BF3 Performance / System Lag / Stuttering

Hey guys, new to the forum and wanted to share up my issues.

So I'm getting some weird issues. Here is my pc specs.

AMD Phenom II x4 965 Black Edition 3.4ghz
16 Gigs DDR3 G Skill SDRAM
EVGA GTX 570 (latest drivers 285.62)
OCZ Solid 3 SSD 120gig (have my os installed on this and currently bf3) (incorrectly labled it agility earlier)
Sound Blaster XFI Fatality (older one with front panel for pc with inputs on it)
(Onboard sound controller has been disabled)

Thermaltake TR2 RX 750 Bronze

Now I can get anywhere from 60-85fps constant on servers but every so often I get major spikes. First I thought it was lag until i kept up task manager and my fps displayed in bf3 and saw that the CPU was spiking like mad and as a result the frame rate dropped drastically.

There is no way my system should be dropping like this. Anyone else having these issues? I was playing on ultra (everything) ran fine but with these issues. So I dropped down to full on medium and it still had it. So I don't think it's the game but I could be mistaken.

Any clues?

Also note it is doing this on low settings across the board too.

FPS will drop from 80-12 in seconds then back up

This is beyond frustrating. Never had these issues.

Any ideas? Maybe a memory leak? Bad CPU management in BF3 code?

Just get's bad when flying and people getting mad because I fly right into a tree or some other obstacle that normally I would have avoided.

Message edited by JesseMoody on 10-31-2011 at 05:16:04 AM

Reply to JesseMoody

also does this in singleplayer...

Reply to JesseMoody

Hey I am getting the same problem. I also have a GTX 570, but its Gigabyte with 3 turbo lift fans. I am playing it on ultra, 1920X1200 resolution, and 4XAA. I get a constant 30-45 fps...perfectly playable. I get massive spikes also, where it drops to like 3 fps, totally freezes, then goes back to normal. I have ruled out over heating, since it maxes at 67C. I have latest driver also.

My specs:
Intel Core 2 Duo OC 3.4ghz
4 GB ddr2 800mghz
Xfi Fitali1ty Xtreme Gamer Edition sound card
1 TB HDD 7200 RPM
GTX 570

I have a better processor then you and you have more RAM then I, so we can pretty much rule out each of those....unless like you said has something to do with bad coding.
Look at this

Now that graph shows that neither the CPU or Graphics card are bottle necking, since they are constantly aligned with each other. I don't know what to do but this issue is ruining the game for me.

Message quoted 1 times
Message edited by pleasehelp on 10-30-2011 at 11:25:56 PM

Reply to pleasehelp

We both have the xfi sound cards. I wonder if those may be the issue. Its a long shot but now i am curious. I didnt have issues with rage or bad company 2 but i wonder if it is indeed the sound card.

Still like ya said its killing the experience for me. I just want this to get figured out bc damn this games sexy.

Message edited by JesseMoody on 10-30-2011 at 11:42:26 PM

Reply to JesseMoody

Yeah i know. You should try doing this console command and show me what happens on yours.

render.displayfps 1
and
render.perfoverlayenable 1

then a post a few pics and lets compare graphics.

Reply to pleasehelp

will do after dinner here. Gonna give that a shot and might take out the xfi card and uninstall all traces to see if it fixes anything. I'm just shuttering at the onboard sound thoughts now already.

Reply to JesseMoody

Reply to JesseMoody

Ok looks like we have identical problems. I talked to some other people, they mentioned turning down the AA to 2X. This seems logical. I will try that when I get a chance and see if that helps. I don't think it has anything to do with the Creative Card, because I also use my G35 headphones which don't use the card and it still happened.

Reply to pleasehelp

Oh I just saw that you didn't have AA on.....

Reply to pleasehelp

I am running this is my power supply [url=http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817153136][/url]

Reply to JesseMoody

I get the same stuttering problem with CF 5850's. frames go from 80-1 periodically.
i downloaded the latest drivers 11:10 v3 + cap4. i play on high with AA off. but everything is fine when i play with a single gpu

thinking about ditching these cards to get one beefier card. this is ridiculous

Reply to dlong

dlong... see i don't get this. it makes no sense at all to me. I have done everything I can to optimize my rig and get things up to speed but the constant stuttering is beyond lame.

