Map scrolling is choppy/sluggish & stuttering

Age of Empires II: DE II - Report a Bug
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While the frame rate will fluctuate there should not be this kind of stuttering with only G-Sync enabled. As I said above (and linked to), disabling V-Sync in-game is a best practice (for G-Sync users). V-Sync is left enabled in nVidia control panel but it is not active unless the frame rate exceeds the refresh rate of the monitor. To that end, a third-party frame rate limiter is used (RTSS for example) to keep this from happening, so that G-Sync is always enabled.

I was not using right click (in the second video). I was using arrow keys so that scroll speed would be consistent.

The ghosting effect is not so much of a concern as is the uneven time between frames (which I think can exacerbate the ghosting effect you mentioned), and the screen tearing that seems to be occuring even when V-Sync is enabled. This isn’t something that we should “get used to”.

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The game doesn’t seem to support exclusive fullscreen mode so I’m not even sure if your gsync is working here honestly. With that said the fps will fluctuate a lot in a situation like this and that may be visible even if gsync does work.

I also don’t see any screen tearing on your videos, just stutter.

And yeah, I mean the first video with the right clicking because there’s it’s obvious you were using it (the UI elements for it are on the screen).

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I edited my post to clarify that I did not use right click in the second video, though I thought it was clear that I was referring to the latest video in which I recorded my monitor with a high-speed camera.

Regardless of whether or not it supports exclusive fullscreen, G-Sync supports windowed modes as well. Also, regardless of if G-Sync is working (seems to not be, which isn’t a fault of “my” G-Sync, lol, it’s a fault of the game if so), V-Sync is apparently not preventing screen tearing nor providing an even frame timing. The frame rate can fluctuate and it should not cause this behavior with G-Sync enabled. That’s the whole point of G-Sync! The frame rate can fluctuate and so does the monitor’s refresh rate.

There is indeed tearing. You have to advance frame-by-frame to see half of the image update before the other half. And it doesn’t always happen every single frame. As I said you can use the period and comma buttons to advance frame-by-frame in the YouTube player. I could even record a short video of myself doing this to demonstrate the tearing that occurs.

I don’t mean to be rude but it seems like instead of trying to help, you’re trying to explain away these issues or perhaps belittle them in some way. I’m just confused by your approach here. I’m simply reporting what I’ve found because I want this game to get fixed and to at least reach a point of decent and acceptable performance - this is not common behavior for a game to the best of my knowledge. Now if the engine for some reason is inherently broken (or these issues are related to something that can’t be fixed for whatever reason) then that’s one thing, but I don’t think they’re going to admit to that if that’s indeed the case. I’m crossing my fingers that it isn’t. But surely they must already be aware of these things, if a lay person like me can identify them to at least some degree.

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The only reason why I’m asking these questions is because to put it simply performance is good for me since the latest patch dropped, meaning:

  • I don’t have stutter while scrolling

  • I don’t have screen tearing, in fact I never had screen tearing with this game and believe me I tried getting tearing because I would have preferred that instead of the stutter I had before

  • the frame pacing seems solid to me: I did not measure it but I’m very sensitive to it and usually I can see it with a naked eye

Based on that my assumptions are:

  • After looking at a bit more thoroughly it does seem like that you have some tearing on the video… how did you achieve that? Do you have some external settings applied in the NV Control Panel / NVInspector / RTSS / other similar overlay programs?

  • Do you limit your framerate other than using the game’s vsync feature? In my experience limiting it with RTSS results in bad frame pacing but I didn’t try it with the latest patch.

  • Since the game is very CPU bound / the core of the engine is very old it’s possible that if you have a high refresh rate (higher than 60 hz, for example 120 or 144) performance will be unstable thanks to sudden spikes in CPU usage.

And no, I didn’t say anything that would imply that something is your fault, just keep in mind that the Genie engine is actually terrible at optimally utilizing modern computers so stuff like gsync simply not working and uneven framepacing (again: CPU spikes) may occur.

“The frame rate can fluctuate and it should not cause this behavior with G-Sync enabled. That’s the whole point of G-Sync! The frame rate can fluctuate and so does the monitor’s refresh rate.”

Sure, I mean that’s how it works but it’s not perfect, in some situations you are able to see the changing refresh basically and scrolling (= usually agressive fps fluctuation) can lead to that. At that point it’s not the fluctuation in fps that’s causing the stutter-like effect but the fluctuation in refresh rate.

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I know you said you saw it upon further inspection but I went ahead and recorded a short video of myself advancing frame-by-frame through a short section where some tearing occurs.

Notice how I compare it to G-Sync and V-Sync (both On) at the end of that video - no tearing occurs and the image moves across the screen at an even pace (compared to an uneven pace when at the beginning of the video only V-Sync is enabled).

