Heavy lag and stuttering Thread - MISERY mod for S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat

I am positive that i am not the only one

I am having huge slowdowns, stuttering, freezes on misery 2.1 even after downgrading graphic settings by more than half of anything basically downgraded from enhanced dynamic lighting to only full dynamic lighting and then disabled everything in options only half a slider on textures and objects and lighting distance) and it still lags like hell:

My system specs are
2.4 ghz 6600q quad core
geforce 250 gts 1 gb ram
4 gb ram virtual memory

and i used to play misery 2.02 with quick fixes with ALOT better settings on full enhanced dynamic lighting with most everything on except the shadows and ssao and sun turned off and it went pretty stable, now i cant play because its 20 or below fps most of the time and unplayable within the skadowsk boat or similar areas

Any help please ?

Hmm 4GB of RAM may not be enough, especially when you take into account service applications running the background, hell the operating system itself takes a chunk of that ram.

I'm sitting on 16GB RAM, Eight-core CPU and a 2GB GPU and I still experience lag. I keep my settings on Medium at all times to minimize it and run the game via Razer game booster (free to download).

I wish there was official documentation with at least minimum hardware specifications required to run this mod, however it seems "high end gaming rig" will suffice..

gamedata, levels, zaton/pripyat/jupiter, build_details.dds
replace with a 1x1 transparent image.
cuts some of the grass. got like 4-5 extra fps. went from 15-20 to 20-24 (misery 2.02 was like 22-28 fps)

there is something seriously wrong with the tweaks/graphic settings on the new version, i never experienced such heavy stuttering on misery like i do now, and actually static lighting with lowest settings is pretty much the same stuttering and freezing and lag as full dynamic lighting with my previous settings (which were fluid game on 2.02 version) so im not sure.. Perhaps they made the texture resolutions much larger or something ?

Btw i am using 85 FOV and 300 a-life distance (default) which really shouldnt hinder my gameplay as that was the same options on the previous misery version.

But "16GB RAM, Eight-core CPU and a 2GB GPU and I still experience lag" this is really, really strange. I dare to say that it should be impossible to experience any stuttering with a beast pc like yours. If you are having problems im prettysure all other players should have stuttering as well...

Call of pripyat only uses 1 core

Stuttering is from alife switching online and is heavily cpu dependent. Using static lighting can actually be detrimental as some of the textures won't display properly.

I'm using a i5-3750k @ 4.2, only 1 of my hd7950's , 8gig ddr3-2133 ram and a WD Black Caviar and besides the standard CoP stuttering I rarely go below 60fps

@ Frostelis : 300 A-life distance?!! That's CLEARLY the problem here. I don't even know how you did with your rig to play previous version with 300 switch_distance.
My specs are :

i7 M620 2,7 GHz (quad core)
ATI Radeon Mobility 5850 1GB.
4gb ram
(Alienware mx15)

And I've never been able to play with 300 switch_distance. From any mod!
I changed the switch_distance located in gamedata/configs/alife.ltxFrom 350 to 150 (vanilla values). You should try 250 first, then 200 and finally 150. If it does not help at 150 then there's another problem...

Have you tried running the .exe as administrator?

Frostelis wrote:
But "16GB RAM, Eight-core CPU and a 2GB GPU and I still experience lag" this is really, really strange. I dare to say that it should be impossible to experience any stuttering with a beast pc like yours. If you are having problems im prettysure all other players should have stuttering as well...

From what I gathered I simply presumed everybody experienced such lag, and I must admit I found it extremely odd to be hitting significant lag spikes given the specs of my rig (certainly not a beast, but suitable for most high-end games )

What's more strange is that If I raise the settings beyond Medium, it gets undeniably worse (I'd love to be playing on Ultra, which is generally what I play all my games on and never experience any problems).

Yastiandrie wrote:
Stuttering is from alife switching online and is heavily cpu dependent.

Could you elaborate?

Edited by: KirosWinstone

When NPC's/mutants are within switch distance range they go from offline (processing in the background) to online. Online basically means they become visible to the player and all their logic, AI, script processing, etc comes to the foreground which uses more processing power as offline they are essentially just data. That is why stuttering occurs. It is basically lag time between a background process becoming a foreground process. Xray engine isn't exactly the most efficient/streamlined in regards to this. If it used mutliple cpu cores it would probably be a different story and stuttering could probably be significantly reduced

Misery's switch distance is set to 300m (twice the vanilla range), so stuttering may initially seem more frequent than Vanilla as it has more alife coming online at any given time, however by getting more of it out of the way early it has the potential to stutter less frequently in the long run then if the switch distance was lower as it doesn't have to constantly keep "switching" as much, if that makes sence.

