Stuttering and FFB aberrations in multiplayer

Romain F

Romain F

Registered
Hello,

When i enter an online game with more than around 30 cars, i experience massive stutterings and FFB alterations. Stutterings affect both the graphics and the physics (for instance i lose ground on another car in the pitlane, under pit-limiter). FFB aberrations include vibrations like running on a flat spotted tyre at high speed (even if i drive a brand new tyre in the pitlane). If i quit the crowded server and join an empty one, same track, same car, everything works fine (both framerate and FFB-wise). The game doesn't completely crash though, it's just severe underperformance.

It's hard to tell when the issue appeared because it can be encountered only when joining a crowded server, which i do only on race day about once a month. I can only say that i never faced this issue in the 2021/22 season or before. It happened only in my september and october races this year.

My PC was bought in 2014 and chosen in order to handle rF2 by that time. It received two upgrades since then (GPU and SSDs). Windows is installed on the Samsung disk and both Steam and rFactor 2 are installed on the Crucial one. I am fully aware that my PC is not a top tier one but on the other hand i'm not so thirsty on fancy graphics so i mostly run medium settings and disable most of effects (except shadows). It used to work fine until september this year...

Config :
CPU: i5-4440
GPU: GTX 1660-Ti
Motherboard: Asrock B85M-HDS
hard disk: Samsung 850 Pro 256GB + Crucial MX500 1TB
RAM: DDR3 1600 C11 2x4GB
OS: Windows 10

If you need further information, i can provide you some, although i'm not an expert in IT and may need some advise. Dump file and CSV joined.
 

Attachments

Hi, can you do these tests too?

Try with 30+ AI cars, to see if something similar happens, and if it's related to netcode or something else.

Also use ctrl-c to show cpu load (purple bar at the bottom) vs gpu load. In this case you'll probably see a full purple bar, indicating cpu overload.
 
Romain F said:
Hello,

When i enter an online game with more than around 30 cars, i experience massive stutterings and FFB alterations. Stutterings affect both the graphics and the physics (for instance i lose ground on another car in the pitlane, under pit-limiter). FFB aberrations include vibrations like running on a flat spotted tyre at high speed (even if i drive a brand new tyre in the pitlane). If i quit the crowded server and join an empty one, same track, same car, everything works fine (both framerate and FFB-wise). The game doesn't completely crash though, it's just severe underperformance.

It's hard to tell when the issue appeared because it can be encountered only when joining a crowded server, which i do only on race day about once a month. I can only say that i never faced this issue in the 2021/22 season or before. It happened only in my september and october races this year.

My PC was bought in 2014 and chosen in order to handle rF2 by that time. It received two upgrades since then (GPU and SSDs). Windows is installed on the Samsung disk and both Steam and rFactor 2 are installed on the Crucial one. I am fully aware that my PC is not a top tier one but on the other hand i'm not so thirsty on fancy graphics so i mostly run medium settings and disable most of effects (except shadows). It used to work fine until september this year...

Config :
CPU: i5-4440
GPU: GTX 1660-Ti
Motherboard: Asrock B85M-HDS
hard disk: Samsung 850 Pro 256GB + Crucial MX500 1TB
RAM: DDR3 1600 C11 2x4GB
OS: Windows 10

If you need further information, i can provide you some, although i'm not an expert in IT and may need some advise. Dump file and CSV joined.
Click to expand...

Perhaps Real Road 2.0 associated to multiplayer is too much for your CPU, which is already on the old side of things.
8 years is an eternity...
 
I'm personally suffering from these stuttering and small freezes too when online racing with 18+ drivers.
Nothing when there are only 3-4 drivers connected. Lowering graphics does not help so much.

I'm also aware that many drivers in our community are commenting it.

My Specs:
Intel Xeon E5-1630v3 (3.70ghz 4-core)
RAM 32GB DDR4
Nvidia RTX 2060 6GB
Network: 1gb/1gb
 
Javibeza said:
I'm personally suffering from these stuttering and small freezes too when online racing with 18+ drivers.
Nothing when there are only 3-4 drivers connected. Lowering graphics does not help so much.

I'm also aware that many drivers in our community are commenting it.

My Specs:
Intel Xeon E5-1630v3 (3.70ghz 4-core)
RAM 32GB DDR4
Nvidia RTX 2060 6GB
Network: 1gb/1gb
Click to expand...

You are - almost certainly - CPU bottlenecked.
 
Hello and thanks for your answers.
coasting&cruising said:
Hi, can you do these tests too?

Try with 30+ AI cars, to see if something similar happens, and if it's related to netcode or something else.