What do you mean, how did I achieve the tearing? I simply recorded my monitor with the high speed camera on my iPhone X (which records at 240 FPS), and used different combinations of G-Sync and V-Sync On/Off to see what would happen. The tearing is simply a result of those settings, and seems to occur in every configuration except for when BOTH G-Sync and V-Sync are enabled (which is very odd, as tearing should also be prevented when either G-Sync OR V-Sync are enabled by themselves).

Are you familiar with G-Sync (do you have a G-Sync monitor?) I use RTSS to limit my FPS to 3 FPS under my monitor’s refresh rate (which is 165 Hz). So, the RTSS limiter is set to 163. As I explained earlier, and forgive me if I’m preaching to the choir, the reason for this is to prevent the frame rate from ever exceeding my monitor’s refresh rate, at which point G-Sync deactivates and V-Sync activates, and I think some minor stuttering can occur when this happens. The whole point of RTSS is to simply ensure that G-Sync is always active by never letting the FPS go beyond 165 (or 163, because it needs just a little headroom).

That said, RTSS is virtually a non-issue in this scenario because my FPS in-game does not approach 163. It seems to max out around 130 - 140 FPS. So, RTSS is never active while I’m playing AOEII:DE. But even if it did activate at certain points to keep the frame rate underneath my monitor’s refresh rate (and thus, to keep G-Sync enabled at all times), that would not explain these issues… These issues are supposed to be prevented by RTSS, not caused by it. I have never experience these kinds of frame pacing/timing issues in any other game and I’ve used G-Sync and RTSS for years.

I don’t know enough about G-Sync to know what kind of fluctuations in FPS (and thus refresh rate) G-Sync can handle without a person being able to detect. But I do know that I play other games which can fluctuate fairly substantially in FPS without experiencing anything like this. It has never been my understanding that such fluctuations in frame rate would cause such noticeable issues.

I mean, I think what you are suggesting might be more believable if the FPS (and refresh rate) was swinging wildly in increments of like 50-60 FPS. But fluctuations in terms of 10-20 FPS, especially when the frame rate is already over 100 FPS? To the best of my knowledge those fluctuations should not be at all visible or causing these kinds of issues.

Also, who is reporting/flagging my posts in this thread, and why? That’s really not cool.

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Why record with a camera though? Why not just let MSI Afterburner go ham and see what the frame time readings give you?

Considering the settings you use I can imagine that you’re having problems, I mean I guess that a game like this will be fairly unstable on such a high refresh. I just checked the frame times with Afterburner and well, here goes (somehow the video ended up a bit choopy which is weird because the game was perfectly smooth so only look at the numbers):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nYmyA7VEfk

So yep, there is a bit of fluctuation here compared to what it should be (16.6 ms) but it’s not at all noticeable in game and really it’s so minor that it shouldn’t be noticeable… on 60 hz because on a higher refresh things may be a lot more wonky. Also you can see that CPU usage spikes a bit on the main core while scrolling and that again can result in inconsistencies.

Anyway I don’t think the game can improve much from here but maybe Wicked Witch will prove me wrong in the future. As a workaround all I can suggest is to find a value you can hold 99% of the time and either lock the game to that combined with gsync for consistency or just disable gsync altogether and use the in-game vsync with a lower refresh rate. I know that it sucks but there doesn’t seem to be many options here.

As for RTSS I’m just saying I had severe frame time issues the last time I locked it with that (and no, I usually don’t have issues with RTSS, it’s a great piece of software) so I’d say try something else, even the base frame rate limiter settings in NV Inspector could be better, who knows?

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I hope that something can be done, because right now it seems that neither G-Sync nor V-Sync are working properly.

Actually, I didn’t know that you could measure the frame timing with software like that. I should install it and see what my results are. Though, whatever the case, the camera doesn’t lie - you’re seeing pretty much what my eye was seeing.

Are you suggesting that I may need to cap my FPS at 60, which might alleviate some of these issues? I could try that. But, that would not be what I would consider a “fix”, of course. I’ll test that later and see if the stutter/tearing is resolved. And remember that RTSS isn’t even in the equation right now since my FPS doesn’t exceed 140. RTSS never has a chance to activate. So RTSS isn’t the problem here.

I don’t know why a “game like this” should be “fairly unstable on such a high refresh”. This is the “definitive edition”, after all, and it supports high resolutions and high resolution textures specifically for people with newer monitors. It was released just a couple weeks ago in 2019 - of course it should support high refresh rate monitors. That only seems reasonable. If it doesn’t then it shouldn’t have an unlocked frame rate lol.

