The Callisto Protocol [PC Stutter Fest]

[BRiT]

And by some they must mean All PC Users...

If it will be ready in a just few hours, they really should have had it for the release or at the least as part of Day 0 launch.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1598732338133110784

 

[swaaye]

It went "gold" around October 27. Does that even mean anything with games? Besides some hot news to get those preorders flowing.

And what's to say they haven't been furiously patching it since October 27?

 

[sir doris]

Hmm, I guess I must have already played it with the patch then. It pre-installed last night and then when I fired it up this afternoon (4pm GTM), I had a 15ish GB patch. I can barely dare to imagine what it must have been like before the patch.

Overall performance was quite good, averaged 78fps on the benchmark, everything maxed out at 1440p with FSR 2 Quality. But the constant stuttering broke any imersion. I really don't understand how a deveopler can get a game to this state, with the time and care taken with the graphics and the sound, game directors employed to create the perfect environments, setting scenes, etc. all to create the atmosphere and then to just have the whole thing fall apart with these imersion breaking stutters.

I don't think I've played any recent Unreal Engine games, have any games with shader stutter ever been sucessfully patched?

 

[Malo]

I don't think I've played any recent Unreal Engine games, have any games with shader stutter ever been sucessfully patched?

100% successfully as in the issue completely negated? I don't believe so. The issue can be alleviated a lot though.

 

[swaaye]

It's probably more a matter of the multiplatform nature of things. The games could be architected to be buttery smooth on PC but they don't give enough of a shit anymore as that's not the bulk of their audience.

Or maybe we should look elsewhere...like Microsoft. 22H2 wasn't exactly great. And what's with that HAGS thing that causes the occasional game to stutter like crazy.

 

[BRiT]

Hmm, I guess I must have already played it with the patch then. It pre-installed last night and then when I fired it up this afternoon (4pm GTM), I had a 15ish GB patch. I can barely dare to imagine what it must have been like before the patch.

Pretty sure that's the Day One patch and not the patch they're working on for ShaderStutter.

I don't think I've played any recent Unreal Engine games, have any games with shader stutter ever been sucessfully patched?

Yes. Not a 100% solution but some have been patched to alleviate the stutter. Gotham Knights for one, I think.

 

[swaaye]

Did they actually say it's shader related or is that just the assumption these days? I'd think if they don't do any precompilation there would be initial stuttering but eventually all the shaders should be cached by the engine, DirectX or NV driver.

 

[BRiT]

Did they actually say it's shader related or is that just the assumption these days? I'd think if they don't do any precompilation there would be initial stuttering but eventually all the shaders should be cached by the engine, DirectX or NV driver.

DigitalFoundry video section with @Dictator commenting its Shader Compilation from all the empirical evidence he can see.

The key aspect being it doesn't happen the second time through.

 

[digitalwanderer]

If it's shader compilation then it's a self-fixing problem and I'll just let the game sit for a while after it fires up, thanks for the advice!

 

[Malo]

If it's shader compilation then it's a self-fixing problem and I'll just let the game sit for a while after it fires up, thanks for the advice!

It doesn't work like that. Unless the developer specifically has a precompiling solution in place, the shaders cache when you first encounter them while playing the game.

 

[digitalwanderer]

It doesn't work like that. Unless the developer specifically has a precompiling solution in place, the shaders cache when you first encounter them while playing the game.

Ah, thanks for the correction and education. I thought it was just like the initial shader cache building like in Zero Dawn when you first fire up the game or whenever you update your drivers.

 

[pjbliverpool]

I don't think I've played any recent Unreal Engine games, have any games with shader stutter ever been sucessfully patched?

Yes. Not a 100% solution but some have been patched to alleviate the stutter. Gotham Knights for one, I think.

Sackboy too. In fact based on the dev tweet you linked this may well end up being a very similar situation.

1. Game released in a shit state
2. Digital Foundry pans it for #shaderstutter
3. Game is patched to resolve the shader stutter in a ridiculously short timescale

I'm not necessarily expect a perfect solution that quickly like we saw with Sackboy given the additional complexity of this game, but I imagine things will improve rapidly given the reception it's getting and the fact that the devs are obviously aware of it.

 

[mr magoo]

It doesn't work like that. Unless the developer specifically has a precompiling solution in place, the shaders cache when you first encounter them while playing the game.

Ask someone to finish the game first and then you can play stutter free. Follow me on MySpace for more amazing life hacks.

 

[pjbliverpool]

The game might have other stutters on top of shader based stutters.

And as far as I'm aware shader stutters don't increase your VRAM use by several hundred megabytes within a few seconds?

I think we probably need to wait for the shader compilation stutter to be fixed before we can determine that. Clearly that's the overwhelming source of the issues we're seeing at the moment.

 

[davis.anthony]

I think we probably need to wait for the shader compilation stutter to be fixed before we can determine that. Clearly that's the overwhelming source of the issues we're seeing at the moment.

Nah we don't, others on Twitter are also claiming the game suffers from loading stutters as well as shader ones, all you need to do it look at Disk and I/O use during stutters.

The game is also a memory hog consuming 19GB total at 1440p.

It wouldn't surprise me if the game struggles to stay in Series-X's 10GB of 'GPU RAM'

 

[pjbliverpool]

Nah we don't, others on Twitter are also claiming the game suffers from loading stutters as well as shader ones, all you need to do it look at Disk and I/O use during stutters.

The game is also a memory hog consuming 19GB total at 1440p.

It wouldn't surprise me if the game struggles to stay in Series-X's 10GB of 'GPU RAM'

Given the state of the game on PC I certainly wouldn't discount other issues sitting behind the shader stutter but I don't put much stock in twitter posts. I look forward to Alex's eventual analysis of this once we've had a patch or two.

 

[BRiT]

It wouldn't surprise me if the game struggles to stay in Series-X's 10GB of 'GPU RAM'

To be pedantic, all 13.5 GB of Game memory resource can be used by the GPU. It's only the speed of which differs. But yes, as you say, they may have issues fitting within the 10 GB faster footprint compared to the maximum 12.5 GB on PS5.

 

[swaaye]

I've been playing Days Gone PC lately and the game is initially very stuttery. The Nvidia driver builds up a cache of shaders and the stutter goes away for the most part. It's pretty easy to test this by going into %localappdata%\NVIDIA\dxcache and deleting everything and letting the driver regenerate it again. Days Gone builds up about 150MB after an hour of playing.

DIshonored 2 on the other hand for example has a lengthy precompilation stage when the game is first loaded (or if your GPU driver changes). The dxcache builds up about 90MB of files during this.

 

[Malo]

Ask someone to finish the game first and then you can play stutter free. Follow me on MySpace for more amazing life hacks.

You just have to find someone with the same hardware and driver configuration as you?

 

[mr magoo]

You just have to find someone with the same hardware and driver configuration as you?

Pay a neighbor kid 5 bucks to come over and beat the game for you