Weird stuttering in Abyssos: The Eight Circle

[Wirhelmina]

My game runs at a pretty static 120 FPS in all areas and instances, except for P8 and P8S, which has a very strange stuttering. If I'm standing still, the game stays perfectly at 120 FPS, but if I start moving my character, for example, left and right around the arena, the FPS drops depending how fast I'm moving, if I walk, it drops around 2 fps, if I run normally, around 5 FPS and if I sprint, around 7 FPS. Now, normally, I wouldn't care about that low amount of lost frames, but that loss comes with a visual stutter, it feels like I'm running the game at 60 FPS, even though it's around 113~120.

For those who are familiar with 2 monitors with different refresh rates, you know when you're playing on the 144hz monitor, but you have something running at 60 fps on the 60hz monitor, and that causes the game to feel like 60 fps, even though it's running at 144? That's the kind of stutter I'm getting.

I tested changing my FPS cap to 60 (with NVidia settings, not the in-game one), and the same thing happens, when I move, I lose around 5 frames and it has a stutter (I shouldn't even been dropping those 5 frames with a cap of 60, since I can easily run the game at 120+). No matter what cap I have, I always drop 5 FPS when moving, if I cap to 30, it will drop to 25 when moving and so on, and it will always cause that weird stutter.

Maybe it's something from the arena graphics, like the fog effect or something? I don't know.

I tried several things already, like, disabling fullscreen optimization, disabling Nvidia HD Audio Drivers, sfc scans in CMD, disabling my second monitor, playing in full screen and windowed, the only thing I haven't tried, is reinstalling the game, which I will later, but I hardly doubt that would fix it.

Honestly, I can just deal with it, but I'm really wondering if someone else is having this problem as well. I've seen like only 1 other person complain about it, but also several others, on console (PS4).

[DiasFlacOg]

Not the same issue as yours, but I have a similar issue. Ever since 6.21 went live my game has been having microstutters all over the place. I even noticed them in dungeons. The game is still playable but this is an annoyance for sure.

Before 6.21 the game ran perfectly fine at a locked 60fps with no drops. Normally I play on 1440p and I decided to lower my graphics settings and set the game to 1080p for testing and the same thing still happens. Before 6.21 I was running at 1440p with max settings and zero issues.

[Dierseus]

Yep seems like quite a few are having problems with P8n/s. I made a bug report yesterday after 6.21 didn't fix it but you might want to add to it that you're experiencing the same on pc. Link here

[Arrhin]

I'm seeing no issues, though as I noted in another thread about stutter in the open world/cities, I'm seeing some differences in GPU clock speed based on NCP power settings. Long story short, XIV has always ignored "Normal" or "Optimal" settings on both my current machines, and on all my past ones, boosting to full at all times. Now it obeys it, so it sits around 80 to 90% utilization and about 900Mhz to 1200Mhz. Launching Risen Master, causes it to go full boost as always, or setting it to "Prefer Max Performance". Consider checking that setting, or it's equivalent for AMD and setting it to Prefer Max Performance. Shot in the dark but who knows. As a side note, XIV has always had issues with lighting effects, just watch GPU utilization jump and/or frame rates drop in Afterburner when night falls and all the lanterns come on. Back in the waaaay back, when there was lots of sh!tty AMD FX CPU's around (I had one, no comment..) you'd tank to below 30 fps around certain lighting effects it was so bad. For sure something has changed, but what it is and why it only affects certain rigs is anyones guess rn. Best thing for everyone to do is post about what they see, and their general system setup, maybe a pattern will be established.

[Wirhelmina]

Not the same issue as yours, but I have a similar issue. Ever since 6.21 went live my game has been having microstutters all over the place. I even noticed them in dungeons. The game is still playable but this is an annoyance for sure.

Before 6.21 the game ran perfectly fine at a locked 60fps with no drops. Normally I play on 1440p and I decided to lower my graphics settings and set the game to 1080p for testing and the same thing still happens. Before 6.21 I was running at 1440p with max settings and zero issues.

Now that you mentioned, I just noticed these microstutters are happening in the overworld as well, and it's always when I'm moving, or moving my camera in this case as well, I tested in older content like 5.0 trials/raids/dungeons and even 6.0/6.1 content, and it's completely fine, it's basically just 6.2+ content

[Wirhelmina]

So, I think I mostly fixed it, I have an NVidia card, RTX 2060 to be more specific, and I installed an older driver, version 457.30, and the stutters are definitely better, not 100%, but it's like 90% better than before, I don't drop frames when I move in P8 anymore (only when there's too much going on on the screen, but that's partially my fault for playing at full graphics, so it's normal), I also disabled HPET (High Precision Event Timer) on my BIOS (not sure if this did anything). Maybe this will help others as well.

[Sarah-Heartfilia]

I play on console (PS4) and p8s is completely unplayable for me. It stutters on my every movement and most my abilities don't register.
To notice that i don't have any issues with all the other game content just in that one instance.
Hopefully they fix it, want shiny weapon

[Shuuli]

Lets up this cause its still an issue... I will also write a suppor ticket just to have it followed officially. Its not really that visible if someone plays the run for a long time, but when you stop and restart you immediately feel it.

[Shuuli]

Quick update fellas....

So i wrote to the support team and all they replied so far is to set my settings to high performance for energy settings.... even though it was already high performance, with a slight adjustments to 96% so that my laptop is not getting cooked.

I lost faith, whatever this is, I don't think they will look further into it, I am sure they think the issue is on user side. So good luck to yall. I will not roll back my graphics driver just for this, but I have seen that this seem to work. I am sorry I will nto roll back to a worse driver for a game that cannot fix compatibility issues.

[Selrath]

I was also having major stuttering on my 3070 Ti. Updated to the latest NVIDIA drivers released yesterday (September 27th) and it's mostly gone! I set up an FFXIV profile on NVIDIA control panel for Maximum performance mode and got even better results.