I am a 3d artist and have worked on quite a few games and know all about the horrors of qa and the bugs those guys send and it's impossible to test every scenario as far as pc goes but this just isn't right.

Having a pretty beefy setup with a good video card should run this game with no issues. Like I said earlier. Even on low settings it hitches and stutters.. Just doesn't make sense to me.

Reply to JesseMoody

Just uninstalled my audio and video drivers and did clean installs and still getting the spikes on my cpu.

Even overclocked cpu to 3.63 from 3.4 to see if it helped at all.

Nothing noticable.

Reply to JesseMoody

Under Nvidia Control Panel go under specific programs, BF3, and change the power management mode to Maximum Performance. Also try turning the Anti Aliasing Post to totally off or low.

I turned off my AA, and I didn't get any stuttering for the last 1.5 hours I played. So I don't know if that fixed it for sure, but it definitely helped.

Message quoted 1 times

Reply to pleasehelp

pleasehelp wrote :

Under Nvidia Control Panel go under specific programs, BF3, and change the power management mode to Maximum Performance. Also try turning the Anti Aliasing Post to totally off or low.

I turned off my AA, and I didn't get any stuttering for the last 1.5 hours I played. So I don't know if that fixed it for sure, but it definitely helped.

I'll give that a shot.

I also just did this.

Set my nvidia to compute the physx instead of letting system decide.

Reply to JesseMoody

Tried turning off my AA post and it still had issues.

Fired Rage up again and now I'm having issues there as well.

I was playing rage pretty smooth with my old 9800GTX 512mb card up until I decided to upgrade to a GTX570 and get a new power supply.

Just doesn't make any sense why I'm getting these issues.

I really don't want to format my system and redo everything only to find out I still have the issues.

Damn PC gaming....

Reply to JesseMoody

doubleposting cause there seem to be 2 posts containing the same issue:

im having the exact same issue like you "pleasehelp" ... i really did try everything i could think of. i underclocked and overclocked my gpu and cpu (there for ram), i checked the temps, i updated the bios of my gpu and my motherboard, i updated every driver i could think of, i defragmentated my hdd, i tried every videosetting preset from low to ultra to custom settings. i tried turning off AA, which finally seems to helped at least a little bit, but i still have no fun playing bf3 because of these extremely annoying lag spikes (fps drops). the problem i have does appear in singleplayer / coop and in multiplayer mode.

my system:
- intel core 2 duo e8500 @ 4gHz
- 4gb aeneon ram @ 1066 mHZ
- gigabyte 1024mb 560 ti overclocked edition
- hitachi 1 tb hdd
- asus p5k se-epu mainboard

Reply to mrmaffen

the game does recommend a quad core guys. i know the op has a quad but you other two just have a dual core.

jessemoody, dont kid yourself you dont have a better cpu then a phenom x4

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cbrunnem wrote :

the game does recommend a quad core guys. i know the op has a quad but you other two just have a dual core.

jessemoody, dont kid yourself you dont have a better cpu then a phenom x4

What do you mean? I have the phenom x4 chip. So who am I kidding?

Still the cpu spikes caused are relative to the FPS drop because they seem to happen at exactly the same time. Something is going on with this game that isn't right.

Message quoted 1 times

Reply to JesseMoody

I have this same issue. It seemed like an overheating issue it was so bad. It was almost as if my integrated graphics card was taking over or the cpu was overheating. It happens randomly. not too often. Should be a problem with the game. My cpu is i5-2500k w/a gtx 465 OC. Load around 70c for both. But when this happened I looked @ my processes and I saw that rtvscan was going, which is symantec's anti-virus scanning. I ended the process and it was fine.

Reply to darklabeley55

Note: I do not have any anti virus/spyware stuff running. Even killed all apple related tasks and anything with my render stuff for 3ds max.

Reply to JesseMoody

I have found a solution to the problem that has worked for me. I was having lag spikes a lot so I looked in to it and found AMD's Cool 'n Quiet to be the problem. Intel also has a similar program called Intel Speed Up Technology, and disabling this in the BIOS should fix your problem. Also I'll throw in a workaround I have found for alt+tab issues in-game. Open Windows Task Manager and set it to "Always On Top" and then run BF3, when you alt+tab it will tab to the Task Manager and work correctly. Have fun!

Reply to Nenketsu

I've disabled cool 'n quiet. Everything is set to run at max at all times if possible.