Right now my options are to enable both G-Sync and V-Sync (and still experience some degree of stutter), or to lower the refresh rate of my monitor and use V-Sync? (and we don’t even know if that would actually fix the problem yet). Both of these are terrible options… Something is not right here, and really needs to be fixed. If for whatever reason it can’t be fixed, then hopefully an option can be added as a workaround so that people with high refresh rate monitors (but without G-Sync) don’t have to manually lower their monitor’s refresh rate everytime they want to play this game lol. And again, we don’t even know if THAT will actually resolve anything; I have yet to test that. But at absolute best that’s a half-measure, and not a “fix” by any means.

What I think, and I’m making an assumption here, is that virtually everyone who meets certain, likely broad, criteria (such as playing at high FPS) suffers from this problem - some people realize it and others don’t. And it could be as you said - those who are playing on 60 Hz monitors (and thus not exceeding 60 FPS or some other possibly arbitrary FPS) may not be experiencing these issues for some reason or another. But, I don’t think this is isolated by any means. There seems to be something fundamentally wrong with how V-Sync and G-Sync are functioning. Or maybe it’s something else, who knows. All I know is that I get a ton of stuttering when panning the camera, screen tearing seems to occur when G-Sync or V-Sync are enabled independently of each other, and there seems to be issues with frame timing/pacing.

And for the record, here’s one of the videos I posted earlier which got hidden because someone reported my earlier post for no reason. This video demonstrates the issues described above with different combinations of G-Sync and V-Sync as recorded by my iPhone X at 240 FPS (recommend watching full screen and at 60 FPS).

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Hey Neros; any news concerning the apparent borked functionality of v-sync/g-sync?

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We have all just gotten back from our end of year break so there wont be any immediate updates for this issue, but I believe there are still some more performance updates in the works which might help with this.

So keep an eye on it after each update and let us know if anything changes (or doesn’t), if it persists after all the planned performance updates are out then we might have a more direct look.

Sorry I can’t be more detailed, I’m actually not on the project any more (at least for now) and I’m also not the graphics programmer.

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Checked after the hotfix on the 13th; everything seems mostly the same as far as the stutter is concerned.

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And the stutter persists after update 34699. Still unplayable for me. It seems that G-Sync is still broken as I still get screen tearing and uneven frame pacing while using G-Sync (V-Sync disabled).

Why isn’t this on the “known issues” list yet? Is this presumed to be included under “issues with low FPS”? Because this particular issue seems to occur independently of FPS.

2 Likes
96

Thanks for continuing to update us on this.

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I seem to be having this issue too! Generally FPS seems OK, but map panning has a maybe 1 second delay after my inputs (whether it is through the arrow keys or moving the cursor to the side of the screen). Happening on a Dell XPS 13 9343 (Core i5 5200U, integrated GFX Intel HD530 or something). It also happens on a desktop that has a Intel i5-7600T with Intel HD630 graphics.

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For me it’s not so much input delay; it’s actual screen tearing and microstuttering / uneven frame pacing or whatever you want to call it.

If you scroll up in this thread you’ll see a few videos I’ve posted of the issue. Here is one such. What’s happening is that I’m recording my screen with an external, high FPS camera and showing how screen tearing is occurring with only V-Sync enabled. Pay attention to how half the image moves before the other half at times.

Then when G-Sync is enabled (along with V-Sync), you can see that the whole image moves across the screen in one unit without separating. This is not normal behavior and only having G-Sync or V-Sync enabled independently of each other should eliminate screen tearing.

1 Like
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I recently got the game and whenever I scroll the screen tearing is so bad it makes me nauseous and I am unable to play. It seems like my G-Sync monitor is not functioning regardless of settings and V-sync is also not preventing tearing. Any combination results in the same tearing/stuttering whenever scrolling even if I limit my FPS.

Is there any work around?

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The ingame tooltip claims V-synch can cause tearing artifacts. So this is probably a dumb question, but have you tried it with that option off?

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I have tried it with every combination of V-sync/G-sync being on and off individually or simultaneously, forced through Nvidia control panel or through game and I always get very noticeable tearing.

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I have seen the other topics on this issue but I have been unable to find any solution. Game is still unplayable for me.

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I have a diagonal screen tear across the monitor when im scrolling in the game itself … V-Sync in game and in the nvidia control panel didnt help or any other older driver… i had a problem with the black screen after intro with music and mouse pointer and i reverted to older drivers and it works … new drivers made my screen black or black when i saw a bit of menu… but after that i have this diagonal tear … any ideas???

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Have you tried again recently? I booted it up again today and it actually seems like it’s improved to some degree, though I feel like I still notice the occasional “stutter” when scrolling the map.