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[Question] Why does RO2 stutter horribly?

Krane65

Grizzled Veteran
Jun 6, 2012
99
1
When it's not stuttering my fps is great. But unfortunately the game is unplayable because it stutters trying to run, move, or aim. By stutter I mean it locks or freezes up during movement and unfreezes. It's really hard to explain but hopefully people know what I mean...

Any ideas on how to fix this? I'm running it on a Core i5 2500k, 8 GB of ram, and a 1 gb ATI HD 5770... Windows 7 Home

Oh and it does this regardless of how I set my video detail, low high medium...it makes no difference.
 
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Does your hard drive light go crazy when these freezes happen? Is the momentary freezing worst at the beginning of a match or when you first launch the game after booting up, and does it get better or go away entirely the longer you play on a map? If so, I'd blame your hard drive.

Unfortunately (or fortunately), Red Orchestra's game engine does not pre-load a lot of game data from the hard drive onto RAM during the initial loading screen, which necessitates a lot of streaming in of textures, geometry, objects, terrain, etc, during actual gameplay. On one had, this not only cuts down quite a bit on initial loading time but also uses very little VRAM (I see <500MB usage at High settings). The downside to this is that those momentary freezes are unavoidable if you've got a slow mechanical hard drive as they simply cannot compete with the lightning-quick access time of an SSD.

If this sounds like it describes your problem, here is some more useful info.

The only way to really get rid of all the in-game momentary hiccups is to get an SSD, but you could possibly improve it by defragmenting your hard drive, optimizing your page file, or increasing the game's texture pool size (at bottom).

If anything, I feel fortunate that Red Orchestra's data management isn't as bad as some examples out there. Diablo III has absolutely horrendous streaming issues and is basically unplayable IMO if installed on a slower mechanical drive. Source engine games also get a lot of freezing due to the same problem.

I can usually make Red Orchestra 2 completely stutter-free if I spectate for about a minute before joining and just roam around the entire map, letting everything preload to RAM. Obviousy, the best thing would be if the game would just load everything into RAM intially like Battlefield 3 does and never access the hard drive during gameplay, but I think this is more a limitation of Unreal Engine 3 than anything else.
 
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Yes! I do have an old hard disk drive.... I will try the above posted solution. Thanks to all you that have answered I will let you know if I get this fixed. :cool:

UPDATE: So I changed my video poolsize to 768 and it seems bareable now. Still not perfect but it is better than it was... What is the highest I can set this thing? I have a 1 GB video card.
 
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UPDATE: So I changed my video poolsize to 768 and it seems bareable now. Still not perfect but it is better than it was... What is the highest I can set this thing? I have a 1 GB video card.
I've got your exact same video card in my laptop (Mobility Radeon 5870 1GB GDDR5) and I have mine set at 256MB. If you have your Texture Quality set at High, you don't need to set it any higher than 256 because the game does not use any more VRAM than that for textures and setting it any higher decreased overall FPS for me without decreasing stuttering.

In any event, I would never set the poolsize to any more than half your VRAM at most. Like I said, the game engine stores a lot of texture data on the hard disk and swaps them in and out as needed, so VRAM usage is pretty low.
 
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