Perfomance issues - framedrops / stuttering

Troubleshooting Hub Legacy Troubleshooting FH4 Troubleshooting
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Hi,

so I started playing horizon 4 today and at first it worked perfectly.
After probably one hour, I expierenced some extrem framedrops and stuttering,
which make the game not really enjoyable for me. I had same problem even
more extrem in horizon 3 which made me really dissapointed. Back then I tried
fixes like turning off core 0, setting the task priority to high and probaby tried
every settings configuration I could think off, but nothing helped. Even on 720p
at low the problem appeared in horizon 3. Further more I had 3 different gpus in my pc,
a R9 290, a GTX 690 and a RX 580 8gb.

Edit. : what I wanted to add is, the demo version worked like a charm.

My system looks like this:
I5 4570
Asus H87 Pro c2
8gb DDR3 1600
RX 580 8gb
2tb wd hdd
128gb samsung evo ssd
sharkoon wpm 700

The first thing that came to my mind is the 8gb ram, but horizon 3 should have
worked in 720p on low.

I made 2 videos to show what the stuttering looks like:

I would really appreciate any kind of help, because the game looks and feels stunning.

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Forza Horizon 4 utilizes 12GB of RAM for me so I would suggest picking up another 8GB stick of RAM if you are able to. I played the demo with 8GB and had issues with stuttering and the extra RAM helped a tonne.

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Sounds like an RAM memory leak… If you have an second monitor, i’d highly suggest checking your memory usage through the recourse manager in task manager (Task manager → Performance → Recourse manager → Memory). That way you can check whenever your memory runs out, you get the stuttering. If it does, I highly recommend following the instructions on this reddit post.
I can’t help but notice that you have a quite small SSD (no offence), is that the SSD you installed Windows on? If so, you might also have some issues with the paging file being turned off. You can check your paging file in this blogpost here (comming from this forum post)

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I will upgrade my ram to 16gb soon, hopefully that will solve my problem.

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After following both instructions I still get framedrops after playing for a while :frowning:
I dont have a second monitor to check the ram right at the moment where the
drops appear, but I ordered 8gb more ram today, to see if that helps.

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So today I upgraded to 16gb of ram, but the problem is still there.
I have no idea what else it could be. I think my system should be on
a level, where horizon 4 runs without any problems. At least I’m
able to try it with 1 month of game pass. Surfing a bit around, it
looks like that this fps-drops is still a common problem in every damn
forza game on pc. Would be nice if somebody got other ideas to fix this.

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Try switching from Horizon Life to Horizon Solo in the pause menu. Please let me know if you see a change.

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I have this xbox live teredo problem, so I was in solo mode all the time.

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Oh ok. Another update tonight. Still stuttering. It really has me mad that they have it listed that they fixed free roam stutter on XBox One X. It’s completely false. The game stutters all the time unless in Solo mode.

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I now what you mean, and I am really losing my patience. If it doesn’t work until my game pass ends, I will not buy it.

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About that, some routers have an option to block Teredo packets that’s activated by default if you’re connected via IPV6. I just found that out myself after troubleshooting for hours today.

(Since you’re German I suspect you might have a fritz.box, which has that filter enabled by default)

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Yeah, I think it is the fritzbox, but since the game is not really playable for me I did not really try to change that yet. But thanks for the advice.

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same stuff that takes the fun out of horizon 3 and forza 7 for me. similar ish system

cpu : core i5 4670K
mobo : asus Z97 pro gamer
ram : 16GB DDR3 2000 (4 4GB sticks)
GPU : GTX 980TI
OS drive : samsung EVO 960 250GB
game drive : 1TB 2.5" WD Black

so i can replicate this by doing 1 simple thing, start my liquid cooling monitoring program which shows some info on the desktop(cpu temp, gpu temp, liquid temp, pump speed, flow rate).
doing this will limit my framerate from 60>57 and introduce random stutters every 2-3 seconds down to the 40’s. meanwhile my gpu is at 60% load, my cpu is bored at 50% load and neither vram or ram is anywhere close to being tapped out.

my point in sharing this is for what ever reason the forza games can be the most sensitive snowflakes out there, close as much as you can and the issue will probably go away or lessen substantially.

other things that alteast for me (not for all people on similar platforms but a few seem to have the same horror show as me going on)

not having a steam chat window open and receiving a message triggering the orange blinking of notice me plz, that’s 25 fps till the blinking stops by either clicking on the chat window or soldering on because your in an online race cursing like a sailor at your surprise 25fps.
anything that shows an OSD on your desktop that’s some stuttering and framedrops happening there.

having discord/xbox app or steam friends open in the background with updating status’s (friend go’s away, friend go’s offline, friend comes online etc) each of those is a stutter (if you minimize it or close it to tray it’s fine how weird is that).

i got my 980TI because my modded skyrim was performing very poorly on my GTX 470, forza’s making me look weekly at updating my platform (cpu/mobo/ram) to hopefully for once and for all be done with this [Mod Edit - Abbreviated profanity, profanity and profanity that is disguised but still alludes to the words are not permitted - D] (hasn’t happend yet because i’m picky about what i want (5ghz on 1-2core’s min and solder instead of toothpaste which is finally arriving but costs an arm and a leg thx to 14nm shortage and the ram shortage was just recovering T.T).

horizon 3 had it at launch (got better and worse with patches still has it), forza 7 ditto and horizon 4 which reviewers with there brand spanking new systems herald as a fantastically running game i can only assume something in the older platforms (Z87/Z97) doesn’t play well with forza maybe the L1 or L2 cache is to slow, maybe the ram throughput is to limited i don’t know i’m grasping at straws here. though a friend of mine with a similar system but with a i7 4790K instead of a 4670k has 0 issue’s. only adding to my frustration, so many stupid fixes tried so many full windows formats to be greeted by the same damn bugs.

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The only thing noticed with osd is, that horizon 4 won’t even start when afterburner is running. I think most of the time I don’t have any apps running that shows notifications, except windows.

That’s interesting, I even thoughtabiut buying a 4770, but I don’t want to invest more money, just to get this game playable. Imo it should just work, even if it takes a few patches. But after 4 games (including apex) take 10 should know about this issue, as it seems to be one of the most appearing problems.

15

There’s some reports around here that state disabling hyperthreading in your BIOS might help. Though that’d only be a fix for Intel processors. So I’ll personally be stuck with this problem on my Ryzen 7 2500.

Also another POI would be the sample rate of your sound card. Maybe a lower setting like 16Bit 48000Hz would help. This fixed some stuttering issues I had in Destiny 2. Didn’t help me in Forza but maybe it might help someone else.

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if you had looked up the big differences (in previous gens) between an i5 and an i7 you would see that it’s the i7 Hyperthreading ability.
’

You could also try open task manager, finding the Forza horizon 4 process, right clicking and set core affinity to
0,2,4,5 (these are, i believe, the actual physical cores, windows interleaves logical & physical cores so 0-1 both run on the same core, 2-3 etc).

EDIT: this was only for the Intel users, not sure how it works on AMD.

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