I do 3d art for a living and try to make sure i get the most out of my system at all times as I'll have 3ds max, photoshop, zbrush and sometimes Unreal 3 (Unreal Development Kit) open.

This is why this is so puzzling to me.

Reply to JesseMoody

That's really strange, I was really having a hard time with it too until I did that. I suppose it's best to pray that DICE fixes their poor coding errors and puts out a patch quickly. I wish you the best!

Reply to Nenketsu

I was told to unplug my wired 360 controller and that might help a bit. I am very skeptical about this one...

I'll report back.

Reply to JesseMoody

Ah yes, you reminded me of that and another fix I tried. I believe that it helped with mouse input lag. If that doesn't work try turning Raw Input off in the in-game settings as well.

Reply to Nenketsu

I don't have the game yet, but I found a thread on stuttering/freezing etc, and I thought I'd share it with you guys.

http://sonsofvalour.forumotion.co. [...] -and-fixes

Reply to Gman450

JesseMoody wrote :

What do you mean? I have the phenom x4 chip. So who am I kidding?

Still the cpu spikes caused are relative to the FPS drop because they seem to happen at exactly the same time. Something is going on with this game that isn't right.

lol im sorry but back to the problem. i second disabling anything that is not needed and unplugging everything that is not needed.

do anyone with a problem have a sound card in addition to the mobo's. they have been known to cause problems.

are your powersupplies ample?

@cbrunnem this has definitely nothing to do with us having dualcore cpus. the games runs perfectly smooth for about 5 minutes, then the fps drops begin.

also i checked wether or not my cpu has been clocked down by intel speedstep or other similar protection and or energysaving technologies. this is also not the case.

i analyzed the problem with cpu-z and gpu-z and various other tools. when the fps drops happen, the cpu clock stays the same, the temps are absolutely stable and low. the only thing i could see was, that the gpu load suddenly drops to 0%.
in addition i tried playing crysis 2 on max settings, which also should bring my hardware to its limits. but crysis 2 worked perfectly well.

im almost certain that this problem im having is caused by a bug within battlefield 3 and not by faulty hardware or bad settings.

Message quoted 1 times

Reply to mrmaffen

mrmaffen wrote :

@cbrunnem this has definitely nothing to do with us having dualcore cpus. the games runs perfectly smooth for about 5 minutes, then the fps drops begin.

also i checked wether or not my cpu has been clocked down by intel speedstep or other similar protection and or energysaving technologies. this is also not the case.

i analyzed the problem with cpu-z and gpu-z and various other tools. when the fps drops happen, the cpu clock stays the same, the temps are absolutely stable and low. the only thing i could see was, that the gpu load suddenly drops to 0%.
in addition i tried playing crysis 2 on max settings, which also should bring my hardware to its limits. but crysis 2 worked perfectly well.

im almost certain that this problem im having is caused by a bug within battlefield 3 and not by faulty hardware or bad settings.

i moved on past the dual core. i read an article proving a dual core is sufficient for this game as dice optimized it extremely well since apha and beta were quads ruled.

i would still try and check out things that are plugged in and try removing the sound card OP

I'm basically with the exact same problem as you guys
I can run the Single Player with almost everything on ultra just fine, at 80~140 fps.
The multiplayer, though, is just impossible to play. It starts fine, but a little later (1~5min) it start stuttering and my fps start to drop. But not just any drop, it goes all the way down to 1~5 fps. It happens on every map, every time; makes it completely impossible to play. I already tried all catalyst drivers I have access to: 11.7 11.8 11.9 11.10 (all the three previews and the official too). Between each driver change I wipe every trace of the old one with driversweeper, just like anyone should do... I also experienced with all the latest caps I found (and also using the drivers with no cap at all). I even forwarded all the needed ports just to make sure it's not connection related. I also set all catalyst options to "application controlled", just to be sure; no difference tho.
I also tried turning the crossfire off.
I even tried tweaking some settings some random people said would help (disabling triple buffering, forcing the renderer to render a number of frames ahead); made no difference.

I sincerely don't know what else I can do... Does any of you have a clue what could be going on? Any hint or sugestion?

