Battlefield 3 Stuttering issues and Heavy Disk IO

[AlienX]

My system is

Core i5 760 @ Stock
4GB 9-9-9-24 1600 RAM @ Stock
GTX 460 1GB @ Stock ( 295.73 )
Seagate 1 TB HDD ( On which game is installed )
Windows 7 x64

The problem is Stuttering, like every 5 second there is a pause of about half second and a flicker in weapon, sometimes when you shoot the game pauses for half a sec and than fires. It renders the game unplayable. Like in a sudder close combat that half second pause destroys the game.
Also I get heavy Disk IO while playing, while it should stop reading from HDD when a level is loaded but the HDD is constantly thrashing like hell and I fear the game may damage the HDD.

This doesn't happen in any other game, Skyrim runs on ultra butter smooth as well as Mass Effect 3 doesn't even hickup at full settings @ 1080p.

Solutions I have tried

Defragment - no help
Drivers - some help
Tried console commands in BF3 - no help

Already have Textures on High or Medium and SSAO off, while Post AA also off, motion blur off, no use.

Previously about 2 weeks ago the game was fine and I leveled up to 27 but now I am so much frustrated as I have no idea where this stutter is coming from even when there is no change in hardware.

Only change I did was shifted to Logitech from Razer mouse, including installing setpoint.

 

[Blastwave]

Were you having this problem before the patch as well?

or started after the patch?


Because a lot of players, including me are experiencing lag and stutter after the patch.

 

[XxRebellionxX]

Did you try the bcdedit command fix?
Anyways my game is butter smooth after the patch played approx 3 times after the patch and it was smooth no lag or stutter

 

[AlienX]

What's bcdedit fix. There is a bottleneck somewhere in system and I can't seem to figure it out. Happens with only BF3 though. I am not moving it to other HDD and see if the problem is gone, otherwise I suspect corrupted install and download the game again.

 

[AlienX]

Moved the game to my secondary 1TB Seagate, reinstalled it and apparently the problem is gone. But I am still not sure.

One hypothesis is too many page faults, which means the game tries to fill the VRAM with textures and than fill the RAM. Now in all this process the game needed to dump RAM contents to virtual memory. So Having game on same HDD as with Page file can explain the constant disk thrashing when its reading and writing on the HDD at the same time and consuming CPU cycles, Causing CPU Spikes.

VRAM usage can be reduced by setting the Textures to High or Medium and reducing AA so less frames are held up in GPU pipelines. However that's all technical geeky gibrish so I won't bother you with how this works.

It may help people with two HDDs to keep the page file and game on seperate HDDs.

Testing in Progress though, its not a final solution.

 

[AlienX]

Ok I can confirm the problem is solved using above method. Seems like DICE needs to work on memory management of frostbite engine. As I can run Skyrim with HD Textures without any problem and yet frostbite fails to utilize the VRAM optimally.

For people with less technical understanding VRAM is GPU memory and RAM is main memory while HDD is secondary memory.

Basically when you load a game, it dumps RAM contents to HDD, Read the textures from HDD and move them to RAM and than move them to VRAM on demand. In all this process frostbite engine is having difficulty in deciding which textures should be available in RAM for fast moving and instead reads them from HDD and move to VRAM directly. This is where all the Madness lies. More RAM won't help...Faster HDD will.

Business point of view : Excellent reason to increase SSD sales. Remember whatever they do, its not without its target. This type of poor memory management is most likely intentional by game developers.

It may seem pointless to you but my research is on relation between Hardware and Software development speed.

 

[hasanJ]

Ultra Textures have been known to eat up in excess of 1GB of VRAM

Though single GPU Owners run out of Graphics Muscle on Ultra Texture but those with cards like GTX560Ti on SLI do report of VRAM Errors as the Cards themselves can handle Ultra but the 1GB VRAM Kills the performance

Strange though that High Res Textures are causing problems and that too with a GTX460 in ur Case

This all happened after the recent Patch Right?

 

[AlienX]

No card has nothing to do with this case. Patch did improve it to some extent, at least weapon flicker is minimized. Its also worth noting that almost everyone with this problem is with Nvidia cards and hence drivers vs frostbite.

Another point is although Skyrim runs great with HD. It does require address extension sdk. That can be mapped to BF3, ultra doesn't increase texture quality but increases their actual allocation size without increasing usable address ranges. That's why HDD activity is extremely high with Ultra textures.

I have everything on ultra though, textures on high.

 

[Dark Sith]

its the vrram issue and it has to do with the game ---i have to dial down the setings even though i have 4 gpu --its not the raw power its the vram which eats up the game .

ultra is no way possible for me as i use surround 5760-1600 -- hence for that res i have to dial down the setings so 1/5 or 1/9gb is used .
4 gpu vram is mirroered.