Sudden massive FPS drops / performance issues.

[Psyolopher]

Sudden massive FPS drops / performance issues.

Hello, I've been having issues with the game running smoothly despite having a decent computer.
Up to character level 11, I had no issues...and it ran smooth, no lags or microstutters.
One day, when I loaded up my game. It went to hell, microstutters, full on lag...and MASSIVE fps drop.
(Even the Audio went bad, crackling / lagging.) There were no updates, windows updates or game updates that happened in the mean time.
BUT after exiting the game first time, I noticed there were cloud sync errors in Steam asking me if I wanted to use new or old save games. (Local or Cloud)
I chose Local, because it was 2 days newer. That's perhaps the only strange thing that happened, and it has asked me that again...again chose Local.
Prior to lag, I had even hairworks on high. That worked smoothly. And other settings were Ultra or High, noticed nothing wrong with it.
Now I can't even run it on low. It's always 30FPS or lower. (Checked with Afterburner, and Steam's FPS counter.) There's always micro stuttering present, and it has heavy fps drops whenever I do something besides walking.

My specs:
16gb RAM
i7 4790k CPU
GTX 970 (4gb)
And an SSD
(NO OC, anywhere.)
Windows 8.1 64bit.
All drivers up to date as well.

Playing through Steam, Game of the year edition.
(tried turning off overlay as well, btw....)
No mods.
I'm fairly certain this is the game itself, not my hardware or OS.


> uninstalled Nvidia experience
> Installed Nvidia Experience and newest driver through it.
> Clean install of newest, and 5 older versions of GTX 970 drivers.
> Fiddled with Nvidia Control panel, and most of hte settings suggested online through many youtube videos and forum threads.
> Tried almost every combination of Graphic settings in game.
(Borderless windowed, Vsync, hairworks, resolution, details, shadows, Lock framerate, AA etc....)
> Tried playing on ULTRA, HIGH, and LOW....I have the exact same framerate, there's no difference actually. It's 10 - 30 FPS.
> Tried starting a new game, I gained 5FPS in the first battle. (But was still lagging horribly.)
> Tried loading older saves.
> Tried playing the game for a couple of quests.
> Disable firewall
> Disable AntiVirus
> Give Witcher3.exe high priority in task manager
> Check Cache integrity in Steam.
> No strange junkware or virus
> Disable various Windows services, for overall computer performance.
> Reboots do not affect the game at all.
> Fiddled with audio driver, but went back t old ones.
> Check temperatures, they are fine. (Also, fans on max speed does nothing to improve anything.)
> memtest
> chkdsk
> upated .NET
> Tried deleting 3 old saved games
> Deleted user settings bak file.

I'm still trying to find a fix online, nothing has worked for me so far.
This seems like a bug in the game, or with Nvidia. Because other games work just fine on ULTRA.
If it helps, my latest save before the massive performance drop was the beginning of the "Forefathers’ Eve" quest.
(Right after talking to that old dude.) Also I have a lot of saves. Should I backup the folder, and delete most of them?
I noticed they are big.

This is by far my favorite game, ever. And I really want to finish the story without this lag problem.
If you guys have any suggestions for fixes, or had the exact same problem. Please let me know.
I'm out of ideas.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Psyolopher]

UPDATE:
Suddenly, for almost 2 days.
It went back to Normal? (Running High / Ultra settings.) And I got a stable 54-60 FPS.
I even tried turning Hairworks on High, (noticed a slight stutter at times, but nothing that annoyed me.)
I had 60 fps even in largely populated areas. I have no idea what happened.(no it's not due a simple reboot.)
And the day after that, the FPS went crazy. (Up and down, 10 fps to 60).
It then proceeded to go down to 10 - and never go above 40. What's mostly annoying is that it's very unstable, and with enemies in the game it's stuttery as hell.
I tried tweaking settings again, both in game and in Nvidia control panel. (Mostly trying to follow guides with similar PC builds.).
And I have about 35 - 41 FPS now. Unstable, but still a lot smoother than that extreme stuttery mess.
Turned down a few other settings, there's only a ever so slight difference.
Also afterburner shows the graphics go up and down VERY inconsistently, on everything.

I kept thinking, perhaps Steam is to blame here? Maybe it's eating resources or something.
I disabled cloud sync (for savegames etc.).
I found a few forum threads where it eats up resources, but it doesn't seem to do that.
(Although random loads on CPU, by steamwebhelper.exe) It's not constant, or that often even.
Steam seems to be okay though


Noteworthy: I've been monitoring my GPU and CPU temps, and they never even go that hot.
It's all very nice and dandy in that department.

