What's Causing Stuttering?

[bbaydogdu]

There are many threads about this issue. Some people say it's because of ram, some others say it's cpu. Also it's been said that installing the game on a hdd is causing this issue. I believe I tried every fixing suggestion on the internet. So it's quite certain for me this is a hardware problem. But I don't know what part or parts are responsible for stuttering. Could you please enlighten me what do I have to do for an experience without stutters, fps drops, lag spikes. 500 men battle capacity is enough for me.

Here's my system specs: Ryzen 5 1600, Gtx 1060 6gb, 8gb 2400mhz ddr4 ram, no ssd

 

[Terco_Viejo]

I noticed a big diference between custom battle vs campaign performance. In cb smooth performance with >500... in campaign stuttering in battles even with a few looters. Very odd...

 

[Carabus]

If you do not have 16GB ram it is most certainly ram.

I have same GPU as you and also no SSD, and have no stutters, so it is certainly not one of these.

 

[ar181]

Yeah I would guess that ram is the problem for you. I have decent CPU and video card and am getting stutters with 8mb. It seems fairly consistent that people with 8mb are running into problems no matter what the rest of their setup. I think there's a decent chance TW fix this at some point as they seem to be aware it is a problem, and at one point I was running pretty big custom battles pretty smoothly on the highest settings. Personally I'm just going to buy another 8mb though as it's relatively inexpensive and should help the longevity/performance of my system a bit in any case.

 

[SmattlePattle]

The combination of 8gig ram WITH an HDD/No SSD = stutters.

Any improvement will be a start. Best improvement is both 16gigs ram & an SSD. From what I've compiled going up to 16gigs is the bigger difference, but if say you had an SSD right on hand and didn't have RAM it would make a difference too.

CPU/GPU bottlenecks are easy to get around by tweaking the settings lower but the RAM/HDD bottleneck isn't really impacted significantly by any settings.

 

[bbaydogdu]

Thank you for all the answers. You guys helped a lot to make up my mind. Now I'm confident for upgrading to 16gb as a start. Then I'll get an ssd and a new cpu after quarantine.

 

[Androme1]

I can confirm that stuttering is due to RAM. I had 8GB RAM and had tons of stuttering. I've updated to 16GB RAM and have 0 stuttering, despite raising most graphical options to High since upgrading.

I'm not very technically knowledgeable but if you've had task manager open while playing with 8GB RAM you might've noticed that memory usage is at 99% all the time. What "stuttering" is, I presume, is the game unable to find memory for the game to function, so the game "freezes" (stutters) while looking to shift memory allocation in order to continue running the game. With 16GB RAM, your memory usage will not come close to 100%, and so the game won't "freeze" (i.e stutter).

 

[Rangah]

Can confirm 8 GB RAM being the cause of stuttering as well. Had stutters ever since b0.8.0, upgrading to 16 GB shortly before EA made the game run according to my specs.

 

[Carabus]

What "stuttering" is, I presume, is the game unable to find memory for the game to function, so the game "freezes" (stutters) while looking to shift memory allocation in order to continue running the game. With 16GB RAM, your memory usage will not come close to 100%, and so the game won't "freeze" (i.e stutter).

You are close but not completely right.
What actually happens when game needs more memory, is that it asks Operation System to allocate more memory for it. But in case the memory is already full, the OS has to temporarily store in the hard disk some (rarely used) data from the memory, to free up space in the memory. It then temporarily moves the memory data to a file known as swapfile, but since disk access is much slower than memory access, it takes a while, and the program that actually requested the memory has to wait. This is what happens in case of stutter - your game is waiting for OS to provide free memory. And this is also why your HDD starts working hard during the stutter, and also why SDD helps in this case (because it allows faster writing of memory data to disk - but still slower than having more memory in the first place).

 

[SmattlePattle]

You are close but not completely right.
What actually happens when game needs more memory, is that it asks Operation System to allocate more memory for it. But in case the memory is already full, the OS has to temporarily store in the hard disk some (rarely used) data from the memory, to free up space in the memory. It then temporarily moves the memory data to a file known as swapfile, but since disk access is much slower than memory access, it takes a while, and the program that actually requested the memory has to wait. This is what happens in case of stutter - your game is waiting for OS to provide free memory. And this is also why your HDD starts working hard during the stutter, and also why SDD helps in this case (because it allows faster writing of memory data to disk).

This nailed it, plus Windows10 being an absolute trainwreck created by howler monkey's that has so many inbuilt processes that constantly draw on disk usage that running it off an HDD even without playing a videogame you see absurd disk usage spikes.

