Re: Game randomly freezes for up to a second

by EA_Blueberry
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Original Post

Game randomly freezes for up to a second

★ Apprentice

Product: Battlefield V
Platform:PC
Please specify your platform model. PC
AMD or Nvidia Model Number RTX 2070
Enter RAM memory size in GB 16GB
Which part of the game is the issue happening in? Multiplayer
Which part of the mode? Conquest
Please select your region Europe
On which server did this happen? On which server did this happen? All servers, all game modes, just all the time ever since I got the game (4 december 2018)
When did this happen? (dd.mm.yy hh:mm) 18.1.2019 18:19
Summarize your bug Framerates drop seemingly out of nowhere for just one frame. I'm running on the low latency preset with DX12 and DXR enabled. I'm usually getting anywhere between 100 and 140 FPS, but sometimes a single frame all the sudden takes somewhere between 50ms and a full second, then everything goes on as normal. This makes gameplay extremely frustrating at times, as you can be essentially on timeout for a full second while mid fire fight, so the game freezes for a second then you're dead. Needless to say this is undesirable. Additional harware/setup information: - The game is installed on an SSD, but the documents folder (which also contains some game data) is on a relatively slow HDD. - The CPU is a Ryzen 2700X. - RAM is running at 3200MHz. - No other game, including another Battlefield game (BF4), does this.
How often does the bug occur? Every time (100%)
Steps: How can we find the bug ourselves? Play the game, turn on the FPS graph using the console for easier detection of framerate drops.
What happens when the bug occurs? The game freezes completely for 50 up to 1000 milliseconds. Specifically the FPS graph shows a CPU time that's way more than what it should be, the GPU time seems fine.
What should be happening instead? The game should not freeze.

submit button on this site does not work either, great.

Message 1 of 48 (3,170 Views)

Re: Game randomly freezes for up to a second

Community Manager

Try unplugging any external drives attached to the PC that you don't need to run BFV, I've seen that help improve performance. I know it might not be an ideal situation, but is there any way you can have both the Origin files and BFV game installed on the same drive to see if that has any improvement? 

 

There is also an amazing performance tips guide that @SterlingARCH3R provided which might help you out. 

 

https://answers.ea.com/t5/Technical-Issues/Battlefield-V-Tips-Part-II-Settings/m-p/7369806#M8856

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Message 2 of 48 (3,137 Views)

Re: Game randomly freezes for up to a second

[ Edited ]
★ Apprentice

Hi,

 

I've moved my documents folder to the SSD and disconnected every other storage device, including the HDD, the SSD is now the only storage device in the system. I've also disabled fullscreen optimisation for bfv.exe as recommended.

 

The issue still persists. I've noticed that it often occurs at a certain events, such as:

- an explosion going off

- zooming in / aiming

- the start of round timer reaching zero

- the bleedout completing

- jumping

However, the temporary freezing also occurs at random moments when nothing seems to be going on. It also doesn't always occur at any of the events above, it only seems to be more likely to occur on those events.

 

This leads me to believe that the issue is caused by too many things / events / whatever going on in one frame, or the game trying to load too many objects into the scene at once due to a quickly changing perspective. To verify this I've played a few rounds of squad conquest in which generally not much goes on because of the low player count and limited (if any) number of vehicles. In squad conquest the freezing rarely occurs. I've only played for a few rounds though, so this should not be taken as conclusive evidence.

I've also noticed that I get much more frequent than normal but smaller (40 - 70ms) frame time spikes when playing breakthrough on devastation. However, freezes of up to (and even once over) 1 second still occur on that map as well as other maps.

 

All of this may however be just by chance, as previously the frequency of these freezes varied quite a lot over time. Sometimes it would only happen twice in a round, sometimes ten to twenty times per minute.

 

I will try to reinstall the game with only the SSD attached, but doubt that this will have any effect. EDIT: I have now reinstalled it with only the SSD in the system so no files could have been installed on any other device, the problem remains the same.

 

Is there any way to prevent origin and Battlefield V from abusing my documents folder? I would very much like that to be moved back to the HDD and to use it exclusively to store documents. At the same time I also want all of the game's and origin's files to be on the SSD.

 

I'm not sure if this is helpful or even related, but I've also attached a file containing every crash I've had so far (since I started keeping track, that is). EDIT: updated crash collection as the game crashed once more.

Message 3 of 48 (3,114 Views)

Re: Game randomly freezes for up to a second

Community Manager
Message 4 of 48 (3,091 Views)

Re: Game randomly freezes for up to a second

[ Edited ]
★ Apprentice

I've applied the NVidia control panel settings as well as limited the framerate to 70 using the recommended command. This did not resolve the issue.

I was unable to set the refreshrate to 144Hz because I do not have a 144Hz monitor, and the problem described in that post is completely unrelated to mine.

