. In DX9 I have 30% higher fps in fullscreen vs windowed and borderless.
Another way I found is to set the refresh rate to something different than your windows default and check if it changes on your monitor menu.
Uhm ok, then fullscreen mode does not work to me too, but still despite the poor framerate, at least It's smooth.
All pointing to operator system config . I've bought a new pc for the ' new' rf2 and no stutters , no input lag , high FPS , added look to the game in general .. All in DX 11 and pretty much maxed out settings . Look within and Ye shall find the real meaning to life.. after dx9 ...
The only thing that worries me is if DX9 are not receiving any updates now. Such as of S397 fix some bugs (I've mentioned one in particular in multiple threads) but it isn't compatible with DX9.
If you're running DX11 with maxed out settings it means you can't race on tracks that haven't been optimized for DX11 due to the excessive glare, so I wouldn't call that the real meaning to life
That's true, but hopefully the time frames will help here. So for example, if they fix the bugs you've found in the next 6 months, and don't leave dx9 (stop updating) in that time, you'll be fine. And if the UI etc is brought out very soon, maybe in that 6 months or not too much longer, some alternatives will exist for the TV plugin etc. Can only hope
Normaly it's only certain textures that glare up and you can still race . Just look past them ..3rd party DX 9 tracks are getting updated daily so all is good here on my sim planet
I'm all for DX11 and in fact I've never used the DX9 version. But I was on an empty server yesterday, no cars and was running at a decent FPS (at least for my machine), and all of a sudden stuttering suddenly appeared which was so severe it caused me to crash. The difficulty is it appears to happen at random, I did a race with 14 AI on the same track and not a bit of stuttering. What I also noticed was that, when I first started playing rFactor with the post effects set to medium with a much lower FPS I never got a bit of stuttering, the issue with stuttering only started to occur when I turned post effects to none and switched on the Anti-Aliasing to 1. From my experience, stuttering happens more when FPS is higher, this is what is confusing. I would have imagined the opposite. Anyway hopefully the new build will help, I'm well aware it's still in beta so fully expected some issues. It could also be because I only race at Spa '66 which I know hasn't yet been updated to DX11. Also not sure if it makes a difference but when I reach FPS in its 50s stuttering is more likely to occur. Could this be related to the fact my refresh monitor is set to 48MHz? I only didn't set it to 60Mhz because my FPS never gets that high (although it's possible it could if I switch off the Anti-Aliasing and road reflection).
Yeah, that sounds bad Jon! Where did you set this refresh rate (Hz by the way)? In the monitor itself? I wouldn´t cap it. 60 FPS should be a minimum to reach imo. I know it works with lower FPS too, but the chance for lag (and obviously also stuttering?) is bigger.
It's set in the settings tab of the launcher, in the Video Options menu in the top left corner. I've done some more testing, I increased the texture quality to high and increased the Anisotropic filtering and it seems to have fixed the stuttering. It seems to appear only when my FPS goes over 40. I'll experiment with the refresh rate at 60, maybe that'll do the trick. I'm sure as Bwana mentioned it's partly due to background tasks. Just before entering the Masta Kink a Skype pop-up window appeared with a stupid picture even though I rarely use it and never have it open. I'll need to try and remove all these background irritants which have flooded Windows 10, I'm sure half the problem is caused by them! Cheers.
Possibly an important observation: Basically, after some research I found that a possible cause of the stuttering that some users are facing is with Skip updates setting found in the controller.json file. I had changed my pre-configured wheel to use different buttons, and saved the file under a new name to avoid overwriting the original. However, after checking the new file I noticed that the following lines were completely missing from the new file: "Skip updates":0, "Skip updates#":"Apparently some drivers can't handle a quick FFB update rate, so use this hack to skip the given number of updates (0=full update rate, 1=half, 2=one-third, 3=one-quarter, etc.)", They were there in the original, just not in my newly named controller. I added the above lines to my newly named controller.json file and it appears to have completely fixed the stuttering issues, and the game does appear to run much smoother (although that might be a placebo effect). I also started a race with 14 AI cars and again no stuttering and my CPU purple bar remained static at around 50% (before it fluctuated to 80% and sometimes 100%). I'm now able to get well over 40 FPS without any stuttering, and I managed to reach to close to 60fps even with many of the graphical settings like textures quality set to high. It's still too early to say whether this has completely fixed it, but the results were promising, especially considering when I first started playing rFactor 2 I was using a modified version of the original wheel file without saving it as a new name and never experienced any stuttering. If the above lines are essential to be included in the controller.json, then the developers should be aware that when saving the controller settings under a new name from within rFactor 2 (in the controls menu in-game) these lines are not added, or at least weren't in my case. It could also explain why some users experience the problem while others do not.