Specs: i5 750 stock, ati HD5970, 4gb ram, win7 x64

Message edited by fe_ on 11-01-2011 at 09:36:09 PM

Reply to fe_

i tried out if my soundcard (asus xonar d1) was the problem and disabled it in the device manager. unfortunately it didnt help at all :S

this game is really starting to piss me off. im thinking about returning it

Message quoted 1 times

Reply to mrmaffen

mrmaffen wrote :

i tried out if my soundcard (asus xonar d1) was the problem and disabled it in the device manager. unfortunately it didnt help at all :S

this game is really starting to piss me off. im thinking about returning it

take it out and uninstall the driver

If anyone has a 360 controller plugged in. Unplug and test. Mines working nicely for now.

Reply to JesseMoody

Ok had a bit of chugging. Turned down the MSAA, changed my AO settings to SSAO and set my texture quality to high instead of ultra. Fixed everything.

Don't really notice a difference either and is running fantastic.

Reply to JesseMoody

after i took my "asus xonar d1" soundcard out of my pc, bf3 is working way better than before. its not perfect, but at least i can now call it "playable". hopefully bf3 will be fixed soon, so i can use my xonar d1 again -.-

Reply to mrmaffen

It seems the problem I have is the same as yours, game running perfectly fine for the first couple of minutes, then gradually starting to have more and more frequent lagspikes. Lowering the settings seems to give me some more time before this starts, but it still happens, it just takes longer.
Windows' performance monitor seems to show HDD spikes coinciding with the lag spikes, has anyone else noticed that? I have a SAMSUNG HD502HJ ATA HDD, and my friend with an SSD doesn't have any problems, so I was thinking maybe that's the problem. (i5 750 and HD5850, 1920x1080)

Reply to AsTheDeath

Looks like its an actual Nvidia driver issue. Will most likely be fixed when the new ones comes out.

http://www.dsogaming.com/news/batt [...] 2-drivers/

This is like the 100th time updating a driver screws something up even more....

Reply to pleasehelp

I was having similar issues but I think I found a solution. If you're running your phenom on an ASUS mobo with EPU installed, check to make sure under the settings that there is no power saving features turned on. Even when I had EPU set to high performance, I was getting those lag spikes and it wasn't until I moved my cpu gauge widget to my second monitor that I noticed that my cpu was down clocking to 800 Mhz (default power saving clock) when I had those spikes occur.
I went into the setting and low and behold there is a dynamic power management setting that was turned on and apparently that was messing up everything. Just make sure you have the airplane tab (hi performance) tab selected when you turn off the DPM. I disabled that and have been lag spike free for about 3 solid hours now.
Hope that helps!

Reply to theGuttedFish

THis is driving me NUTS. I have the same problem as FE_, any solutions? Please.

Reply to akkad

I had similar problem

I recently bought an asus gtx 570 direct CUII card to play BF3 at decent settings. The performance was great, until i noticed that after playing for about 20 mins, the game slowly stutters/micro stutter. I dont know the proper technical term but the graphics gets a bit hickuppy even though FPS was solid (mini freezes that lasts microseconds). This problem never occured before i installed the GTX 570. Even in other games such as F1 2011, Driver san Francisco the phenomenon occurs. I tried many Nvidia drivers from the latest to the oldest but none solved issue. I sent the G card back to the seller and plugged the old one in and suprise, same issue. Today i reinstalled windows 7 (32 bit) and downloaded ati drivers and same issue occurs in battlefield 3, even with fixes. I tried using the fix for battlefield 3 (you have to go to game command menu thingi and change settings) which helped for 2 days and then problem reappeared. It seems nothing seem to fix the issue. And this happens only after playing for about 20 mins. If i close the game and start another level, the phenomenon occurs again after around 20 mins.

Note that even if i turn settings into low, the phenomenon does not go away, nor does so called "fixes"

Reply to Su35BM

my specs AMD 630 X4 2.8 ghz
4gb DDr3 ram
500gb hard disk (of some sort)
gigabyte GA-MA770T-ES3 mboard
650w generic power supply (dont know wat brand)
Sapphire ati 5850 graphics card

Antec 900 case running on win 7 professional 32 bit (as from today, originally 64bit)

Reply to Su35BM

I was having similar problems on MP. Added another 4GB Ram to make it 8GB, now everything is smooth as butter.

Core i7 860 @ 3.8GHz, XFX 5970

Reply to raan2

to everybody who hasnt seen it yet ... there has been a release of a new nvidia beta driver: http://www.nvidia.de/object/win7-w [...] er-de.html

hopefully this will fix most of the problems with bf3 ... im downloading right now.

