5-10 second screen freezes every 30-60 seconds

[magnuskn]

5-10 second screen freezes every 30-60 seconds

Well, I wanted to start my second playthrough after updating my rig to something more modern. Sadly, after starting the game it was noticeably quite quickly that there was a problem. The game graphics freeze for five to ten seconds every half minute to full minute. Dialogue and music continue through those freezes.

I've updated to the newest Nvidia drivers and used their game optimization feature.

My system specs are:

AMD FX-8370 Eight-Core Prozessor 4,0 GHz
16 GB RAM (G.Skill Ripjaws DDR3-1600 DIMM)
Gigabyte GeForce GTX 970 Windforce 4GB
Samsung 850 SSD

Nvidia drivers are: 358.87, from two days ago.

I have no mods installed. I normally run the game from GOG Galaxy, although the same issue happened by running the game just from the .exe.

Any help? The known fix for dual core CPU's seems to not apply here, since I got an eight core CPU.

Thanks for any help!

 

[Rebdy]

I suggest you do a clean reinstall of your graphics drivers, reinstall and repatch the game, Verify/Repair and regenerate your user.settings file.

 

[DXMG]

I'd try the BES 99% fix first anyway.... the problem there isnt exactly dual core CPUs, its any time the game hits 100% usage and goes into kernel time, and that can happen on ANY CPU... it is just far more common on 2 core jobs. And thus we have attained a sort of false equivalency. There was one guy in the old threads about this with an i5 4690 that had the same problem, and BES fixed it for him jsut as well as it does for 2 core users.



Either way Id try it before uninstalling/reinstalling anything.

 

[magnuskn]

I'll do that first, thanks.

Re-installing would mean downloading the entire game again. :- But if it comes to that, I'll do that, too.

---------- Updated at 12:10 PM ----------

We'll , that didn't help any. :- Worse, I got complete freeze-ups with even the sound being gone. Guess I'll do the re-install. I hope that helps.

I'd hope that CD Project Red will finally fix that problem after four patches!

 

[magnuskn]

And after the re-install the same problem continues. :-

Alright, BES somewhat seems to fix the problem, with a 10% limit on the CPU. But there are still freeze-ups, only that now I need to alt-tab out of the game to get rid of them.

I hope this issue gets fixed by CD Project Red. Extremely annoying, especially since I specifically got my PC upgrades to play the Witcher 3 at the best quality.

 

[Dubya75]

In your Nvidia Control Panel, set Pre-rendered frames to 1 and offload all PhysX to your CPU (also set in the control panel). See if that works,

 

[magnuskn]

Did try that, made no difference.

At this moment, using BGE at 10% is working most of the times, but I get occasional complete freezes and have to alt-tab to get rid of them. Since putting autosave to three minutes it has become a bit less annoying.

However, the graphics really do look good on ultra settings. ^^

 

[Nurmi90]

I'm pretty sure this is 970 or Hairworks issue because my friend also complained about this. If I remember right that 4970k is running at 4.7GHz.

But my Fury & 8370 is pretty equally using all cores at 50-70%, and I'm not using Hairworks. So I'd say that try out first how the CPU usage reacts to disabling that? and if its not the reason, then we can figure out another reason why is that setup grinding so hard.

 

[Walster]

Sounds more like a driver/software problem to me. If I were you I would just reinstall a clean Windows version, install the latest drivers and try again. Provided you got time for this though. My guess is a 90% chance this will fix your problem.

 

[Nurmi90]

Could also try disabling Turbe Core or other power saving features from that FX-8370, but to do that you need to go BIOS and switch them off.
Because I know one of those caused my friends CS:GO/Borderlands FPS sink from 200 to 30, but he didn't investigate which one of them was it. :excl:

Been myself just disabling those for OC, so have no experience really.

 

[magnuskn]

Thanks for the advice, guys.

1.) It's not hairworks, as far as I can tell. I went down to low graphic settings and had the same 5-10 second freeze-ups without BES.
2.) It's still a fresh Windows installation, from 1 1/2 months ago, so I don't think that the OS is the problem. I got the latest nVidia drivers, did the update after the problem appeared. No change.
3.) I'll look into that.

---------- Updated at 04:06 PM ----------

Changing options in the BIOS didn't help, neither.

 

[nanodrummer]

Well, I wanted to start my second playthrough after updating my rig to something more modern. Sadly, after starting the game it was noticeably quite quickly that there was a problem. The game graphics freeze for five to ten seconds every half minute to full minute. Dialogue and music continue through those freezes.

I've updated to the newest Nvidia drivers and used their game optimization feature.

My system specs are:

AMD FX-8370 Eight-Core Prozessor 4,0 GHz
16 GB RAM (G.Skill Ripjaws DDR3-1600 DIMM)
Gigabyte GeForce GTX 970 Windforce 4GB
Samsung 850 SSD

Nvidia drivers are: 358.87, from two days ago.

I have no mods installed. I normally run the game from GOG Galaxy, although the same issue happened by running the game just from the .exe.

Any help? The known fix for dual core CPU's seems to not apply here, since I got an eight core CPU.

Thanks for any help!

If you are using MSI Afterburner, Fraps or any other, close them and try again.
For me, they were the villain. Once I closed Afterburner, I never had any of these freezes again.

 

[magnuskn]

As far as I know, the computer is not using an overclocking software. The Windforce is overclocked as a factory setting, however.

While I still need to use BES, there were no freezes yesterday while using it. I hope this continues.

On the good side, the game looks beautiful on Ultra and it's really nice to play it again, now on the highest difficulty.

 

[SigilFey]

This is most commonly a result of bad sync between the CPU, GPU, and monitor refresh (resulting in frame skipping). Try to get the game to run as smoothly as you can without exceeding your monitor refresh. Because of the way the engine wants to work, it's best to manually set refresh to 60, then try to get the game to run at between 55-60 FPS overall. If that's not possible, dropping FPS to 30 should stop the stutter while obviously lowering your framerate. It might be the lesser of two evils.

You'll want to play with the following settings. Toggle each setting in turn, systematically, restarting the game from Windows after each change to ensure you've got a clear game cache.

In-game:
Fullscrees vs. Windowed/Borderless
Frame Limit
Vsync

NV Control Panel:
Max pre-rendered frames (I would set this to 1 and just leave it.)
Vsync (Just be sure both this and the game's vsync are not both ON at the same time. They can both be OFF at the same time.)
Refresh rate 60 or 120 (I would avoid 144 if available. The game wants to run at either 30 or 60)

The goal is to achieve steady FPS, not high FPS. You will actively try to lower it so that your GPU can handle the load without struggling. Honestly, 45-50 FPS is pretty darn smooth. I don't even mind 30.