Anyone with 2GB VRAM+ get microstuttering in BF3 with 4x MSAA?

[Frito]

I can also add this: I have a GTX580 and when everything is on Ultra with Anti Deferred at 4x it comsumes almost all of my VRAM. When I put everything to High with Anti Deferred OFF, ANIS 16x, Ambient Off, Motion Blur Off, and Anti Post on High it only consumes 730 on the VRAM. I'll be honest, I really don't see a huge difference between the High settings and the low settings.

My friend also has the SLI'd Evga GTX 570's and get's stutter and we have been trying to troubleshoot this for about a week. We have tried everything that Google has to offer and notta. Somebody earlier recommended the Evga Bios update... that is new and we'll give it a try. If he play's with just one card the stuttering goes away so it's obviously a SLI thing... which btw I hope it doesn't effect me since I have another GTX 580 on it's way

you know what you are right SLI seems to be the only thing that gets the massive performance hit when you hit the VRAM ceiling on your cards for some reason, i remember before i got my 2nd 560 Ti i could force too high of video settings on my single 560 Ti and while it did not get great frame rates it did perform better than with my SLI setup and the same settings smoothness wise.

the only hardware related thing that i can think of that is the cause of this is that when running SLI your cards in most motherboards are only running in 8x mode rather than 16x when there is only 1 card, this halving of the bandwidth each card can get on the bus combine with the fact that you now have 2 cards that need the same rendering data at the same time and if the game runs out of space to store this data on the video card's RAM it automatically falls back on storing it in system ram until its needed, once needed by the GPU's rather than just having one GPU on a 16x slot calling for the data from system RAM now you have TWO GPU's calling for the same data at nearly the same time with HALF the bandwidth to get it there. so as you can see there are 2 reasons why it could cause massive slowdowns that don't happen with a single GPU. with SLI you need twice the amount of data moved on half the pipe bandwidth or well half to each GPU but same to the CPU because its got the 16x PCI-e controller in it (or your chipset if your not on a sandy bridge cpu)

i think the main problem is the twice the data part. system ram even dual channel DDR3 is quite a bit slower than GDDR5 ram and if a game is forced to do this there will be performance hits due to it anyways but doubling the amount of data needed to be transferred will make a bad situation even worse and i can totally see this being the cause of the major performance hit when this happens.

 

[Frito]

ok so i just did some more testing in full ultra mode 1920 x 1080.

first i joined a server running in standard conquest mode rather than conquest large (the maps are a little smaller) and it was also on grand bazaar a city map that is not very large to begin with. ultra was playable, frame rates in the 60-70 range mostly sometimes a little under 60 fps but it was at least in the short time i was in there not enough to push my GPU out of VRAM

in game screen shot with performance graph.

then i alt-tabbed out to take a screen shot in windows of my CPU/RAM/GPU/RAM graphs

next i joined a conquest large server on firestorm, one of the larger maps but it is a pretty barren map overall but should push me over VRAM and it did once i got into some action (i was in the gunner spot in a tank)

the area of the graph i circled is when i hit the VRAM limit of my GPU's afterburner reported 1008 or so mb used (1024 is theroetical max but no game can use the actual max for various reasons)

alt tabbed out again and took a screen shot of my afterburner/windows graphs again

once again i marked the start and end of the over VRAM situation on the graphs

the down jumps at ends of the out of game graphs is due to alt-tab taking the game out of full screen and into windowed mode at a much lower resolution so as you would expect ram usage drops across the board but this was the only way i could screenshot these without having to resort to taking pictures with a camera of my 2nd monitor while in game

it is also very much worth noting that the longer you are in game the more and more stuff seems to pile up in ram and while you get good performance at first most of the time it gets worse and worse it seems.

also in game performance graph shows the most dramatic impact on performance when this happens in on the CPU presumably because it has to take attention away from rendering frames in order to feed data to and from system ram to the GPU's to keep them going with rendering frames. i believe if this game was not as CPU reliant as it is there would be a much smaller impact when this happens.