There is no skip updates in any of my Controller.JSON files, so I suspect it has been removed on purpose. I would find it a) weird if it somehow worked by adding it manually back if the code doesn't use that line anymore and b) strange that it's helping to put it at "0", because the purpose of that line was to use a higher value than 0 for wheels that couldn't handle a high update rate. I think 0 is default anyway, regardless if you have that line there or not.
The skip update was definitely present in the default controller because I copied and pasted it from there. I got the game recently and believe it hasn't been updated since I got it. Like you, I originally presumed it would default to 0, but I've just done some more testing and without a doubt it's eliminated the stuttering. Another thing I noticed was that before, replays would play at a higher FPS than while driving which I presumed was due to the real-time physics and FFB, now the replays are playing at a lower FPS which is what I would have expected considering there are more cars on screen. I'm really not an expert though. It may be due to another factor, as soon as I got home and switched on the computer I loaded up rFactor and there was stuttering, which is why I did some additional research. Then I made the changes mentioned above and reloaded rfactor and the stuttering was gone. It could be due to background tasks still loading at start up which had completed their tasks by the time I reloaded it. But the line was definitely in my default controller's json file and not in my newly named controller file. It's probably a quite complex problem which only the developers know how to fix, I just put it there in case it could help others or the developers.
I can confirm that skip updates is present in default controller files and gets overriden by use thread when saving to controller.json at game exit. I think your trying to introduce the line is useless as the game will remove those lines from controller.json everytime you exit the game. If you are under something and those lines are effective, it should only last until you exit the game. Then you should go back to old stuttering a second time you run rF2 unless you load again the wheel profile you created. If you don't touch anything it will load controller.json where those lines have been removed. Do you get my point? Can you try it?
I got your point, in fact I made a mistake. I was referring to the controller settings in the controller folder, I didn't know about the controller.json file in the player folder. That indeed does remove the Skip Update, although it's still present in my controller setup in the controller folder. I've been working for much of the day and didn't have time to do a proper test, although I did quickly do what you suggested, first run a lap when it first loads, then loaded the controller I had saved from the controller folder. I didn't experience stuttering on either occasion, but I'm starting to wonder whether it was because I made some other changes at the weekend. I basically followed the steps given in this post: https://fossbytes.com/how-to-fix-high-ram-and-cpu-usage-of-windows-10-system-ntoskrnl-exe-process/ After the changes, I noticed a considerably increase in performance in Windows 10 in general, which perhaps has had a knock-on effect on rFactor. It's quite possible, as others have pointed out, that it is indeed related to background tasks. I won't have time until the weekend to properly test everything, but I plan to remove my anti-virus from startup and pretty much everything else. I'll also research a suitable program which suspends all non-essential background activity. But in all honesty the stuttering only happens only very occasionally (usually if I load rFactor soon after starting up the computer), and not really a problem for me since I'm just a casual racer and am quite content with 40fps with the textures set to high and anisotropic filtering set to x8, with road reflection set to Low and AA set to 1. I've had a fair few races with the AI and a few close races with some guys in an online practice server, without experiencing any stuttering or lag. Usually if it happens, it happens on the first lap only. Post effects can definitely be left off, they make little to no difference during gameplay (except the performance hit), although the DoF is superb for replays. The road texture, in my opinion, is one of the areas where rFactor 2 shines, so it's what I focus on during setting up the graphics. A "road quality" setting wouldn't go amiss, neither would customisable filters to create a vintage, but drivable, colour effect or even a low contrast B&W filter which in turn could allow further graphics options to be reduced. It's also worth noting that the FFB is simply fantastic, spinning the car and then experiencing the micro-vibrations from the tyres' flat spots is something I've never experienced in a sim before. The same applies to the tyre degradation in general. If the price we pay for such unrivaled FFB and physics is an occasional stutter then that seems a pretty fair trade-off to me, although I accept others may disagree.
