(PC) Visual performance much worse in multiplayer than singleplayer

[NightFire 0]

Hi there.

One of my current gripes with F1 2018 is that the game is suffering from a visual judder and poor visual smoothness and fluidity in online multiplayer that is not evident in any single player mode.

After a few days of testing, I can't diagnose why this might be happening. My CPU and GPU are not bottlenecking the game in any way, and while I have an old processor, an i5-2500K overclocked to 4.4GHz, it is not being maxed out on any core while playing the game in any mode and my GTX 1070 easily handles this game at high settings at 1440p. The game looks and plays fine on my own, but as soon as I go to any online session, while my framerate shows a pretty much a locked Vsync'd 60fps, the smoothness of the image is horrific, as if it were running at something closer to 30fps. No graphical setting in-game changes this situation, no change of input helps anything, and this problem appears no matter how many other players are in the session. Even one-shot quali runs poorly.

My first thought was to run some frame latency tests, and while they show some less than ideal frametimes especially in dry weather, it is seemingly not the cause of the issue as visual smoothness is much better offline than online despite showing similar frametime results. The frametime could always be helped by a game ready Nvidia driver update which I'm hoping we'll see soon, but I'm struggling to see how the online issue in particular can be helped by that.

This could be related to the microstuttering suffered by players without Vsync applied I'm guessing, but I can't know for sure.

Anyone else have this issue? Any thoughts on some causes why this could be happening @Hoo? Can supply videos if needed, and my dxdiag is available here: https://pastebin.com/GnhfgiZt.

[NightFire 0]

Can confirm no improvement to the issue after today's Nvidia driver release which is optimised for F1 2018.

Looking through the tests again and it does seem frametimes are slightly worse in multiplayer races than singleplayer, so maybe it actually is the cause of all this, but it is hard to say for sure.

The ball is in your court Codies!

[supersnel 7]

It has definitely to do with poor optimization on the multiplayer side of things. The slideshow glitch you get (have you experienced that one yet?) is another sign of this. If you play a little bit of online, it's quite clear that this wasn't the main focus this year. (what it never is)

[Smu3l3y 0]

i am suffering with this problem i talked about it in another thread 

[karnak07 40]

Smu3l3y said:

i am suffering with this problem i talked about it in another thread 

yes.  I'm waiting for the patch

[NightFire 0]

OK so have run a few more tests after the discovery in the other thread for this issue (http://forums.codemasters.com/discussion/137544/microstutters-and-general-unsmooth-performance#latest) that this problem can be helped by changing your display mode from "Fullscreen" to "Fullscreen (Windowed)" (from which I will refer to now as windowed mode) and the suggestion from you @Hoo in the major stuttering problem thread (http://forums.codemasters.com/discussion/137286/game-breaking-bug-lagspikes-slowdowns-pc#latest) to try running the texture streaming stetting at 0.

While the texture streaming change didn't help the multiplayer judder issue at all, what I did notice from the test is that CPU usage is significantly higher in Fullscreen mode than windowed mode, with it in particular linked to texture streaming setting, which spikes up depending on whatever setting you've got it set to. The ultra high setting for streaming sees jumps on all cores upwards of 30% on the average, which itself is higher than what it is in windowed mode. Not enough to spike usage to the point of the CPU limitations, but enough to see a pattern that something isn't quite right either in the fullscreen code or the texture streaming code..

In comparison, the windowed mode shows none of these spikes at all, either in single player or multiplayer, which correlates with how that setting seems to be to the right pick to get smooth gameplay at this point (and more making me think fullscreen mode is definitely the culprit here). Single player in fullscreen doesn't really spike like it does in online, but it does sit at a higher average depending on your texture streaming setting, with ultra high maybe averaging 20% more compared to the windowed mode average. So similar to online, just without the spikes that could be the cause of the issue.

It is also important to note that just like in the other unsmooth performance thread, it seems evident this judder occurs much more prominently on objects outside of the player's car. It's basically what eliminated my initial thought that frametimes were the root cause of the issue, even though I feel they can give some useful information to the state of the game's graphical optimisation.

[NightFire 0]

Tested this after the update and it seems there has been some improvement, even if the patch notes didn't address this directly.

Frametime tests have shown some decent improvement in the dry for fullscreen users, close if not identical to fullscreen (windowed) mode, and in turn online gameplay's image fluidity has improved. Wet frametime tests still show more consistency and the frametimes are still not ideal, but it's definitely a step up from 1.04.