Also use ctrl-c to show cpu load (purple bar at the bottom) vs gpu load. In this case you'll probably see a full purple bar, indicating cpu overload.
Click to expand...
I run the test with 35 IA and it's not better than online.

1. Stuttering happens with AI as well. Stuttering was lighter in the free practice session with IA than it was online (if free practice too). But stuttering became heavier when i launched a race session (even heavier than online in practice).

2. In practice, the physics seem untouched (no FFB aberration and normal pace). But as soon as i passed to race, the framerate dropped and the car speed dropped accordingly (i guess it would take about 5 minutes to complete a Daytona lap in GTE, if it gives an idea). IA left me behind. IA appear not to be physically slowed down by the stuttering, although they are impacted in some sort of way: i could see them lagging here and there, often all cars at the same time... Like if the game was trying to synchronize something or so...

3. Green bar was allways at maximum while purple bar was 40-50% when in pit box, and 80-100% when on track. In race session, both gauges were always at 100%.

Additional information : until this summer, i always had a better framerate (and less stutterings, should they happen) online than with IA.

vava74 said:
Perhaps Real Road 2.0 associated to multiplayer is too much for your CPU, which is already on the old side of things.
8 years is an eternity...
Click to expand...
rF2 is older than my CPU... which was by then dimensionned to match rF2's recommended config. I can acknowledge rF2 right now is not the same as rF2 back then but still... Everything was fine 3 months ago.
 
Romain F said:
Hello and thanks for your answers.

I run the test with 35 IA and it's not better than online.

1. Stuttering happens with AI as well. Stuttering was lighter in the free practice session with IA than it was online (if free practice too). But stuttering became heavier when i launched a race session (even heavier than online in practice).

2. In practice, the physics seem untouched (no FFB aberration and normal pace). But as soon as i passed to race, the framerate dropped and the car speed dropped accordingly (i guess it would take about 5 minutes to complete a Daytona lap in GTE, if it gives an idea). IA left me behind. IA appear not to be physically slowed down by the stuttering, although they are impacted in some sort of way: i could see them lagging here and there, often all cars at the same time... Like if the game was trying to synchronize something or so...

3. Green bar was allways at maximum while purple bar was 40-50% when in pit box, and 80-100% when on track. In race session, both gauges were always at 100%.

Additional information : until this summer, i always had a better framerate (and less stutterings, should they happen) online than with IA.


rF2 is older than my CPU... which was by then dimensionned to match rF2's recommended config. I can acknowledge rF2 right now is not the same as rF2 back then but still... Everything was fine 3 months ago.
Click to expand...

It's really not the same game and Real Road 2.0, the new sound engine and the sparks added new layers of CPU demand.
 
the game stutters like hell even with my new PC i9 13900k and 4090....
AMS2, F1 2022, DR 2.0, ACC, all are fine.
The exception should be the issue, but I dont find the issue....
My theory is rF2 engine is too much old for the new hardware...


Edit : Solved.
 
Last edited:
AlexHeuskat said:
the game stutters like hell even with my new PC i9 13900k and 4090....
AMS2, F1 2022, DR 2.0, ACC, all are fine.
The exception should be the issue, but I dont find the issue....
My theory is rF2 engine is too much old for the new hardware...
Click to expand...
You should not have those issues. I am in VR, with a 58003D + 4090 and it runs really well. In VR with the Reverb G2 I can't max out graphics, but I can run the High present within normal daylight conditions on DLC tracks (some good looking mods -ie. Digga's - are very poorly optimised). For instance, with a full Formula Pro grid at Monza, at 5pm, medium-long shadows: zero issues.

There was an optional W10 update a few weeks (maybe up to 3 months ago) that cratered performance.
Check if by any chance you don't have that applied.
In case you are in W11, recently there was also an update that hammered performance, being that your current setup is so powerful that it only manifests on rF2.
 
vava74 said:
You should not have those issues. I am in VR, with a 58003D + 4090 and it runs really well. In VR with the Reverb G2 I can't max out graphics, but I can run the High present within normal daylight conditions on DLC tracks (some good looking mods -ie. Digga's - are very poorly optimised). For instance, with a full Formula Pro grid at Monza, at 5pm, medium-long shadows: zero issues.

There was an optional W10 update a few weeks (maybe up to 3 months ago) that cratered performance.
Check if by any chance you don't have that applied.
In case you are in W11, recently there was also an update that hammered performance, being that your current setup is so powerful that it only manifests on rF2.
Click to expand...
Holy sh*t even with 4090 u can't max out !
At that price i expect VR or 4K MAXIMUM everything else (maybe excluding anti aliasing and some visual effects i hate).
 
