Strange continuous glitches in rendering

[WindyGamer]

Esp in Dungeons, every 2-3 sec my screen pauses for about 1/2 sec. I have played 2 other games and there is no problem with those. I have a high end system and a 1 gb connection. Others seen this?
This has been going on since Dawntrail dropped.
Is there another thread for this?

Running around Udah does not show this. However, running outside, not mounted, it does not show it unless I use skills. Peleton first showed it, and when I shot some low level mobs it showed up. So looks like it has to do with skill animations or skills themselves. And of course dungeons are full of those. Happens today on MCH and two days ago as PLD.

Ryzen 7 3800, 32gb memory, SSD, Nvidia 3060

[WindyGamer]

I did a dungeon with PLD and recorded some of it. Also for last boss I turned off all skill animations for everyone and it did not stop the glitches. No clue what's causing this. BTW, I updated to latest Nvidia driver before dungeon. This is certainly annoying. Very distracting to see screen stop frequently while playing.

[WindyGamer]

I just put together some game footage from several dungeon runs showing the problem. As I said, it not only happens in dungeons, but for example, just outside Udah killing level 1 mobs.

https://youtu.be/p_V4fbilCgw

[Shibi]

a 20 minute video without giving us the timestamp makes it a bit hard, as we don't know exactly the symptom to look for. However, it is a fairly common problem where a lot of old oft-played games will work except a new one that just came out which causes new crashes, blue screens, lockups, or freezes.

If your video card is being pushed, and that can happen with a xx60 level card, then that can cause weird issues on the rest of the PCI bus which can cause slowdowns in hard disk or the rendering itself, plus of course exposes stress-related problems in the hardware itself that might not manifest during your playtime in your more established games, or even in older versions of FFXIV which had the old shaders.

It would make sense to first of all reset your PC to optimised defaults in BIOS, and see if that helps. Removing any OC on the video card, and you can also play around with the system settings and try to reduce the graphics a little to lessen any extra bandwidth the newer shaders are using up over the old.

Checking airflow, cleanliness, and potentially having someone experienced blow your computer out. But in the end, it's likely going to come down to the new shaders adding a stress to your PC or xx60 card that it can't handle. Lowering that stress is a goal in your debugging.

[Gralna]

Almost looks like thermal throttling from CPU, what are your temps running at?

[WindyGamer]

a 20 minute video without giving us the timestamp makes it a bit hard, as we don't know exactly the symptom to look for. However, it is a fairly common problem where a lot of old oft-played games will work except a new one that just came out which causes new crashes, blue screens, lockups, or freezes.

Thanks for your input.

Let's review... Timestamps? Just watch the video. In the first minute or 2 you'll see quite a few STUDDERS. places where the video freezes for a second or two. There would be hundreds of time stamps. Of course The video could be shorter, but This shows it happens all the time in dungeon after dungeon and more than one character.

Graphics issues: Also let me remind us that I play ESO and GW2 with no glitches. This is a HIGH END computer. I have never had an issue like this with any game over the several years that I have had this or other computers like this with the litany of graphics cards that came before it. I'm asking if anyone else is seeing this.

BIOS?? Oh come on please.. Little green men? If I were only playing this game and not several others that were all showing the problem But nope.. It seems like messing with the BIOS is a bad idea.. Adding yet another variable to a fixed environment. Unless we are saying that installing Dawntrail messed up my BIOS, which I don't think we are saying. If we are saying that, then this is the bug. No game should be messing with the BIOS, right?

But this appeared with the installation of Dawntrail. Not at all ever in the three years that I've been playing FFXIV before.

This computer is so high end that FFXIV does not even warm it up. Yes I know that the RTX 3060 is not the latest and greatest, but it is WAY WAY WAY more GPU than FFXIV needs.

The case filters are visible through the glass case and they are clean.

Windows 10 is fully up to date. The graphics driver is fully up to date - and moving it forward a few micro versions from a few weeks ago did not change anything. All the videos were recorded under the same conditions - Updated windows and driver.

The day before Dawntrail dropped, no studders. The day of dawntrail dropping - Studdering in dawntrail only.
It occurs to me that the other games I play have already made the Graphics updates that Dawntrail has introduced.

I thought about SSD errors in the Dawntrail files, but the studders appear after all the files are loaded. There is no SSD activity as the studders happen. Also the other games are installed on the same non-system SSD with FFXIV and they show none of these studders.

Re shaders - recall that the studders still occurred when I turned off all the skill animations - me, party, everyone - still studders.

I'll do some more investigation. Thanks again.

[WindyGamer]

Based on your suggestions I recorded the Task Manager for GPU and CPU performance, and Open Hardware Monitor for Temps of the entire system. The first part of this video shows a Paladin outside Udah killing low level mobs and flying around. There are not very many studders, but when they occur, the GPU performance dips. I didn't see any correlation with Ethernet activity and studders.

In the second part of the video, GW2 is used in the same way. At no time were there studders. The low GPU points were loading screens while transitioning between areas of the game.

As we can see from the video, the GPU and CPU loading are no where near maxing out this computer while doing this test for FFXIV. GW2 shows slightly higher loading during part of the tests.


https://youtu.be/F1-T_skDcts

It seems odd that no one else is experiencing these studders.

Correction. In my previous reply I said that the studders were "a second or two". That is wrong. The studders are less than a second long. In a dungeon they occur every few seconds.

[KageTokage]

I'd suggest just toying around with the different settings and seeing if one of those fixes it.

The thing that ended up curing my FPS stutters was reducing light reflection via Effects > Glare > set to low. Given that almost every object in the game is subject to some degree of light reflection it can make the FPS extremely variable depending on how aggressively a given area makes use of it.

Could also explain why it seems to trigger on skill usage due to lighting being involved in those, too.

[Tercano]

Try seeing if you have any overlays (e.g. Discord).

Discord overlay was causing stutters and framedrops similiar to what you're discribing for me.

[WindyGamer]

I think I have found the problem. It's a "Network Privacy Tool" called Portmaster. The studders appeared to be correlated with a spike in Network activity, so I shut down portmaster and now I can't make the studders happen after significant testing where studders were happening frequently before. Why Portmaster should cause this effect only for FFXIV after Dawnbreaker is not clear. And why Portmaster was not effecting the other games is also not clear. But I was not getting much if any benefit from using portmaster anyway. So that's why nobody else is seeing the problem. I'm guessing Portmaster is not a very popular tool.

Tomorrow when folks wake up I'll run some dungeons and confirm that the studders are gone.

Thanks for all your comments. I'm glad to find out that the issue is not with FFXIV.