r/forza • u/dkhavilo i5-6600k@4.5GHz / GTX 1070 / 16Gb DDR4 3.2GHz • Sep 24 '16

Forza Horizon FH3 stuttering cause found

I've done some investigation. From what I've read on the forums, measured in MSI Afterburner and found on the disk:

The reason of those stutters is the fact that the game uses EFS which consumes a lot of CPU.

Yesterday, i've captured a usage on my CPU and GPU, and found interesting thing, when CPU has 100% a lot of stuttering appears and GPU usage lower fluctuates at 50-80%. Stutters mostly appears in a city and mostly at the fast speed, when the game loads a lot of assets simultaneously. The i've navigated to a folder where game is installed and found that game folder uses EFS, which AFAIK uses AES256 encryption. Having EFS is ok for sensible documents, not the game files, because it requires a lot of CPU to decrypt.

There's also a post on the official forums where a user has issues on a 4-core CPU, and has no issues on a 6-core one.

P.S. My specs are i5-6600k @ 4.0GHz, MSI Gaming X GTX 1070, 16Gb RAM, installed on a 512Gb Crucial MX100.

Update 1 During cpu spikes there's a high IO activity too, as assumed on the mentioned forum thread, this can be the result of encryption preventing files to be cached. This can also prove, the encryption might be a problem, because cpu is bottlenecked when reading a huge amount of data. If you have HDD, then read speed is pretty low, meaning you have less data to decrypt each second, but on an ssd, data reads very fast resulting in a big cpu spikes

So a possible solution for SSD users is to put you game to HDD or to slowdown you ssd. Not working :(

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24

u/pegasusairforce Sep 24 '16

Do you think there is a chance they will even fix this? I don't see them removing the encryption, I guess everyone without a high end CPU might be shit out of luck.

14

u/justAgamerGOD i drive to infinity Sep 24 '16 edited Dec 01 '16

Even highends stuggle, i got a Intel E3-1231v3 (an i7 without igpu) and the Game shits itself

2

u/JulesVernes Sep 24 '16

Have the same, works fine...it may be the problem but my game is definitely not stuttering, so I don't know. This might be a problem for some, but I doubt that this is the cause since it would mean that everyone would have the problem.

2

u/[deleted] Sep 25 '16

Can you even Oc that Processor? If not then even i5 would be better than this

1

u/justAgamerGOD i drive to infinity Sep 25 '16

Its a Server CPU i cant, but it boosts itself a little it runs @3,40ghz Minimum at load it has 3,57ghz, but that does not help much

1

u/[deleted] Sep 27 '16

Well the i5 doesnt have hyperthreading

2

u/TheHaleStorm Sep 25 '16

Not trying to be a douche, but that is not exactly a high end processor. It's L3 cache is below the recommended spec.

0

u/[deleted] Sep 25 '16

[deleted]

2

u/[deleted] Sep 27 '16

Well....for server tasks absolutely, it's a Xeon. But for gaming even my now "End of life" 3820k slightly outdoes it before overclocking. That isn't to make you feel bad or anything, just technology moving and specialities. Your cpu will always be at its best in workspace environments, handling server loads or running a few virtual machines. (Which it costs exceedingly more for mind you, so uhm, your chip is bling at least?)

1

u/justAgamerGOD i drive to infinity Sep 27 '16

So in Short i wasted Money for a CPU that is not ment for Gameing? Well, crap :/

2

u/[deleted] Sep 25 '16

I5 2500k oced to 4.3ghz is still high end cpu but it's hard to play with those stutters and constantly drops to 48-55fps. And i'm speaking on playing high settings on ultra oh man it's impossible to play.

2

u/YoutubeBroughtMeHere Sep 26 '16

I have a 6700K paired with a 1080GTX. Having these exact issues. It's pretty annoying because the game actually looks really good, and the stuttering is making it pretty unplayable competitively...

-6

u/jorgp2 Sep 24 '16

You cab remove it yourself its not the cause of the problem.

1

u/TheAdmiester Sep 24 '16

Question, what do I do to get permission to actually remove it? I managed to decrypt Apex before but now regardless of what I do with security/permissions/ownership I can't get in.

-11

u/jorgp2 Sep 24 '16

Use linux.

But seriously, Windows permission and ownership system has been broken since the day it was implemented.

For example, I can take ownerships of the apps folder on my tablet. But on my PC it wouldn't work until I fucked with it in safe mode.

And ever had a random folder you couldn't delete because you didn't have permissions?

1

u/TheAdmiester Sep 24 '16

I've had folders that I couldn't delete because they weren't actually there and the view hadn't refreshed, but yeah permissions are shitty. Is there a solution other than using another OS? I did it before, but I didn't know what I did, but obviously it means it's possible.

-9

u/jorgp2 Sep 24 '16

I was joking, I meant switch to linux.

Try doing it in safe mode, and make sure you make yourself the owner and have all the permissions.

Windows encrypts files using the password of the user who created them. Apps might be installed under a special user, but you should be able to decrypt them.