 

[badman]

I have 8gb ram too, but i noticed the game NEVER uses more than 2gb. the most I've seen is 1.98gb or thereabouts. Just below 2. Seems like its capped or something. There is additional ram available but it doesn't use it.

 

[bbaydogdu]

You are close but not completely right.
What actually happens when game needs more memory, is that it asks Operation System to allocate more memory for it. But in case the memory is already full, the OS has to temporarily store in the hard disk some (rarely used) data from the memory, to free up space in the memory. It then temporarily moves the memory data to a file known as swapfile, but since disk access is much slower than memory access, it takes a while, and the program that actually requested the memory has to wait. This is what happens in case of stutter - your game is waiting for OS to provide free memory. And this is also why your HDD starts working hard during the stutter, and also why SDD helps in this case (because it allows faster writing of memory data to disk - but still slower than having more memory in the first place).

Amen!

 

[Meatbun]

There are many threads about this issue. Some people say it's because of ram, some others say it's cpu. Also it's been said that installing the game on a hdd is causing this issue. I believe I tried every fixing suggestion on the internet. So it's quite certain for me this is a hardware problem. But I don't know what part or parts are responsible for stuttering. Could you please enlighten me what do I have to do for an experience without stutters, fps drops, lag spikes. 500 men battle capacity is enough for me.

Here's my system specs: Ryzen 5 1600, Gtx 1060 6gb, 8gb 2400mhz ddr4 ram, no ssd

I have 16 GB RAM and still getting stutters in large battles only since 1.3 was released.

 

[stevehoos]

I have an SSD, GTX 1070, six core, and 16 gig ram and get stuttering at the beginning of battles.

 

[RobustTurd]

Is it really the RAM and not the CPU like everybody was saying in the beginning? I'm thinking about upgrading my CPU from i5-2500k but that's very expensive compared to just increasing RAM to 16gb. I'm suspicious because my 8Gb of RAM also never gets fully utilized. I use at most 95% my RAM when playing.

I have 8gb ram too, but i noticed the game NEVER uses more than 2gb. the most I've seen is 1.98gb or thereabouts. Just below 2. Seems like its capped or something. There is additional ram available but it doesn't use it.

 

[Terco_Viejo]

I really laugh at the phrase "ah, it doesn't work with 8GB, then buy 16GB"...I've been reading it for a while. Paying you'll become happy, right?
No, honestly if you are able to move Rome 2 total war (despite its terrible optimization and being a 2013 game) you should be able to move Bannerlord as well.

 

[Calathar]

game is poorly optimised, that's the reason. I have massive memory leaks despite having 16gigs of ram and game being on ssd (my ssd is for games). I mean my rig is not the most powerfull ever, but game becomes unplayable after around 2 hrs of fun. Sometimes even forcing me to restart my PC.

 

[Kesis]

1.3 has reduced memory allocation for battles that I believe to be the root problem causing strutter. This basicly means that even as game would need more memory it won't take it or that it needs to ask for it in middle of performance heavy time.

Anyway in general both ram and gpu memory speeds are more important than quantity as the game doesn't use much of either. With CPU it's trickier as CPU has it's own work memory where it moves stuff from ram but it's never much so calculation speed is where it's at and in games general good single core performance is better than threading capability as most games don't have support for using many cores anyway.
If your computer needs to compensate ram shortage by using hard drive, it should be big red light as only pci-e ssd comes even close to ram speeds.

Lastly to contradict myself as Bannerlord has memory leaks, compensating that with having more memory is always good way to go.

 

[ahseph]

Hi guys, I encountered this issue as well.

Being a programmer myself, just like to point out that using Afterburner showed that it was a NO LOAD, which only happen in menu or static screen meaning there was nothing to load or no loading of graphics either way. Must be some compilation errors in the codes or something.

Putting it up for the TW team to see this and hopefully can help quickly in the troubleshooting.

I'm running the game on SSD, no mods and my rig has no issue whatsoever.

Edit:
What is no load limit?
No load limit means that there's nothing for the GPU to do, so it clocked down. Usually happens when not in game or you're on a loading screen or something... and potentially, when a CPU core is pegged


Cheers,

 

[Kesis]

Hi guys, I encountered this issue as well.

Being a programmer myself, just like to point out that using Afterburner showed that it was a NO LOAD, which only happen in menu or static screen meaning there was nothing to load or no loading of graphics either way. Must be some compilation errors in the codes or something.

Putting it up for the TW team to see this and hopefully can help quickly in the troubleshooting.

I'm running the game on SSD and my rig has no issue whatsoever.

Cheers,

Inspired by ahseph I decided to checkout Performance monitoring while in battle and when the struttering starts CPU usage dropped down from 75% to 12% while memory usage had no change. So there surely is something that stops the game thread from running freely.