 

[Undermoose]

3 ASUS EAH6970 in Tri-Fire and Battlefield 3 using 3 Dell U2412M LCD panels in Eyefinity configuration. i7-2600K, 16gb Mushkin redline, ASRock Z68 Extreme7 Gen3.

I went weeks hoping to get smooth graphics, driver updates, game updates, and I used MSCONFIG to remove all non-essential programs, but for some reason I always started up Smartdoctor to control the fans on the graphics cards.... woops!

Yep, happened before, but so long ago I forgot. The only good Smartdoctor is, is to set voltages and then exit it. Then use MSI Afterburner for monitoring etc. I haven't found a way for Afterburner to handle the voltages on the ASUS cards yet.

So guess what, my Eyefinity rig rocks now, good bye Smartdoctor, BF3 with everything on Ultra and MSAA/Motion Blur off, 30-40FPS consistently 6048 x 1200 (5760x1200 before bezel compensation). Totally playable and smooth.

 

[WiL11o6]

I'm going to be stuck with 570s for awhile so I am wondering how well they will last me. How much of an effect does vram have on texture qualities and etc. It seems like what's really killing me is the AA, but the 1.28gb vram has no problem rendering textures or what not so that means the 570s will last me quite a while right? I might just need to run future games with lower AA compared to 2gb+ cards, but I should still be able to maintain very high FPS with maxed graphical settings right?

 

[Seb1]

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it is also very much worth noting that the longer you are in game the more and more stuff seems to pile up in ram and while you get good performance at first most of the time it gets worse and worse it seems.
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Here's a SS with my (lousy) RAM usage, that's on Caspian Border with 64 players after 1+ hour of game-play.



My question is to you Frito, with a higher-end SLI system the bf3.exe does use more than 2GB memory, because I know that the application is LAA.

 

[Frito]

Here's a SS with my (lousy) RAM usage, that's on Caspian Border with 64 players after 1+ hour of game-play.



My question is to you Frito, with a higher-end SLI system the bf3.exe does use more than 2GB memory, because I know that the application is LAA.

your not running out of system ram with only 4gb? i did when i first built this machine and only bought 4 to save a bit of cash, i had to make sure i wasn't running anything i didn't need or i would run out of RAM in multiplayer

ill check ram usage on my machine closer tonight when i get off work but i'm fairly certain its in the 2 to 2.7 GB range because before getting into those servers last night in the screen shots above i was sitting at about 2gb used in windows with firefox and origin running already (as well as other stuff ofc)

also i just installed the new beta drivers (finally, was waiting to hear if they had any major problems) they seem to have a bit of a performance boost for BF3, might just be me but its worth testing this out again to see what happens on them

 

[Seb1]

your not running out of system ram with only 4gb?

No, not once - I have a simple rig. For me 4GB is enough, of course I wanna upgrade to 8GB (for the same price I did bought them in January )

I have searched trough other forums too, there are multiple screenshots showing really high RAM usage during gameplay, but none of them showing that bf3.exe used more than 2GB of RAM.

 

[WiL11o6]

I have the option of returning both my 570s, so I am thinking about grabbing two 2GB cards instead, but that only limits me to CFX 6950s or 6970s as the NVIDIA offerings are either 2.5GB 570s or 3GB 580s which are too pricey. I am almost thinking about downgrading to CFX 6950s. The 570s have more horsepower than 6950s for sure, however at 1080p and the extra 2GB of VRAM, I can turn up 4x MSAA and still get very playable FPS. If I am getting 80avg from 570s, I'll probably get 70avg from 6950s, and it'll remove all the stuttering caused by being VRAM limited in my 570s. Plus, I'll save ~$200.

Should I go this route?

