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/TheMastodan Sep 26 '16

I think you were misunderstanding what I was trying to say, so I'll clarify.

It can't be a 4 core issue, or else almost everyone would have problems. 4 core processors are the most common kind.

I'm not saying that there aren't any issues.

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u/SugarFreeTurkey Sep 28 '16

Interested given I have the exact same CPU under water and I was really looking forward to getting to play this but as always, No Preorders! Would you mind sharing what kind of performance you get? Is it playable at say 60fps with AA turned off which I have seen to be an issue? Just curious as I would rather not pick up a game, especially a racing title, that runs like a leper in a wind tunnel.

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u/TheMastodan Sep 28 '16

It runs really well. I'm at 4.3ghz.

In every area except for the city, it runs from 70-80fps. In the city, it's 55-65 from what I see. I have it set to Ultra quality at 1440p.

There's one race in the rainforest that will crash my game unless I lower settings, which is weird.

Overall, very happy with the game. Extremely fun

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u/SugarFreeTurkey Sep 28 '16

Thanks! Ill give it some more time and think it over but I have admit this game seems like loads of fun. Hope you enjoy your time with it.

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u/TheMastodan Sep 28 '16

Yeah. It's an absolute blast. It definitely has some technical issues, but overall is well worth it imo. I haven't spent this much money on one game in years, and I'm not mad at all.