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Hey fellow TLers,
This thread is a bit of a follow-up thread from this thread
- shoutout to FFGenerations who sent me here.
I've lately been having problems with Dota 2; the visual experience being a bit choppy.
At first it was a problem with correct refresh rate which was fixed (see the other thread), but now I suspect the problem is with my CPU.
The symptoms:
• When I start a game the game feels smooth, but after a few minutes the game feels more and more choppy/gluey. I would not describe it as lagg (network), because there's no packet loss and everyone who's experienced lagg vs hardware issues know there's a different feeling to it. At first I thought the problem might be with my graphics card (Sapphire Radeon r9 280x) being unable to handle 144 hz (Screen: Benq 2720z)
• When I run Dota 2 my Task manager/Resource Manager says Dota 2 is hogging > 50% of my CPU capacity. I've heard that Source games are generally CPU intensive, but I have an i5 4690k processor and friends of mine with i5 2500k or worse CPU's only have about 15-20 % CPU usage in Dota 2.
So my main questions are:
• Is my CPU usage normal for dota 2 (considering the CPU I have)?
• Could the problem be that my graphics card is too weak to handle gaming Dota 2 at 144 hz?
• Overall: How come every Dota 2 game I play starts out feeling very smooth but after a couple of minutes start feeling worse and worse, ending up feeling rather choppy/gluey?
Any and all theories + suggestions on how to troubleshoot would be greatly appreciated!
Thank you in advance!
Extra info
• The Net Graph in Dota 2 shows the FPS being pretty stable around 144.
• I've updated my graphics drivers. I'm not using Raptr or other bonus programs.
• I'm using BitDefender Pro and have done a thorough virus scan. I even formated my entire comp/reinstalled Win8.1 just 1 week ago.
• Dota uses about 15 % of my RAM. I've also done extensive stresstests (Memtest and Prime95) on my RAM and CPU. No errors. Everything looks fine.
• My temperatures looks fine. All CPU cores hover around 50°C when after 1 hour+ of gaming. During stresstests they might reach 60°C. GPU temperature is usually around 60°C when gaming.
• I've set "fps_max" to 144 in my Dota 2 autoexec file
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United Kingdom20338 Posts
CPU is supposed to be utilized. If your CPU didn't need to be above 20% load on any core, then you could buy a CPU 1/5'th as fast and still get the same performance. A load of 40% or whatever it is is normal unless you're GPU limited and the CPU is waiting for GPU all of the time, and it'd be higher (towards 100%) if you were CPU limited and the game could utilize more cores well
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I'm not really sure what your issue is here, have you made sure that vsync is off? If it's on, that would cause stutters and spikes of input lag if any of your frames took even a moment longer than 1/144'th of a second (because the screen would have to wait for the next refresh cycle) which wouldn't necessarily show up on an FPS display (because they're not accurate unless your frametimes are consistent).
It could easily be possible that your CPU can keep all frames faster than ~6.94ms for the start of the game, then when more units and actions come on, it takes a bit longer to handle 1 frame so you could get those stutters/lags with vsync.
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Just disable fps_max for now or use fps_max 999.
You should be able to see if you're GPU limited or CPU limited at times quite easily. The easiest way is to just grab msi afterburner or gpu-z and look at GPU load, if it's >95% then you're probably GPU limited
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My i5 3570k uses like 60-70% in dota2, with my GPU using around 50-60% aswell (gtx 760), so afaik its pretty normal.
I have the same problem as you (way worse on windowed fullscreen), but mine starts after seeing certain spell effects ingame, alt-tabbing sometimes helps, or can make it worse, its been driving me nuts, gonna try what cyro said and see what happens.
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Thanks Cyro for the quick and informative reply!
What you say makes perfect sense. I've been looking at temperature and FPS as a way to measure the GPU workload; I'll look at it percentage-wise through GPU-z and will post another reply tomorrow.
To clarify, the issue I'm experiencing feels like input lagg, but since I'm a tech newb I have a hard time putting my finger on exactly what it is and even more so putting it into words.
If I remove the fps_max line my fps will not go above 120 (since Dota 2 is capped at 120 fps per default), but I might try setting it at 999 or whatever and see what happens.
Thanks again for your reply. I'll be back tomorrow with a progress report!
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United Kingdom20338 Posts
You could also note what you have the issues with in particular - one of the main reasons that i didn't get into dota 2 was some lag that was deliberately put into the engine when doing stuff like scrolling the map to the sides with mouse.
That effect is smallish but annoying on 60hz when your game is already somewhat laggy anyway, but the closer you go to an input lag optimized setup (144hz, minimal pre-rendered frames etc) then the more disproportionally laggy that part of the game feels because the delay for accelerating and decelerating the camera is still the same. Not sure if that's related to your issue or not
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I did a quick run (Dota 2) vs bots: One on High grahpics settings and one on Low graphics settings.
On High Settings (ambient occlusion and all that jazz enabled) my GPU was at 90 % load or higher.
- Isn't that quite high for an r9 280x card? (Sapphire, Tri-x)
On Low Settings (all effects off, rendering set to low) my GPU was around 35-40 % load.
- The funny/sad thing though was that the sense of lagg/stuttering/glue-ish feeling was still there. I can't say I experienced the game running significantly smoother on Low settings than High.
I go to bed scratching my head. This will be an interesting one to crack.
Ps. Oh and putting the fps_max to 999 made it significantly worse I'm afraid - so I put it back to 144.
