Hello all,
I'm Glen from Space Dust Studios (ex-EA). We released Obliteracers on Steam this last week but found just prior to release that the more recent AMD drivers have been causing various issues with the game on a range of AMD hardware. They occur when using 15.11, 15.12 or 16.1.1 drivers with v-sync on and running in a window. We are seeing a severe frame stuttering and pausing issues for both the UE4.10.0 editor and our game when in windowed mode.
It is a potentially similar issue to the one that has been reported to UE4 by others on the answers hub here.
The most severe issue is a semi frequent ~1000ms stall within the call to Present(). Some periods of gameplay runs smoothly but often when something exciting happens (like particle explosions), the game will stutter and pause up, which can happen in rapid succession and for a few seconds at a time.
When the issue is occurring, the time seems to be spend waiting in the Present call:
D3D11Viewport.cpp in FD3D11Viewport::PresentChecked(int32 SyncInterval) and on the line with SwapChain->Present(SyncInterval, 0);
It seems to be at its worse when D3D resources are being locked/unlocked, such as for particle updates (explosions in game, or dynamic texture loads in the main menu, etc).
Another issue which doesn't seem as frequent and may have been improved with latest AMD drivers or only applies to some hardware (inc. HD7870, R9 380 and R9 280x, or on Win 8.1) is during our Frontend. Our slate based main menu (based loosely on the Shooter Game template) can be especially bad when transitioning between menus. At times the screen doesn't seem to visually update, however you can still navigate the menu and hear the audio feedback. Moving the window itself seems to cause a single frame update, which slightly helps.
The three workarounds we have presented to our community are under our troubleshooting guide in the section "I have an AMD card and the game stalls for long periods when v-sync is on."
- Play fullscreen (with v-sync on or off, can't be windowed or windowed fullscreen).
- If you need to play windowed, turn off v-sync.
- Uninstall problematic drivers and then install 15.7.1.
Although we've heard that windowed with v-sync off may still cause minor performance issues in some cases.
My development PC which can reproduce this issue is running on Win 8.1 64bit and has a HD 7870. I have tried the following drivers:
(No issue) AMD-Catalyst-14.4-64Bit-Win8.1-Win8-Win7-WHQL-Aug
(No issue) amd-catalyst-15.7.1-with-dotnet45-win8.1-64bit
(No issue) [Guru3D.com]-AMD-Catalyst-15.9.xBeta-64Bit.exe
(Has issue) amd-catalyst-15.11.1beta-64bit-win10-win8.1-win7-nov14.exe
(Has issue) radeon-crimson-15.11-win8.1-64bit
(Has issue) radeon-crimson-15.12-win8.1-64bit
(Has issue) non-whql-64bit-radeon-software-crimson-16.1.1-win10-win8.1-win7-feb3
(Has issue) whql-64bit-radeon-software-crimson-16.1.1-win10-win8.1-win7-feb12
We've had this issue reported for our game on a bunch of different configurations and cards and on at least Win 8.1 Pro 64bit and Win 10 64bit systems.
There was one other issue reported on Windows 10, where after successfully launching the game, and all logos and intro movies are correctly displayed, it can be observed that a black screen will persist for a period of time (approx 3 minutes) before the title screen appears. Please note that this issue was experienced randomly on one test system. Forcing a driver downgrade to 15.7.1 seemingly avoided this issue.
Are there any other known workarounds for these issues?
Is there a development contact that I can provide a build to?
Thank you,
Glen.
