A’ight, y’all’d’ve better sit down, 'cause I need to be a pissy bastard for a couple paragraphs.
Splash Damage, I don’t know whether it’s just me being a dum-dum, my overconfidence in my otherwise half-decent laptop, or my godlike Asian internet, but I seem to have an infuriatingly difficult time loading into a match.
I’m not talking about finding the match itself, no, Asia and Straya are usually well populated enough, it’s the loading in part that feels so tediously slow. From the moment I click on “Join Server” or such, it could take up to three minutes before I actually come and join the match and another few minutes to shake off the early lag spikes and frame skip, even when my laptop is parked like two islands away from the nearest server.
This used to not be a noticeable issue, but ever since DB upgraded to DX11, I have had this issue amplify itself to unimaginably laughable levels. I’m talking about that moment when you look at the splash screen for a map but being able to hear Jackal shouting insults and players shooting the ever living hell out of each other. Sometimes this is bad enough to where I can hear my own vote to be kicked out while I’m stuck in the loading screen.
OK, Glad I got that out me system. Can anyone else share their experience? Any suggestion as to what I can personally do to help solve the issue a bit?
To be honest I’m not entirely surprised, given the shitty net-code used by their server provider (i.e. Multiplay) and their seeming obliviousness to the quirky issues with their Directx 11 version of Dirty Bomb.
With Dx11 Rendering Enabled I notice odd issues on the hit-reg visually from client-side; with shots appearing to not register when landing directly on the target but instead when landing a few in-game units behind or ahead of the them. I also notice that players will warp more frequently with higher latency or packet-loss visually from the client-side on Dx11 than normal, giving a more choppy and unpolished feel to the experience. While there’s noticeably less input-delay with Dx11 enabled, compared to the responsiveness on Dx9, I can’t say with a clear conscience that it’s worth the issues that come with it; especially when you can achieve the same or better results via Thread-Sync, with a rig capable of handling it and the frame-rate dip, on Dx9.
For the sake of reference, Thread-sync is a decrease of about 300ms of input-latency at the cost of Frame-rate. Assuming your rig can keep your Frame-rate above the Refresh-rate of your Monitor, you should have no issues with tearing; conversely, as long as your rig can handle it and maintain a consistent Frame-rate as well, it should have no noticeable impact on your performance outside of the apparent lack of input delay in most cases. It should be noted though that while Thread-sync is very helpful for Mercs such as Fletcher, and any other Merc with abilities that have travel times, it will have an affect on your timing with regards to muscle-memory as it feels noticeably different with Thread-sync compared to without.
TL;DR - Dx11 on Dirty Bomb has a lot of weird quirky issues that seem to rear their ugly head frequently, or are more apparent than they were on Dx9; not to mention it seems to have even more issues handling the game when suffering from latency and packet loss with Dx11 enabled.
I’d advise trying it from a Desktop Computer as opposed to a Laptop in general, but I’d above all advise avoid using Dx11 on Dirty Bomb for now. Once it’s no longer in a beta-phase of integration into the engine it may be worth testing it out again, but currently I can’t justify using it as the Pros of having Dx11 enabled are outweighed by the Cons at present.
I’ve been getting some extremely long loading times lately too, though nothing as long as what you’re describing. Before DX11 the game would occasionally take so long that I’d still be stuck in the loading screen after the tutorial ends, but now I’m getting it a lot more regularly. Some matches I’ve joined just refused to load altogether
I fairly regularly enjoy major stuttering and jitteryness in early matches as things constinue to load, often times resulting in my death. The issue has gotten pretty bad since the DX11 update. Honestly, I haven’t noticed a good difference since the update, only more hitches.
Ever since dx 11 was added i get fram rate dips down to the 40s. I used to never go bellow 120 at its worst in game with around 180 normaly. Doesnt mater if im in dx11 or dx9. I do plan on doing an anual reformat of my pc and hopefully that will help. Yes i do it yearly my wife uses my pc and its never the same after she is done and wont use my spare pc as her own.
Ok, so it does seem that whatever the DX11 update did, it royally messed up all of us. Seriously, how can you make things poorer by upgrading? Is UE3 really that old?
It sounds more like it could be a random hardware issue. If you’re on the loading screen it’s because you’re loading assets. Are you using a mechanic hard drive or an SSD? If it’s mechanical that could be the issue causing long load times so upgrading to an SSD would greatly improve this.
Thanks for swinging by, Shoe. My hard drive is just one I got from the manufacturer and I haven’t learned about any good parts to upgrade my Microsoft Office machine since I rarely use it more than for school and the occasional games.
I might consider an upgrade, though the idea of the issue being caused by a hardware issue does seem odd as we would expect consistently slow load times, yet I could sometimes load into a game of Dome (which is rather large) yet other times it could take three-plus minutes to load into Underground (which can trigger my claustrophobia in some parts). It’s oddly inconsistent and others are reporting on the issue as well.
That’s strange enough. Maybe it’s also caused by network speed?
I also got weird dips to 40FPS from a usually 130FPS. It was happening when the Steam Overlay popped up with a message though. But then after that with the same kind of pop up, it didn’t do anything, stayed on 140FPS. It’s truly weird. Should I test on DX9 as I’m currently on DX11? Or just disable Steam Overlay as it may be causing it?
I personally never had issues with the load times typically since the patch; at most I had instances where the UI seemed to be slow and clunky, but it was typically because of something I had done prior. Essentially it just necessitated me pushing my weekly maintenance routine forward, doing it earlier that week to remedy the issue; it was typically heavy fragmentation of the Hard Disk or Registry, as well as a build-up of temporary files or bad Registry entries that needed clearing, that was slowing down all processes for me.
@stayfreshshoe brings up a good point that it could be partially hardware-related, however it could also be driver-related; Dirty Bomb’s engine was designed to work with Nvidia’s line of Video/Graphics Cards and drivers, which means potential compatibility issues with drivers from other Video/Graphics Card manufacturers is a distinct possibility. In the past there have been notable instances of the engine under-performing with cards not manufactured by Nvidia, and thus not making use of their drivers; this has especially been noted with built-in/integrated Video/Graphics cards, although it is hardly an issue specific to Dirty bomb with those.
With how CPU-intensive games built in any version of Unreal Engine are, including derivative versions such as the one Dirty Bomb runs on, routine maintenance of your computer is a requirement to keep things running smoothly regardless of your rig’s specs. That being said though routine maintenance is something required and intrinsic to general use of a computer regardless, in order to keep things running at optimal performance and avoid complications, but that’s another discussion so I’ll drop it there.
All that aside, I can’t agree with @stayfreshshoe, coming from experience with the Unreal Engine, that it would be solely a hardware-related issue in this case; I don’t even use a S.S.D. and I haven’t run into this issue since the Dx11 update. However I will admit prior history would suggest hardware to be a potential factor, just not the sole factor in the issue.
@AlbinMatt@All If you need someone to point you in the direction of software for performing maintenance actions (e.g. Registry Defrags, Registry Cleaning, etc.) send me a message and I’ll be glad to point you to some that aren’t overly-invasive and are user-friendly to those with less experience in this area; it might miss a few things due to this, however it should be noted that it’s safer this way for the general end-user, but you won’t find yourself nuking vital Registry entries on accident with the less-invasive software.
Recently I have this micro-stutter. Something is wrong. It was never there before and I changed nothing with my setup.
Maybe it’s coming from the anti cheat?