Simulation_Player said:
Holy sh*t even with 4090 u can't max out !
At that price i expect VR or 4K MAXIMUM everything else (maybe excluding anti aliasing and some visual effects i hate).
Click to expand...
I play at triple 1440p with Anti aliasing x8 and all at max, and in day in Nordschleife 20 AI, I have easy 120fps constant, with night I have 80/110 at start, then constant 120fps....I did not try rain in rF2, I suspect the performance awfull, and I don't like the rain in rF2..

vava74 said:
You should not have those issues. I am in VR, with a 58003D + 4090 and it runs really well. In VR with the Reverb G2 I can't max out graphics, but I can run the High present within normal daylight conditions on DLC tracks (some good looking mods -ie. Digga's - are very poorly optimised). For instance, with a full Formula Pro grid at Monza, at 5pm, medium-long shadows: zero issues.

There was an optional W10 update a few weeks (maybe up to 3 months ago) that cratered performance.
Check if by any chance you don't have that applied.
In case you are in W11, recently there was also an update that hammered performance, being that your current setup is so powerful that it only manifests on rF2.
Click to expand...
yeah fixed, now it's 100% smooth, with Windows 11 and Full screen Optimisation OFF.
For the rain+night, I suspect awfull performance.
AMS2 and ACC have a better framerate with rain/night.
 
Romain F said:
3. Green bar was allways at maximum while purple bar was 40-50% when in pit box, and 80-100% when on track. In race session, both gauges were always at 100%.
Click to expand...

The purple bar shouldn't ever be as high as 80-100%. You're definitely bottlenecked by the CPU. I've had this issue before and it looked as you describe. I guess it has progressively reached the point where it has become the bottleneck when it wasn't before.

Your CPU was released the same year rFactor 2 was released so it has the same age. You might have bought it last year by it's still a 9 year old CPU.

You can still try to follow some tutorials to minimize the CPU usage by the OS and other apps while you're gaming. It doesn't matter much when your CPU has more than enough power but it becomes important when you're reaching the limit of your CPU.
 
Bernat said:
The purple bar shouldn't ever be as high as 80-100%. You're definitely bottlenecked by the CPU. (..)
Click to expand...

The purple bar might be an overall approximation of CPU load not tell the whole story. For instance, if one of the cpu cores is blocked waiting for interprocess communication or networking (but in fact doing nothing), would the purple bar still show full? It would be more informative if we had one bar for each core, and also to have some info to tell if each core is locked waiting for other processes of if it's actually doing something at 100% usage.

Maybe there are some bottlenecks due to rF2 code, like lack of multithreading for some parts of the engine.
 
coasting&cruising said:
The purple bar might be an overall approximation of CPU load not tell the whole story. For instance, if one of the cpu cores is blocked waiting for interprocess communication or networking (but in fact doing nothing), would the purple bar still show full? It would be more informative if we had one bar for each core, and also to have some info to tell if each core is locked waiting for other processes of if it's actually doing something at 100% usage.

Maybe there are some bottlenecks due to rF2 code, like lack of multithreading for some parts of the engine.
Click to expand...

We're talking about the physics thread (purple bar), the most demanding.
 
vava74 said:
My post preceded Alex's "Solved" edit and, I am pretty sure, any reference on the thread's title to "solved".
Click to expand...

To explain: when you wrote your helpful post, he had already changed his own thread to solved. Nothing wrong with what you did.
 
Bernat said:
You're definitely bottlenecked by the CPU.
Click to expand...
The CPU hasn't been upgraded for 8 years, no wonder it should be a weaker point. Should i buy a new CPU, it may be wiser to get a completely new PC (i'd just keep SSD and GPU). I'm not really hyped by such an investment since i don't play rF2 as intensely as during our honeymoon, and my PC works perfectly fine and smooth for other uses (despite its age). *stingy*

Bernat said:
You can still try to follow some tutorials to minimize the CPU usage by the OS and other apps while you're gaming. It doesn't matter much when your CPU has more than enough power but it becomes important when you're reaching the limit of your CPU.
Click to expand...
Is the gain to expect massive or marginal?

coasting&cruising said:
Maybe there are some bottlenecks due to rF2 code, like lack of multithreading for some parts of the engine.
Click to expand...
Who knows? Should it be that, i could hope for improvements on some future builds...
 
Last edited:
Romain F said:
The CPU hasn't been upgraded for 8 years, no wonder it should be a weaker point. Should i buy a new CPU, it may be wiser to get a completely new PC (i'd just keep SSD and GPU). I'm not really hyped by such an investment since i don't play rF2 as intensely as during our honeymoon, and my PC works perfectly fine and smooth for other uses (despite its age).


Is the gain to expect massive or marginal?
Click to expand...

The only way to know is trying. You might find out some background app is causing the bottleneck. Or maybe there's nothing to gain.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top