My PSU is 650 watts. And that's plenty to use with GTX 970.
>Powerplan in Windows is set to maximum performance
>Maximmum performance preferred in Nvidia Control panel.

So to sum it up:
Still having problems, game seems very inconsistent in FPS in my rig.
idk if it's my system, or the game itself.
And settings don't affect it that much at all.

 

[SigilFey]

Sorry you're hitting such walls. I believe there's a problem with your system config, but the symptoms you're describing are difficult to narrow down. Can you answer the following:

1.) Have you downloaded any updates to Windows recently? Or has the the auto-update triggered? (You can check your Windows version timestamp / backup to be sure.)

2.) Are you using any overclocking for any of your hardware?

3.) What version of GPU drivers are you using.

4.) Uninstall Geforce Experience and everything to do with it. Someday...that program might be a worthwhile thing. Not today, however. (At the very least, execute services.msc through Task Manager, and disable anything involving Nvidia Streamer Service and/or Nvidia Shield.)

 

[Psyolopher]

1.) I did have it on automatic, but I disabled that. So I believe it's recent, yes. Perhaps it's some driver conflict with the chipset, hard to know. Although I did make sure it's all up to date there.
I have yet to try to manually download drivers from MSI's websites. ( I have a MSI motherboard. ) Very possible that there's some windows service hogging resources.

2.) No OC. Everything running on stock speeds.

3.) I'm not home atm, but I have the most recent one now. Manually installed, after using DDU. I've tried to roll it back as well, and I've also tried really old ones. With minimal results.
(As of now, I tried the newest one again.)

4.) Geforce Experience uninstalled, it's more annoying than anything. And thanks for the tip, I'll try to keep a look out for those service, haven't tried disabling it.

Also "strange" update:
Yesterday, I booted up.
I had even BETTER FPS now. With almost everything on Ultra and a few things on High. (And most Post processing things on.) minus Hairworks.
I have 80 FPS. Goes down to 60 when there were battles or a lot of things happening, but always very very very smooth.
Weird part is that, I did not change anything last 2 boots. And, nothing changed in start up / msconfig.

 

[SigilFey]

Try turning Vsync ON in-game and setting Frame Limit to 60. It's more important for the game to have enough resources to run and sync everything it needs in the background than to produce high FPS.

It sounds like something was taking focus away from the game, so it may crop back up. If it does, play with Task Manager open to Resource Monitor in the background. As soon as the issue starts, Alt-Tab out of the game* and quickly check what programs are using the most RAM / Drive / CPU. I'm guessing it was something like Geforce Experience or Windows trying to auto-update...because "scheduled maintenance" is sooo important when you're being attacked by 15 Nekkers...

*Note: This will likely crash / hang your game. You may have to force-close and restart it. Create a backup of your saved games, just in case you bork one of them doing this. It will likely be fine or just fail to re-initialize, but the game does not like to be minimized while it's running.

 

[Psyolopher]

Try turning Vsync ON in-game and setting Frame Limit to 60. It's more important for the game to have enough resources to run and sync everything it needs in the background than to produce high FPS.

It sounds like something was taking focus away from the game, so it may crop back up. If it does, play with Task Manager open to Resource Monitor in the background. As soon as the issue starts, Alt-Tab out of the game* and quickly check what programs are using the most RAM / Drive / CPU. I'm guessing it was something like Geforce Experience or Windows trying to auto-update...because "scheduled maintenance" is sooo important when you're being attacked by 15 Nekkers...

*Note: This will likely crash / hang your game. You may have to force-close and restart it. Create a backup of your saved games, just in case you bork one of them doing this. It will likely be fine or just fail to re-initialize, but the game does not like to be minimized while it's running.

UPDATE btw:
>Vsync on
>Unlimited option on.
>Get 55 - 80 FPS
> High Graphic settings with post processing on. (No hairworks though)

Game runs smooth as hell, and even with a higher FPS now lol.
I'm still not sure what caused this.
But I think it's either:
> Nvidia User Experience
> Razor Synapse.

Both in which I have turned off.
I can try test it when I get home tonight.
Perhaps this thread might help someone in the future, if I find out.

 

[SigilFey]

Alright, then; happy hunting!

