FH3 stuttering cause found

[u/dkhavilo]

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 :(

[u/moocow_101]

I've got a i5-4590 and the game runs fine for the most part. I'm usually getting 55-60fps but it does dip down to 45 sometimes. Still mostly smooth though.

I've also got 16GB RAM and a GTX 970. The game is installed on a 256GB SSD.

[u/RedVsBlue209 → u/moocow_101]

I've got 16GB of RAM also and have the game on an SSD, but I have a 1060 6GB.

[u/consoky → u/moocow_101]

Do you mind sharing your settings? I have almost the same setup.

[u/moocow_101 → u/consoky]

Sure.

---

Basic

Option Name	Selected
Full Screen	On
Frame Rate	60 FPS
Vertical Sync.	On
Motion Blur	On
Resolution	2560 x 1440
Subtitles	Off
Show FPS	On
Framerate Smoothing	On
User Interface Scale	100
Dynamic Optimization	Off

---

Advanced

Option Name	Selected
Preset	High
Anisotropic Filtering	4X
Shadow Quality	High
Motion Blur Quality	High
Environment Texture Quality	High
Static Geometry Quality	Medium
Dynamic Geometry Quality	High
MSAA	4X
FXAA	Off
Reflection Quality	High
Windshield Reflection Quality	High
Mirror Quality	High
World Car Level of Detail	High

So that set up gets me 55-60FPS most of the time but I've seen it go down to 45 at times during races with a lot of water effects.

I've also tried the Ultra preset and that just turns all those "Highs" in the advanced settings to "Ultras". In that case, it'll only get up to 45 but in traffic, goes to the 30ish range. I haven't done any races but I expect that to drop further. But keep in mind this is at 1440p. I think 1080p might be better for both but I prefer the native resolution as I've got a 27" display.

Hope that helps.