 

[Frito]

i personally probably wouldn't do it, the more i look into this issue the more it seems to me that its an SLI issue and i really think they have not got the game engine or drivers sorted out completely for running maxed out settings. AMD cards have been shown to perform quite a bit worse than nvidia in this game with MSAA enabled, I think your safer route if you want good performance with 4x AA is to sell the 570's and buy one 580 and keep it single GPU. the more i see other peoples perf graphs and experiences with SLI setups and MSAA enabled the more it seems likely that with SLI MSAA should not be attempted at least on nvidia cards. i'm just erring on the side of caution here due to lack of definitive results VRAM seems to be the source of the performance hit but single GPU setups seem to not get this massive hit. perhaps i will try some benchmarks w/ vs w/o SLI tonight with MSAA

 

[ARGH_SLI]

Bf 3 has an issue with its rendering pipeline that causes stuttering in single gpu and multi-gpu setups whenever the frame rates drop below the monitors refresh rate (hertz). the game now has a built-in fps limiter to combat the stuttering. Go into the game's console menu and type in "GameTime.MaxVariableFps 31" without the quotes. This will cap your frame rate to 31 fps and virtually eliminate the stuttering. Do not input a cap of 30 or below as for some reason the game does not properly handle it.

So for example your monitors refresh rate is 60 hertz and you are playing with maxxed out graphics but oftentimes the frames dip below 60 and it causes stuttering. You cap the frame lower and the stuttering is aleviated, as described.

Edit; as long as your frames do not dip below the set fps cap you will not experience the unnatural stutter.

 

[Frito]

ok so did some SLI vs non SLI benchmarks on full ULTRA settings to see whats going on.

1x 560 Ti

Frames
11326
Time (ms)
300000
Min
9
Max
77
Avg
37.753

in game perf screen shots

just getting into game, frame rates ok. game is playble but not completely smooth

shortly after getting into main combat areas massive framerate drop, these new 290.36 drivers seems to keep the frame rates from jumping high low as much as the previous beta drivers.
also with 1 card stressed out this far i started getting major polygon glitches with large black blocks appearing randomly as you see here in the screen shot

now SLI

Frames
12614
Time (ms)
300000
Min
9
Max
97
Avg
42.047

better performance with SLI but clearly its a lack of VRAM issue limiting both scenarios as just like before without SLI the initial getting into game it runs very well now, good frame rates very playable but once i get into the action it all goes to crap.

with or without SLI the game used a little over 1.8 GB of ram and maxed out ram usage on my video card (s) at 1014mb according to afterburner. it seems pretty clear to me that MSAA esp. makes the game take a ton of VRAM and i'm not sure what the high limit of it is at 1920 x 1080 resolution but its definitely up there if you want good frame rates. i think the only way we will find this out is if someone with a 2-3 gb per card SLI setup wants to do some testing like this on a full 64 player server on a large map like the one above (firestorm)

all these things being said even when im getting high framerates with maxed out settings the game feels sluggish compared to running say high settings with no MSAA/FXAA on, i honestly believe that AA in general adds input lag because it probably requires a buffer and to me from a performance stand point of view on a multiplayer FPS game this is not acceptable.

 

[ARGH_SLI]

devs mentioned that ultra @ 1080p requires more than 1 gb of vram.

 

[code137]

with or without SLI the game used a little over 1.8 GB of ram and maxed out ram usage on my video card (s) at 1014mb according to afterburner. it seems pretty clear to me that MSAA esp. makes the game take a ton of VRAM and i'm not sure what the high limit of it is at 1920 x 1080 resolution but its definitely up there if you want good frame rates. i think the only way we will find this out is if someone with a 2-3 gb per card SLI setup wants to do some testing like this on a full 64 player server on a large map like the one above (firestorm)

all these things being said even when im getting high framerates with maxed out settings the game feels sluggish compared to running say high settings with no MSAA/FXAA on, i honestly believe that AA in general adds input lag because it probably requires a buffer and to me from a performance stand point of view on a multiplayer FPS game this is not acceptable.

I'd be willing to test some things out at that resolution for you with my setup, but I'm not exactly sure if my setup is performing normally.

Edit - I went back and tested the game at 1920x1080 Firestorm with MSAA at 4x. Afterburner reported a max GPU memory usage of 1416MB.