 

[NoBlackThunder]

So i also have Massive FPS drops / shuttering while playing . It seems this only happens to me when someone has damaged applied to them .. like in a fight .. once they are dead its fine. I can with ease reproduce it on my computer but i have no idea beside that the issue seems to be with damage.. I do tech support for another game my self .. but this here seems almost like a bug to me. Reinstalling the game ( making sure to purge all files) and starting a new game is not resolving the issue.. I also updated all my drivers etc .. still the same i get 80 + fps without combat but my frames drop to 10 fps ( feels more like 5 to me) again i tried allot of stuff.. This only happens when i hurt some one or they have damage applied to them . This issue came together with the latest patch. So i wonder if that introduced it .. Fighting in the game is now totally unplayable for me with my 980TI and my 6 core Core i7

 

[SigilFey]

So i also have Massive FPS drops / shuttering while playing . It seems this only happens to me when someone has damaged applied to them .. like in a fight .. once they are dead its fine. I can with ease reproduce it on my computer but i have no idea beside that the issue seems to be with damage.. I do tech support for another game my self .. but this here seems almost like a bug to me. Reinstalling the game ( making sure to purge all files) and starting a new game is not resolving the issue.. I also updated all my drivers etc .. still the same i get 80 + fps without combat but my frames drop to 10 fps ( feels more like 5 to me) again i tried allot of stuff.. This only happens when i hurt some one or they have damage applied to them . This issue came together with the latest patch. So i wonder if that introduced it .. Fighting in the game is now totally unplayable for me with my 980TI and my 6 core Core i7

First, try everything I've posted above. Also, be sure you disable any OC you may have running. The game doesn't like OC very much. All sorts of problems can be fixed by removing it.

 

[NoBlackThunder]

Drivers are up to date , i dont overclock .. no point reducing lifetime of my hardware for 2-3 fps more , i have the latest drivers ( i always do a clean install after having issues with broken openGL drivers that broke each update and only got fixed on a full uninstall and reinstall for some odd reason) i dont use ingame overlay or streaming .. that is actually disabled totally .. I do game support my self for another indi game so i do many of the most common thinks you might think of like driver update etc. As i mentiont the issue comes only when i damage someone, so it seems its not a gpu related issue at all because of that .. it seems there is an issue with the damage value it self since the lag only happens from 99% health - 1% health, as long as my opponent has full health everything is fine or as long as he is death .. right when i hit him and there health goes to 0 the shutter / lag goes away before the opponent even starts falling to the ground, That there gets me to belive that graphics is not the issue here but a value and cpu calculation etc .. of course i even did a benchmark on my cpu to be sure but no issues there ether. My cpu usage also never goes above 20 % so its not that my cpu is under heavy load at all. I reinstalled my C++ libs to make sure that they even where causing an issue ..still the same issue

 

[SigilFey]

Hm. Send this in to CDPR Support with a saved game. Let's see if it's something with the save-state. In the meantime, thinking laterally, try disconnecting from the internet completely. Unplug the LAN, cable, or disconnect from the wireless router in Windows, then play. See if it continues to do it when not online.

 

[NoBlackThunder]

So I have replied tech support parallel to this here last 19.1 and still havent received any reply from them. Do they not reply to email replies after the first contact?

 

[SigilFey]

They will reply! But I do know that most of the dev / tech teams are very busy with the next title. Do feel free to send in another ticket! I can also suggest ensuring your message is as brief as possible. Try to get the issue down in bullet points, and as few of those as you can while still covering the details of your issue.

Now, sadly, I think pretty much everything that can be done with TW3 has been done at this point, and it's in great shape for most people...despite a few really annoying niggles. I've played through 4 times without any major performance issues whatsoever. The problem is likely something that has changed with your system configuration, something caused by steam, or some bug that cannot be retroactively fixed. That last means, if I started my game in the 1.0x days, encountered an issue (even if it didn't manifest until now), then updated through 1.1x, 1.2x, and 1.3x...there's no way to fix it now except starting a new game. Alternatively, new GPU drivers often invalidate functions used by older games. (And "older" means "a year or two" in game-dev speak.) Rolling back to drivers that were released in 4th quarter 2016 may help.

I wish I could offer a surefire, "Try this!" but this type of issue could be any number of things at this point. I'd need to be seated at your system to actually start digging. Send another ticket on Monday, and post back here if you don't hear anything in a few days.

 

[NoBlackThunder]

Ok thanks. I try first to see if i cant clear anything else + start a completely new game see if that helps before i issue another ticket, i also finished the story like 3-4 times with dlc's , never had an issue before now hehe