Awful performance Thread - MISERY mod for S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat

Started playing the mod a few days ago and I had around 45 FPS with complete max settings, would've liked 60 but it's fine. After playing for a little bit I started getting some stuttering issues. Occasional drops to <10 FPS. Still playable but annoying. Now I'm getting frequent stuttering and my FPS dips down to 10-25 which isn't really playable for me. I've tried tinkering around with the game settings going from DX11 lighting to static, turning off AA, lowering shadows, lowering distances, etc but the performance issues always come back. I really like the mod but it's just a pain in the ass to try to play with low framerate.

AMD 8350 processor, nVidia GTX 760, and 8gb DDR3 1600mhz ram.

Never play in DX11, it's poorly implemented and will also cause crashes at anomalies with some video cards. Sun Shadows are a big hit on FPS also, but there is a bug where it toggles back on after restarting the game. The stuttering is caused by loading meshes and textures; also some horrible lua scripting by GSC. I'm not sure if Misery 2 has a properly set precache_single.ltx though I don't think it matters much because precaching all the meshes this mod has would require a shit ton of GPU RAM and would increase loading times to ten fold. Not much you can really do about it.

If you play at a high alife like 500 or 600, (which is standard choice on install 300) you also use a tons of your cpu/ram.

Alundaio wrote: Never play in DX11, it's poorly implemented and will also cause crashes at anomalies with some video cards. Sun Shadows are a big hit on FPS also, but there is a bug where it toggles back on after restarting the game. The stuttering is caused by loading meshes and textures; also some horrible lua scripting by GSC. I'm not sure if Misery 2 has a properly set precache_single.ltx though I don't think it matters much because precaching all the meshes this mod has would require a shit ton of GPU RAM and would increase loading times to ten fold. Not much you can really do about it.

But, but the tesselation effect Playing on dx10 would make those rough/jaggy concrete surface less eye catching

My CPU usage is always low when playing and ram usage never goes past ~70%. GPU doesn't get touched much but it's still stuttering like crazy. I've lowered alife down to 150 and it didn't help much.

I'd play on directx10 or 9 instead 11 like Allundaio suggested

Edited by: Nyayr

I found turning off SSAO and / or turning off 'sun shadow' made a huge difference. For AA, try using FXAA.

Is your cpu overclocked? If not, do so.

Nah it isn't overclocked I got a rather old card 250 gts, which was a above budget a few years ago.

Sorry, I was referring to Cephalo.

Tried a few things and got a better average framerate. 30-45 average, 60 when looking in certain directions but I still get bad stuttering sometimes. Gonna dick around with a few other things I've found when googling such as compressing textures/different texture mod.

Have you tried using my performance texture package?
Also, if the stuttering still causes you problems, you might want to consider either getting an ssd or utilizing a ram-disk (some information about this here, also here's a video of the differences), although for loading all of the game's data into the memory you might have to download more ram ( ).

Edited by: Stiivais

Not to hijack the thread, but I have basically the same problem. Ever-smooth 60FPS with static lighting, but that's boring and ugly; I up it to dynamic object, ~45fps, and much prettier. However, going near water drops it to 20-30 and constantly stuttering - being inside the swamp drops it to the unplayable teens. I've searched in advanced options but there is nothing there about water or soft particles. I'm currently downloading the performance textures, but unless it kills the water textures to nothing I'm a bit doubtful.

Running this on an i7 2460QM (2.4gHz) and an ATI 6770M 1GB card with 8GB of DDR3 RAM @ 1333mHz.

EDIT: Preliminary update: performance textures totally nailed it, super solid FPS everywhere, water still looks good. Overcast skies, sun effects unknown.

Edited by: cardgame

Your graphic card is quite weak, and your CPU has low clocks per core. Stalker is one threaded process, so it needs high clocking CPU. Above 3,5Ghz and you should max everything.

Eh, it' an i7, it can turbo boost to ~3.1 IIRC and in single-threaded applications scores a higher benchmark than an FX8350 (1600 vs. 1500).

I know my GPU is weak as hell, but I figured it could run STALKER decently at above minimum... Well, 24fps at full enhanced dynamic lighting isn't too bad, I guess, but not exactly smooth.

I'm generally satisfied though, the performance textures did an amazing job.