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United Kingdom20338 Posts
- Isn't that quite high for an r9 280x card? (Sapphire, Tri-x)
Unless something in your system is capped out and running the game as fast as it can, FPS will just keep going up and up until something does hit that limit. If it's GPU, it'll show ~100% load. If not, then GPU load will drop. For games, usually one CPU thread is running 100% of the time (limited by the speed of how fast individual CPU cores are) or GPU is at 100% load. It can easily change depending on the state of the game, for example sc2 can by GPU limited at the start of the game when CPU load is light, and then become extremely CPU limited when there are lots of units on the map~
I really have no idea what your issue could be, just disable vsync in game. Check your graphics driver and see if vsync is enabled or disabled there (disable if it is) - try playing around with pre-rendered frames setting, i can't remember what it's called for AMD cards
+ Show Spoiler +sometimes people have problems with DPC latency causing lag/stutters, you can measure that with this program, but it's kinda annoying to troubleshoot or see if it's even your issue, because power management features etc can give you really messy results. If your DPC latency is constantly spiking into the thousands while your game is running though, that's probably bad. - http://www.resplendence.com/latencymon
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Thanks again Cyro,
I guess that makes sense and although the GPU load is high, it isn't capped (100 %). I do however still believe the GPU load shouldn't be that high for a relatively powerful card like an r9 280x, especially not in a game like Dota 2, but maybe that's what happens when you're running 144 hz.
Anyway,I've disabled vsync in game and I don't know if there's an option in Catalyst control center for it; if so I haven't been able to find it.
I'm at work at the moment, but I'll have a look at this DPC latency as soon as I'm off work.
To be continued.
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United Kingdom20338 Posts
I do however still believe the GPU load shouldn't be that high for a relatively powerful card
Your GPU load will always be at 100% unless you're limited by something else in the system.
If you get a 4x more powerful GPU, then you'll just have 200fps at 100% load instead of 50fps at 100% load - but you'll still be at 100% load.
If you're in a situation that doesn't put a demand on your GPU for it to be at high load, then you'd be able to use a weaker GPU with no FPS loss at all. That happens in cases like starcraft 2 lategame, because it's CPU bound - but generally for most games, you'd expect GPU to be at high load unless you have an extremely overkill GPU, you're very CPU limited or you have an FPS cap (so your system is idle instead of pumping out frames as fast as possible).
Dota 2 at 150-200fps and max settings is still probably quite challenging for a 280x  at med settings and 60fps, not so much.
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OP you need to post what settings you're running the game at including resolution, whether it's fullscreen, and if not, if Windows Aero is enabled/disabled, otherwise you're just going to get generic answers that don't really help.
You're probably experiencing microstutter due to frame-time variation. Lots of people are sensitive to it and someone who isn't won't be able to understand why it feels off to you. There's several different reasons why it might be happening and although I can only speak for myself (and other people I googled with the same problem), running games in windowed mode with Windows Aero on means that V-Sync is enabled on the desktop whether or not you change the option in game and that contributes significantly to the stutter. So let me know exactly what your setup is and we can try from there.
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Cyro, thanks again for your informative replies. I'm learning a lot from you; really appreciate it!
hariooo: Thanks for your input! I was running Dota 2 with everything except vsync enabled and the other settings at "high". However, I recently disabled ambient occlusion because I don't see it making any real difference.
What you're describing about microstuttering is probably spot on. I've experienced similar things in Starcraft 2 and other games while friends of mine sometimes don't even see what the problem is (when trying the game out on my PC). I run Dota 2 in Fullscreen mode. I didn't know windows aero was still a thing in Win 8.1. Is it? If so, where are the settings for it? (I'll google in the meantime).
Hmm, am I forgetting something? I run Dota 2 in 1920 x 1080, in 16 : 9
My launch options are: "-novid -high -console -hideconsole -freq 144 -noforcemaccel -noforcemspd -useforcedmparms" and I have fps_max 150 as a line in my autoexec. Otherwise my autoexec is just keybindings etc, nothing that should affect visuals or hardware.
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Make sure your monitor settings are correct. Is it properly set to 144hz? Probably but check.
Try fps_max 143 or 145. I'm not sure why this works for some people (involving pre-processed frames) but it won't hurt.
Check how many steamwebhelper.exe processes are running during a game.
There's unfortunately a lot of possible reasons and one solution won't work for everyone. I encourage you to google Dota 2 microstutter and try as many tweaks as you can.
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Roger that! It's basically what I've been doing the past two weeks 
My monitor is set to 144 hz in Catalyst control center and in Windows monitor settings.
I'll try setting fps_max to 145. May I ask what the theoretical mechanic behind this is? *curious*
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I'm honestly not too sure. V-Sync works by holding certain frames in memory until to display them in sync with the monitor refresh rate and prerendered frames is sort of how many frames you're keeping (but only sort of and definitely not technically). Some people found that subtractin or adding the number of prerendered frames (which varies by game) to any sort of fps_max command can help for some reason or other.
^don't that that explanation as super accurate though it's my very layman's understanding.
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hariooo, thanks for that layman's explanation
I've reached a point where thing are okay yet not great. I.e. I'm playing right now while trying minor changes daily, but I think I can safely say nothing is wrong with my CPU or GPU hardware-wise; yet there might be some setting and/or driver causing minor hiccups.
I'll keep troubleshooting and do welcome any suggestion you guys might have.
Not giving up just yet
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EPT
