Random Screenfreeze/Stuttering

[tyasy]

Yo so, Ive been around for a rather long time, been playing AC modded with the same rig for like a year and a half and Ive never had any problems out of this world with the game.
So, my problem is, recently after updating Sol to 2.1, I started to get random stuttering or 1-2 sec screen freezes after just a minute in a session, while averaging 45-50 fps.
It started off giving me the CPU warning message aswell.
Ive already done a clean reinstall including deleting all mods, and all that it changed was the CPU warning message, which doesnt appear anymore, but the crazy stuttering is still there and it makes the game unplayable. Im literally no cap doing an average of a nice 45-50 fps (for me its nice enough) and suddenly the screen freezes for 2 seconds and Im in a ****ing wall.
Honestly, I dont think my specs are really relevant since Ive been playing for such a long time without any problems, but Im on a Laptop, its got 8GB RAM, 940mx GPU and an I7 6500U CPU. SSD memory also.

And finally, incase you wonder, it happens in PRACTICE, with NO AI cars whatsoever, and I havent even tried racing cause its obviously gonna get worse.

And no, I dont do 20 car races, ever. I just drive alone, maybe race 1-2 cars that are faster than mine just for some fun. Or go online, which didnt give me any problems ever either, but I havent tried since I started getting the stuttering.

If anyone knows anything or just might know whats wrong, PLEASE take the 30 secs to reply and tell me. Im starting to get stressed the **** out, I play very very often and honestly its just annoying and upsetting not to be able to play. I cant race my stock shitbox civic in real life lol.

 

[Neilski]

One thing it *might* be is thermal throttling (of CPU and/or GPU). This happens a lot on laptops when dust gets into the (pretty narrow) cooling air channels.
Firstly, you could check if it's happening - one way to check for CPU throttling is to use the built-in MS tool "Resource Monitor" and check that the little blue line showing the CPU frequency stays pegged at 100% when the system is under load (it may well drop lower when you're not running CPU-intensive things). See pic below.
If you think it's happening, you can do various things to clean the air paths. Vacuum cleaners, partially dismantling the system, and even blowing really hard (without spitting! ) into the air ducts - with your eyes closed - can do the trick, and if those measures have any effect that would tend to confirm that this is what's going on.

It might of course be some kind of legacy effects of a mod you've installed - I have no experience of using Sol, CSP, or CM but I believe some of them put their libraries in places that aren't affected by a game reinstallation.

 

[tyasy]

One thing it *might* be is thermal throttling (of CPU and/or GPU). This happens a lot on laptops when dust gets into the (pretty narrow) cooling air channels.
Firstly, you could check if it's happening - one way to check for CPU throttling is to use the built-in MS tool "Resource Monitor" and check that the little blue line showing the CPU frequency stays pegged at 100% when the system is under load (it may well drop lower when you're not running CPU-intensive things). See pic below.
If you think it's happening, you can do various things to clean the air paths. Vacuum cleaners, partially dismantling the system, and even blowing really hard (without spitting! ) into the air ducts - with your eyes closed - can do the trick, and if those measures have any effect that would tend to confirm that this is what's going on.

It might of course be some kind of legacy effects of a mod you've installed - I have no experience of using Sol, CSP, or CM but I believe some of them put their libraries in places that aren't affected by a game reinstallation.

View attachment 478249

Yeah Im definitely gonna give it a try. Once I get home Ill try to clean the cooling channels and see if it makes any difference, nonetheless Im gonna do another reinstall and give it a go. But, just one question, (Im not a native speaker(canary islands yo)), so is the CPU monitoring supposed to stay at 100% all the time?? Or is that when you know somethings wrong??

Also, a millions thanks man, idk yet what it might be cause Im at work, but I always appreciate tons the feedback, for real, thanks a ton for taking those 30seconds (probably longer, since you gave me a really nice in-depth explanation) to reply.

Ill check it once I get home and let you all know whether it was that or not.

 

[Neilski]

But, just one question, (Im not a native speaker(canary islands yo)), so is the CPU monitoring supposed to stay at 100% all the time?

The UI for that tool isn't great, but the blue line represents the CPU frequency history (I snipped another portion of the screen below, which now includes a little more info) and the green curve represents the actual CPU usage.
When you are running a demanding app, the blue line should generally be hugging the top of that panel. If it starts to dip after a minute or so, that's the signature I'd expect from a machine that's thermally throttling the CPU.
The green curve will depend heavily on the app you're running - if it's capable of keeping half of your cores permanently busy, it'll be around the half-way mark, but if all of your cores are busy it may also max out.
There are loads of other performance monitoring tools available of course. That one just happens to be part of the basic Windows installation

 

[tyasy]

The UI for that tool isn't great, but the blue line represents the CPU frequency history (I snipped another portion of the screen below, which now includes a little more info) and the green curve represents the actual CPU usage.
When you are running a demanding app, the blue line should generally be hugging the top of that panel. If it starts to dip after a minute or so, that's the signature I'd expect from a machine that's thermally throttling the CPU.
The green curve will depend heavily on the app you're running - if it's capable of keeping half of your cores permanently busy, it'll be around the half-way mark, but if all of your cores are busy it may also max out.
There are loads of other performance monitoring tools available of course. That one just happens to be part of the basic Windows installation

View attachment 478290

Alright, so I did another reinstall deleting all mods, and ran the game without SOL, only CSP (also 1.60 recommended)

The issue still persists, and Im starting to think its because of what youve told me. So heres a snap of that screen, right after I got out of a 3 lap session that I suffered to complete due to the issue. The spikes arent all the way down, but it does have little drops every now and then. Is this what youre talking about? (attached image)

And if so, what could I do to fix it? Just try to clean the air channels??? Or is this worse than a simple fix like that??

Man, Im so upset I cant play. Either way thanks for the feedback, hope to hear more if youre kind enough. Thanks again.

 

[Neilski]

Those little drops aren't enough to suggest an issue. However, the data also doesn't show any sustained period of high CPU utilisation.
Your i7-6500U has 2 cores (thus 4 threads with hyper-threading turned on) so if AC was running I'd expect to see the CPU utilisation well above 50% (or basically maxed out if you have HT turned off), until you switched back to the main Windows UI.
The picture only shows the most recent 60 seconds worth of data - is it possible that you started the tool after leaving AC? If it was really running the whole time that you were in the AC session, then the only interesting thing is the blue line rising to ~ 100% from a really low value right at the start of the picture...

 

[Michael Krone]

I think its a csp issue. I have a very similar issue that happens with the newest version but doesnt happen if I revert to an older csp version.

 

[RasmusP]

I've read about a few cases of cpu related stuttering with the latest sol and some csp versions.
It seems there's something new that hits the cpu quite heavily and on some systems it makes a big difference.

Go back to an older sol and csp version and you should be fine.

However some say they needed to delete their csp and sol files in the documents/Assetto corsa folder to really get the old performance back.