Reply to mrmaffen

I am running BF3 on ULTRA for all settings except anti-aliasing (2x, other type off), (and aniso set to 8x) with the following system:

AMD Athlon II X4 (2.6 GHz)
ASUS M4A785TD-V Evo (newest BIOS installed)
8GB DDR3 1600 running at only 1333
AMD / ATI 6750 (1GB vid ram)
7200RPM 320GB hdd / sata II

screen res is 30" monitor 2650 x 1600 / fullscreen mode, sync'd frames

I have no noticeable slow-downs / no lagging.

Tonight I installed more ram to make my 8GB. I had 4GB and could not run ULTRA texture res. and multiplayer was unplayable. The game is using 1.5GB of ram (at most). The game combined with other things going on in the background / W7 64bit and random drivers (no other major applications running) is using 65% of my newly installed 8 GB.

I wouldn't say I have a state of the art machine and I don't have it OC'd at all. Game is great / looks unbelievable.

INSTALL MORE RAM! (and don't necessarily get crazy w/ top of the line gfx cards and OCing)

Message quoted 1 times

Reply to dr_xion

dr_xion wrote :

I am running BF3 on ULTRA for all settings except anti-aliasing (2x, other type off), (and aniso set to 8x) with the following system:

AMD Athlon II X4 (2.6 GHz)
ASUS M4A785TD-V Evo (newest BIOS installed)
8GB DDR3 1600 running at only 1333
AMD / ATI 6750 (1GB vid ram)
7200RPM 320GB hdd / sata II

screen res is 30" monitor 2650 x 1600 / fullscreen mode, sync'd frames

I have no noticeable slow-downs / no lagging.

Tonight I installed more ram to make my 8GB. I had 4GB and could not run ULTRA texture res. and multiplayer was unplayable. The game is using 1.5GB of ram (at most). The game combined with other things going on in the background / W7 64bit and random drivers (no other major applications running) is using 65% of my newly installed 8 GB.

I wouldn't say I have a state of the art machine and I don't have it OC'd at all. Game is great / looks unbelievable.

INSTALL MORE RAM! (and don't necessarily get crazy w/ top of the line gfx cards and OCing)

please tell me your not serious! there is no way that gpu can play bf3 at ultra so your creditably just went down the drain.

bf3 never uses more then 1.5 gb on my system and it can use more then 3.5 gb because thats the 32bit limit.

do u know of a way that i can take an SS of the game that displays the frame rate? I'd be happy to post that if i knew of a quick way to do so.

other details about my system are that it has a workstation gfx card installed (FirePro v5700). this should play absolutely no role in speeding things up (it may slow it down due to used mobo resrouces). Additionally the system has two other montors (1920 x 1080) on that workstation card.

--

Primary Adapter
Graphics Card Manufacturer Powered by AMD
Graphics Chipset AMD Radeon HD 6700 Series
Device ID 68BA
Vendor 1002

Subsystem ID 3150
Subsystem Vendor ID 1682

Graphics Bus Capability PCI Express 2.0
Maximum Bus Setting PCI Express 2.0 x16

BIOS Version 012.020.000.044
BIOS Part Number 113-HD677XZNF70-113-C01201-021
BIOS Date 2011/02/21

Memory Size 1024 MB
Memory Type GDDR5

Core Clock in MHz 850 MHz
Memory Clock in MHz 1200 MHz
Total Memory Bandwidth in GByte/s 76.8 GByte/s
--

I had no intention of coming on to make claims - only to point out that adding more ram solved my slow-down issues.

I was playing the game with everything on Ultra except the textures. it would studder sometimes in the campaign, and it was totally unusable in multiplayer.

now I can play all Ultra settings (with the exceptions listed above, i.e. low AA and mid aniso).

the gameplay is quite acceptable on Ultra...

Reply to dr_xion

i read how to show the FPS using the console.. in multiplayer my avg. rate is around 21 fps. max rate during movements is 26 fps. max rate observed overall is 41 fps. min rate observed is 18 fps

so you're right, the numbers arent' as good as a better GPU. that said, I do alright, and i don't notice the lag.

Reply to dr_xion

so you have a workstation gpu and a gaming gpu???

why?

I am an engineer and need to use certain features in SolidWorks that require a workstation card.

Reply to dr_xion

Forum Games General : PC Gaming BF3 Performance / System Lag / Stuttering

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