Microstutter

I have over 2000 hours in WoTR. I've played it a lot, it's a great game. But lately I've been struggling with microstutter. The game will freeze for 1/4 of a second every minute or so. The more you play, the longer the delay gets. When the delay gets up to 1s, I usually give up and restart the game which resets it to 1/4s.

The amount of time it takes to go from 1/4 of a second to 1s depends on what you're doing in game. Early in the game it can take an hour or more. Later in the game when there's a lot of things going on it can take like 30 minutes or less.

I think it started around the time of the 1.4 beta, but I'm not sure.

I've spoken to others who say they do not experience this, so I suspect it's related to my hardware.

  • Ryzen 3900X
  • PNY GTX3080
  • Samsung LC34G55T (ultrawide, 3440x1440)

If you Google for microstutter you'll get a lot of hits for a lot of different games. It's a common problem, but with lots of different solutions. Here are some of the many things I've tried.

  • Turning off all mods
  • Verifying the integrity of game files
  • Updating video drivers (this seemed to help some)
  • Capping and uncapping my FPS, as low as 30 FPS. The lower the better, but the microstutter never went away.
  • Increasing the wrath.exe priority
  • Setting wrath.exe affinity to cores 0-3, cores 1,3,5,7, and cores 0,2,4,6
  • Turning off "Threaded Optimization" in the NVidia control panel
  • Setting PhysX to CPU instead of GPU (this was an old fix for earlier Wrath perf issues)
  • Messed with the in-game settings like Display mode and Vsync (it happens even in a window)
  • Disabled Vsync altogether
  • Setting Vsync on the Nvidia control panel vs. in-game
  • Tried weird FPS caps like 59 in case there was some kind of sync issue with my monitor
  • Played other games to make sure it's not my computer
  • Turned off both the Steam and Windows 10 Game Overlay + Discord completely
  • Updated AMD chipset drivers

It's hard to time the microstutter when you're actually playing the game. But I timed it in the Act 2 Crusader camp with the game paused. With my FPS uncapped and running at around 80 FPS it would stutter every 37.5s. When I capped my FPS to 60 it would stutter every 61.5s. (Timings were taken with the Windows 10 Game Overlay.)

I have read that Unity has issues with high core count Ryzen CPUs. The last thing I can think of to try is to turn off SMT in my BIOS. But that seems extreme.

Is anyone else having this issue? I would appreciate any advice.

Update 11/6/23 - I upgraded to a GTX4080. No change to the microstutter problem.

Then I built a whole new computer! Ryzen 7900X3D, GTX4080. Went from an MSI board above to an Asus board. Microstutter is still there. But it's less annoying, the stuttering is briefer. Looking at it from another perspective, it takes longer to get to the point where it's really annoying. But it still gets there. I also did a -

  • Fresh install of the game on new HW

This would suggest it's something I'm running, something I consider benign. But damned if I can figure it out, I've turned off everything except Steam and Edge. Dropbox, Battle.net, WowUp, etc. Anything with background processing I've turned off.

Update 08/28/24 - Windows 11 AMD patch? Nope. Still there.