Bit of troubleshooting for recent stutter and low FPS.

HW: i7 3930K, 960 2GB , 16 GB
Dual booted: Kubuntu 23.10 with flatpak Steam and Windows 10

Sorry I removed my Windows install since but there are guides to opening and setting up resource monitor in Windows. But you should know which apps are ok to shut down on your own systems. You should be able to Google it.

[TLDR]
Use resource monitor in Windows and in-game diagnostic to isolate if there are a lot of hard faults and set up the virtual memory on Windows. If you see a lot spikes on the drive activity it maybe hard faults.


[How I got to isolating the problems]
So I haven't played for a long time and had problems since the league started. Thought it was my HW getting dated as expected. Stutters and lag kept happening at the beginning of the league as normal. After a few weeks it got better but it depended on the time of day. So that part is out of my hands, the usual server load.

But what I could do was look at the HDD activity in Windows and the in-game diagnostics. There was a lot of drive spikes and CPU time was always max to 60ms. CPU load wasn't 100% though. I forget the exact values but it probably below 60% most of the time.

So in resource monitor in Windows I could see a lot of spikes in hard faults. I closed highest memory consuming programs which helped. But still had some problems so I set the virtual memory on the Samsung 840 to 2x RAM fixed. That helped for a while.

I made a SSF just to test the server load theory and it does improve town loads and game play. But as I turned down resolution I wasn't getting the proportional performance gains.

Just today I finished installing the Flatpak Steam version on Kubuntu and logged into my basic hideout. And the FPS was pinned to 60 without and drops. I went through the campaign Act 1 from prison gate with SSF character. When the funnel for the Wildwoods appear at Ship Graveyard the FPS dropped to 15. I could sometimes get it back to 50 - 60 range but it would go back to low 20's.

So came up with a theory maybe all that virtual memory was storing the Wildwoods creatures. So I opened the game up after a reset and logged into a Standard League character. A mass zoomancer and opened a white Mineral River T2 map. Played it for a few minutes and it hasn't been this smooth in a long time.

Got to act southern Forest with SSF and FPS dropped to 15 FPS.

Made way to town.
Closed the program down
Log in and Waypoint to beginning of Southern Forest again. Same low FPS.
Enter from the town end into Southern Forest still low FPS.
Made new instance of Southern Forest same thing.

Rebooted and login new instance and it was faster. 30FPS.
Waypoint to old instance with map revealed and same 30FPS.

Next Morning

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There was a lot of drive spikes and CPU time was always max to 60ms. CPU load wasn't 100% though. I forget the exact values but it probably below 60% most of the time.

Windows' Task Manager default Performance view is somewhat misleading : it adds all cores together. But most programs aren't perfectly parallelized, so typically it's one core that is being used near 100%, and the others are waiting for it. (Can change to a per-core view.)