Edited by: cardgame

What the hell you people talking about???! This game is not demading. This is only fault of Nvidia poor drivers and voitage variations. I maxing out this game at 25-30 FPS 1920X080p with only one GTS 450 card. Max settings in DX11 mode. If i reduce SSAO i have lot more fps. See my videos i recorded today .Here is my video,machine specs are below video
Misery 2.1
Dailymotion.com

And my 40 other videos,most demanding games and demos and letter from NVIDIA February 2014 and also my Gmail data in Full HD

Dailymotion.com

Dailymotion.com

Dailymotion.com

People this is INCREDIBLE performance for GTS 450 card. 1080p high resolution people

Edited by: Stalker90

Oh, right, I'm pushing extra pixels. 1200p.

guys guys. with who has problem with stuttering / lag. there 1 thing simpley thing u can fix it all lol.

i set everything max without lag stuff, you guys stalker itsn new games like watch dogs?, Most newst game are fix them self without getting stuttering etc -.-.
Stalker it kinda old game, itsn very optimal runing any pc. I got only 4gb ram, gtx 660gtx quad core processor. some had problem even he have 8gb bist pc still stuttering sometime. so i figured out it just very simpley things and stupid. it was Detail texture something rly useless, when u put everything settings max and you need to texture detail 1 step back thing no lag for me or stutterin very very ½sec sutterin nothing different . i hope its work for you.

Sorry my english really handicaped, but hope you know what i mean

Edited by: Yazan185

Something I've noticed that seems to help a little, at least at smoothing things out making it feel more consistent, is changing the game's CPU affinity.

When you launch the game it's set to use all CPU cores, but if you check the usage only 1 core gets hammered while the rest sit idle so it's clearly not putting them to use. Though if you set the game's CPU affinity to 1 core then back to all cores you will see usages across the multiple cores. I haven't run benchmarks or done any objective tests, but subjectively things seemed to run more smoothly overall. It's possible this helps with running the game on CPUs which despite being powerful and having many cores don't have a high clock sleep, perhaps it works as a substitute for high clock speeds. (I am aware the engine was not designed to take advantage of multiple cores)

It's very easy to do, just start the game then goto Task Manager and check the Processes list, near the bottom should be the game's process with the name "xrEngine.exe ". Right click it and choose "Set Affinity", change it to only 1 core (eg: uncheck all boxes except for "CPU0" or any singe core) and click "Ok". Then do it again but this time making sure all boxes are checked. Then go back to the game and carry on as you normally would, though now if you check the CPU usage history while playing you'll notice not just one core is being hammered but instead many cores are sharing the workload.

Just want to stress again, I don't expect this will increase performance/max FPS but it may help eliminate some lag spikes related to CPU usage or waiting on the CPU, though it obviously won't help with lag spikes related to loading in new things such as when you walk into a new area and the game has to load things (model/texture/etc) from the hard drive, lowering texture quality should help with lag spikes from loading in new things.

Edited by: Browser

^^ In addition to that tip, you could try putting all of Misery's resources on a RAMDISK to try to mitigate some of the texture/mesh loading stutters. I've tried this in the past and I noticed loading times were reduced but couldn't honestly discern whether in-game stutters were any better (Probably not but still worth a try, especially if you're running misery off of a traditional platter based HDD). I know this helped me quite a lot with area transition loading stutters in Skyrim and GTA IV (basically any game that loads/dumps assets from HDD-->RAM while in-game).

You would need at least 16gb of RAM to do this btw (so you can fit all the game's resources into RAM).
PM me or google SoftPerfect RAMDISk,
Link Shell Extension - Schinagl.priv.at (symbolic links)

Edited by: ibebyi

hello, I recently have had this problem, it only happened after I walked into the sub station with the starving mercs... as soon as the text window popped up telling me to leave my fps went down to slide show speed and has not recovers, I have turned graphics options down to minimal, all the sliders all the way down, disabled detailed textures, set to static lighting. nothing has helped.

setup: 8gbram, amd a8-3850 apu with radeom hd graphics 2.90ghz. before walking into the sub station the game was running fine, and loading up a save before walking into the substation is also fine.

okay me again quick update, so I reloaded up the save that's created as soon as you get the dialog box at the substation, I clicked "that's all for now" to close the box and started to run around, zero stutter normal fps, I ran all around the sub station, again completely fine no stutter, so I started to wonder if maybe the stuttering was a fluke, so I talked to the mercs again and accepted the mission to bring them food, as soon as the mission sound happened BAM! slide show fps... so for me at least the stuttering only seems to happen if I accept the mission to bring food to the starving mercs... this is weird and I wonder why it is happening. should I make my own thread with this problem, or does anyone know if its already known about?

