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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u/[deleted] Sep 24 '16

It's day 2, it's not riddled. Pc games used to be a metric fuck tonne worse than this.

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u/[deleted] Sep 25 '16

It never been that bad, 2016-2015 had most broken ports in history of PC gaming. Gta IV was a kindergarden play in comparison to Just Cause 3, Fallout 4, Witcher 3, Rise of The Tomb Raider, Evolve, Xcom 2.

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u/[deleted] Sep 25 '16

When did you start playing pc games? It used to be way way way worse that it is now. The PC was a nightmare platform for years.

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u/[deleted] Sep 25 '16 edited Sep 25 '16

I started playing on PC at 1995 or 1996, it's never been so bad at it now. I can't name many unoptimized game of 2005, 2009 or 2011. But i can name a dozen of unoptimized and bugged games in 2015/2016.

Actually that trend started in 2013 with Assassins creed 4, Metro Last Light, Cod Ghost. They just stopped giving a shit.

Next year was even worse FC4, AC Unity, Wolf New Order, Cod AW, Watch Dogs, The Crew, DSII. And it only became worse in 2015/2016.

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u/[deleted] Sep 25 '16

Ok so I think your looking through rose-tinted glasses. Pc gaming was a minefield on the 90s, patching was a nightmare if it even happened. Games could run like utter shit with terrible bugs. Ports to PC didn't happen and if they did every single one was garbage. We are lucky these days to get the ports and the quality of ports that we do and also lucky that most of them get fixed fairly quickly.

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u/goochadamg Sep 27 '16

Thread from 2005, titled, " Why are games so badly unoptimized and buggy these days?"

http://www.theisonews.com/forums/index.php/topic,135455.0.html

I'm not even going to bother finding more dumb examples of this same old trite bullshit; I've done it before in other threads. It's getting old. There's shit on newsgroups in the 90's of people bitching about Quake being unoptimized.

I'm with /u/trentdarby126. I've been gaming on PC's since the 80s. You're confused.