That being said people with older PC's would have to lower their switch distance as essentially there is too much information going on at once..More then their CPU can handle without bottlenecking

Hope that all makes sence

But it says during installation that 300 is default so i assume it does not require a really really great gaming system... And the lowest value (200) is mentioned as "not recommended". I can confirm that i used to play 2.02 with all quickfixes on 300 a-life distance with my rig with only occasional stuttering and never below 40-35 fps. Oh well.. i suppose i have no choice but to further downgrade everything to the lowest a-life distance as well and then see what's up.

But i still think that this is not normal since misery 1.2 and 2.02 were completely fine, this however is really problematic. There msut have been something changed to do this drastic lag spikes

Edited by: Yastiandrie

Frostelis wrote: But it says during installation that 300 is default so i assume it does not require a really really great gaming system... And the lowest value (200) is mentioned as "not recommended". I can confirm that i used to play 2.02 with all quickfixes on 300 a-life distance with my rig with only occasional stuttering and never below 40-35 fps. Oh well.. i suppose i have no choice but to further downgrade everything to the lowest a-life distance as well and then see what's up.

But i still think that this is not normal since misery 1.2 and 2.02 were completely fine, this however is really problematic. There msut have been something changed to do this drastic lag spikes

300 is default misery yes..The reason lower values are not recommended is because NPC's can potentially see past 200m under certain conditions, and experienced+ NPC's have 150m eye_range by default, which would effectively mean that as soon as they come online and are visible to the player they could be potentially shooting you
Accidentally hit edit on your post instead of quote :-/

Edited by: Yastiandrie

That makes perfect sense Yastiandrie, Thanks for the clarification.

I suggest installing Absolute Nature 3 Lite with Misery. My computer could run regular Misery 2.0 fine (avg. of 65 fps), but I would get some pretty horrible stutters in certain areas. After installing AN, the stutters were almost completely gone. I also think it looks better, too.

Edited by: vandelay

If you want it to look better add sweetfx on top.
Moddb.com

Looks way better!!!
Thank Cromm

Edited by: theTops

can i just replace the files of absolute nature into the gamedata folder and there will be no problems and everything will be fine ? At this point i am willing to do anything to play on my old settings with normal fps

Frostelis wrote: can i just replace the files of absolute nature into the gamedata folder and there will be no problems and everything will be fine ? At this point i am willing to do anything to play on my old settings with normal fps

Yes, but make sure it's Absolute Nature 3 Lite.

Edited by: vandelay

okay thank you

I'm having the same problem, however I have 15 GB of RAM, Intel Core i7, and a 6800 ATI Radeon graphics card. The game has a lot of stuttering, right after I accepted the mercenary food quest in Zaton.

Have you cleared the waste processing plant? If not, you had probably activated their "alife". Sometimes when you wander around the bridge, will also trigger that.

Are you fucking shitting me?
Back to ARMA it is, at least there I can force spawn 100 AI with no problems on my 'puny, puny rig' on a game that's using a 15 year old dilapidated engine.Fuck this, I'm not going back.

Sorry for bumping an old thread, but I'm having issues with lag spikes as well.
I would've played the game for a few hours to see if they occur everywhere, but they're really game-breaking.

I run the game maxed out at 1080p with 400 NPC activity, and I get 60-130fps depending on where I look (that's another issue, when I look at the fields where you start the game my GPU usage drops to 35-45% and so does the FPS), but I also get lag spikes every 10 seconds.

Specs:
Intel Core i7-4820K 4.6GHz
6GB DDR3-1600
GeForce GTX970 4GB
Windows 7 SP1 x64

Could you clarify? Is it exactly the same period, even if you're not really doing anything? Or is it when you're running around and averages every 10 seconds, but is sometimes 5 or 12 or whatever?

The game/mod greatly benefits from having just the right settings for your particular rig. As Yasti says, CPU speed is King. In order to experiment around with your settings while finding your sweet spot, I highly recommend deleting user.ltx before trying a new batch of settings. Trying Higher alife switch_distances like 450-550 may also reduce the number of times you lag, especially when running around. Once your system has the AI loaded, there are fewer points where a large group of mutants/NPC's will suddenly be in range. The forum has some great starting point tips for tweaking your graphics settings. It took me a while to trip across the right combo. Deleting user.ltx each time keeps you from missing out on the winning combo. You might change the one thing that optimizes your rig and the system won't actually implement it right otherwise.

Hallejuah! I just found the magic bullet. I gave the Mercenaries that needed food all of my 6 chocolate protein bars and all of my lag disappeared. After downloaded packs and adjusting A-life, this is what fixed it.

seriousluy ?:D

ClintHardwood wrote: Hallejuah! I just found the magic bullet. I gave the Mercenaries that needed food all of my 6 chocolate protein bars and all of my lag disappeared. After downloaded packs and adjusting A-life, this is what fixed it.

Did you by any chance have the protein bars in your quick slots? I always kill all mercs, they have bad attitudes. Dead mercs don't get hungry. The group of NPC's turning more friendly probably yields a reduced load on AI processing.

Edited by: jasper34