I had this once in Jupiter in april, I don't think it's caused by anything specific and is a random occurence. Most likely something odd going on nearby giving the xray a brainfart. What's your switch distance at?
Could even be your own system; windows update, antivirus update or something eating memory suddenly.

Also - and this is important - Stalker appears to have been designed to run on single core. Before you start Stalker, open task manager first. Then load up a game and pause it, go back to desktop and click performance in task manager. There will only be one core handling Stalker and the graph will show it's being hammered.

Go into processes and if you're running Windows7 click 'show processes from all users'. Scroll down to xray engine, right click and 'set affinity'. All your cores will be selected so untick them all but one and click OK. Then do it again but put them all back on. You can also 'set priority' of xray engine.
Leave task manager open and go back to your game, play for a bit then go back and check task manager performance. Graphs will now show each core being used more evenly.

This should get rid of some of the bigger stutters when the one core running Stalker gets maxed out.

Edited by: htkblazer

Done the process thing, doesn't make a notable difference, also made sure my back ground process's are down to minimum. here is the thing, if I load up my save that I made when the stuttering started after accepting the starving mercs mission its a slide show, but if I hit escape and load up one of my current saves *where I did not accept the starving mercs mission* everything is smooth as butter. not real sure why this happened to me when accepting that one mission, but I did find a work around... I just went in and slaughtered all those mercs and looted them all , they were starving anyways, i did them a favor. But I don't believe it was a random hiccup due to back ground process's or anything because like I said I can load up the "stutter" save and its bad, but I can hit esc and load up a current one *currently in Yantor* and its fine, I haven't had this happen again. So something for some reason got messed up for me when I accept that mission every time, if the devs would be interested in my save file and anything else they want to look at and poke around in to see just what is going on I would be up for it. Also for the process's work around, I don't seem to need to do it for some reason as xrengine.exe seems to always utilize all my core right away without needing to do the task manager shuffle.

Edited by: Batuea

Yeah it's obviously something ingame, a combination of something happening when you trigger the mission. Like I said, it happened to me once, around the parking lot in Jupiter going south. I reloaded and it continued so I just headed off toward Bitumen anomaly instead. Upon my return and subsequent completion of Misery 2.1 I have yet to experience anything like it again. Rather than slaughter them all, I'd maybe recommend just saving it till later. That way you can hire them to guard the scientists The mission is not bugged.

Xray engine is predominantly single threaded core design. Call of Pripyat and related mods will not run multicore until requested to. If all your cores are EVENLY active, there must be other process using them. Give it a google.

actually I did not think of something before, I have a AMD APU, a CPU with A radeon HD 6850 integrated into the multi core processor, that's probably why all my cores are being used automatically, because the other 3 are rendering not precessing the game data.

Edited by: Batuea

Browser wrote: Something I've noticed that seems to help a little, at least at smoothing things out making it feel more consistent, is changing the game's CPU affinity.

When you launch the game it's set to use all CPU cores, but if you check the usage only 1 core gets hammered while the rest sit idle so it's clearly not putting them to use. Though if you set the game's CPU affinity to 1 core then back to all cores you will see usages across the multiple cores. I haven't run benchmarks or done any objective tests, but subjectively things seemed to run more smoothly overall. It's possible this helps with running the game on CPUs which despite being powerful and having many cores don't have a high clock sleep, perhaps it works as a substitute for high clock speeds. (I am aware the engine was not designed to take advantage of multiple cores)

It's very easy to do, just start the game then goto Task Manager and check the Processes list, near the bottom should be the game's process with the name "xrEngine.exe ". Right click it and choose "Set Affinity", change it to only 1 core (eg: uncheck all boxes except for "CPU0" or any singe core) and click "Ok". Then do it again but this time making sure all boxes are checked. Then go back to the game and carry on as you normally would, though now if you check the CPU usage history while playing you'll notice not just one core is being hammered but instead many cores are sharing the workload.

Just want to stress again, I don't expect this will increase performance/max FPS but it may help eliminate some lag spikes related to CPU usage or waiting on the CPU, though it obviously won't help with lag spikes related to loading in new things such as when you walk into a new area and the game has to load things (model/texture/etc) from the hard drive, lowering texture quality should help with lag spikes from loading in new things.

Great advice, it works. Thank you.