Save file has been attached, its the one I've been using to test. I have all the dlcs by the way. Not the original game where the stuttering starting occurring though.
It was last working on the current patch, but I have tried reverting to other patches to no success.
At this point, I really don't have anything else to test. I've sent a save to a friend to test and I'll hear back probably tomorrow. The only other things I can do now is starting replacing hardware.
Just to recap for future readers: When starting a new game, pausing the music can help reduce the stuttering for the early game ( you can still see it if you look closely). However, later on the stuttering gets much worse and a lot more easier to see. The stuttering can be seen when changing menus or viewing different systems. Ships will jitter when moving across a system. Panning the camera while in the ship design menu will also show the stutter.
This problem occurred on the current version of stellaris, and I have had no real issues with the game up until then. Performance is not a issue for me (see pc specs below). I do not remember making any major hardware or software changes at the time. The only thing that I remember happening was a windows update, but the restart to install the windows update was done after the stuttering started. So I don't think that really applies.
Changes I have tried:
- Changing full screen / border less windows
- uninstalled GeForce Experience and installing graphics drivers without it
- turning off v-sync, multi-sample level, lowered graphical settings
- turned off autosave and all event pop-ups
- turning off adaptive sync
- installled the game on my M.2, SSD and mechanical hard drive.
- disabling all my DLCS (which made the problem worse)
- rolling back patches (all the way back to 2.7)
- reinstalled windows and drivers
- used older drivers
- motherboard has been updated
- turned off multi core enhancement & Hyper-threading
- setting Stellaris' cpu afinity to real time
- Switching the load across different cores (it always maxed out one core)
- capping the frame rate to 144hz
- running the game in as a administrator
- signing out of the launcher
- playing offline
- Re-run the Redistributables
- disabled game mode, game bar, steam overlay, Nvidia's overlay
- capping the frame rate to 144fps and 60fps through Nvidia's control panel
- disabling windows defender and adding it the 'approved programs'
- Each time I reinstalled my OS, I only installed programs that were critical to testing.
Less reputable tests were:
I installed Linux (Ubunutu) and installed steam to run the game. Admittedly, I didn't have a lot of time to test on Ubuntu and I know very little about the OS, but I booted up the attached save to find the same issue. I also tried running the game through my integrated graphics (on a windows install), and I think the problem persisted as well. Though that may just have been the low fps making it hard to distinguish it.
I want to stress this: All the benchmarks and stress tests I have done so far have showed healthy hardware. The other games I have tried have not shown any issues. At first I thought this was an issue with my hardware, but nothing seems to be failing or faulty. If my quick Linux test was true, then it's not the OS either. This leaves Stellaris interacting with the drivers / hardware in some bizarre way. Am I oversimplifying this? Is there something I'm missing ? I'm no expert, but this the conclusion I have come to.
This might be a running issue with Stellaris, as there are others with this issue. Many of these people have higher end hardware, which is only thing I can correlate with all the other cases. Some people found that shifting the load around to different threads/core fixed the problem. Someone reported that upgrading their CPU caused the issue. So it could be possibly CPU related? While I"m probably already extrapolating too much already, other paradox games have people reporting a similar issue, even after going through the motions of reinstalling OS, etc.
Some examples:
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/cant-find-solution-to-micro-stuttering.1467122/page-3
I recently was able to message Permannoyed (from the last link), and they confirm that they still have the problem. He had done the largest amount of testing:
- rolled back to every version of the game and back again. I did this every time I made another change, to make sure it wasn't that some version of the game worked with any of the other changes I made. this was an exhausting process.
- increased the windows swap file size from 8gb, to 16gb, and made sure the swap file is on my m.2. so its almost as fast as my ram is.
- disabled all settings in nvidia control panel that would potentially interfere.
- disabled SLI and tried the game using each graphics card alone.
- disabled all overclocks.
- disabled game mode, dvr, and suppressed windows 10 updates.
- rolled back to older drivers and back again. graphics, sound, network, chipset, you name it.
- updated my bios, and rolled back to older versions, and back again.
- verified steam files
- reinstalled the game,
- reinstalled windows 10,
- ran the game outside steam, signed out of pdox account,
- ran game with and without fullscreen optimizations,
- ran game in compatibility mode for windows 10, 8.1, and 7.
- ran the game in windowed mode and fullscreen.
- installed the game on SSD, m.2, and hard disks.
- disabled all antivirus and firewalls, and tried multiple different AV/FW solutions.
- disabled windows indexer (cortana)
- disabled every single telemetry system in wondows 10
I don't know what else can be tested. This has to be an engine issue, possibility related to how it interacts with the CPU.
Sorry for the long read AndrewT, just wanted to outline what's happened to see if someone in the future can look at this with the same problem and possibly solve it.
Here are my PC specs for the sake of future readers:
Intel Core i9 9900K Octa Core LGA 1151 3.60GHz Unlocked CPU Processor
MSI GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Gaming X Trio 11GB
Samsung 860 QVO 1TB 2.5" SATA III 6GB/s 4-Bit MLC V-NAND SSD MZ-76Q1T0BW
WD Black SN750 500GB NVMe M.2 (2280) PCIe 3x4 3D NAND SSD
Corsair Vengeance LPX 32GB (2x 16GB) DDR4 3200MHz Memory
Gigabyte Z390 AORUS PRO WIFI LGA 1151 ATX Motherboard
Corsair RM850x 850W 80 Plus V2 Gold Fully Modular ATX Power Supply
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