The two other posts were related to bad framerates. My framerates are fine when the game runs normally, that is not the problem.

 

The problem is that the game either randomly or at certain events, as described previously, freezes for up to a full second. This is measurable in CPU time, not in GPU time (GPU time is very stable), so changing any graphics settings or messing with the monitor / graphics card is unlikely to resolve the issue.

 

I've also disabled anything origin related, which also did not resolve the problem. I'm pretty confident that this is not an issue caused by bloatware running in the background, as I haven't installed anything that runs in the background on this PC except for Steam and Origin. I've also disabled every windows service that is save to disable that I know of. On top of that, I would expect to see similar issues in other games if this was some sort of misconfiguration of the system and/or a starvation of the CPU. Opening taskmanager reveals 0.2% - 1% CPU usage with chrome open as the only application.

 

My connection is also stable and fast. I never get a ping above 12 ms unless I manually select a server from across the ocean. This is consistent with other multiplayer games. I've never seen my ping go outside the 8ms - 12 ms range through normal matchmaking. I have monitored the games network usage with taskmanager, which revealed that the game used at most 500kb/s of bandwidth, which is far below my maximum download or upload bandwidth.

 

My guess is that this is a performance bug in the game itself that occurs when too many things happen on the map in one frame, or something along those lines. This is somewhat consistent with my observations, although I can never be sure because some freezes that seem completely random may have been caused by something that happened on the map that was offscreen.

Message 5 of 48 (3,058 Views)

Re: Game randomly freezes for up to a second

★ Apprentice

I've now tried turning off DXR and turning on the low latency preset again, so using the lowest of the lowest possible settings. This resulted is very high framerates and somewhat seemed to limit how often the game would freeze. This could be coincidence as the frequency of freezes varies a lot as described earlier. It could also be that with more frames per second the likelyhood of too many things going on in one frame is reduced, therefore reducing the chance of a freeze.

Message 6 of 48 (3,040 Views)
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Re: Game randomly freezes for up to a second

Community Manager

@arizakaa 

 

Thanks for the specific details. Any way you can try this to see if it fixes this for you? Even though the thread is related to crashing, I have a hunch it will help. 

 

"So after one hour roughly no crash... 

If this helps anyone, I've had to download Zotac Firestorm, to be able to remove the manufacturer's default OC. Went down to 1350Mhz (base clock)... I'll test some more, but seems good enough for everything in Ultra DXR and all... 

To EA CM : This is not normal, we shouldn't have to do all this..."

 

https://answers.ea.com/t5/Technical-Issues/Game-Keeps-Crashing-don-t-know-what-to-do-HELP/td-p/71646...

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Message 7 of 48 (3,025 Views)

Re: Game randomly freezes for up to a second

★ Apprentice

I've used aorus engine, which is the gigabyte variant of zotac firestorm (my card is from gigabyte), to set the boost clock equal to the base clock (1410MHz).

 

I also came across this post: https://answers.ea.com/t5/Technical-Issues/bf5-random-freezes-on-high-end-system/m-p/7319669/highlig...

 

This describes the same problem, on nearly the same hardware with exception to the card being a RTX 2080 instead of RTX 2070. So it might be due to a faulty graphics card.

 

I don't know how I'm supposed to know if my graphics card has bad VRAM though. I've tried turning down the memory clockspeed of the GPU as far as possible, as was suggested in a video linked to by that post, but this together with setting a lower boost clock did not solve the problem. I'm not sure if this setting actually had any effect on the memory clock though, as according to GPU-Z it did not change at all, and is always at 7000MHz.

 

I've also noticed that whenever the game freezes, one CPU core has a sharp spike in usage (usually they're all around 60%) while the others have a sharp dip. I'm not sure what this means exactly. It is clear though that one thread in the game is doing something that the rest of the game has to wait on, but I don't know what. There is also a sharp dip in GPU load (usually around 90%) that can be observed through the GPU-Z utility. I should probably clarify at this point that I'm always running with VSync and FFR turned off, as I'm sure this has some effect on the GPU utilisation of the game.

Message 8 of 48 (2,992 Views)

Re: Game randomly freezes for up to a second

[ Edited ]
★ Apprentice

I've switched to MSI Afterburner. Aorus engine, as it turns out, not only has the least responsive user interface since last time I used a windows XP machine, it also does not even work.

With MSI Afterburner I was able to turn down the memory clock by 502MHz, which could have fixed the random freezing if it was due to bad VRAM. This did not solve the problem however.

I've also tried turning down the memory clock together with underclocking the card so that its boost clock is equal to the normal base clock, but this also didn't help.

 

I have contacted NVidia's customer support just in case it is a graphics card problem after all, but since underclocking the card did not fix anything I highly doubt it is a graphics card stability issue. If this leads to anything useful I'll be sure to post it here as well. NVidia customer support did not turn out very useful, and reiterated that this is likely a issue with the game rather than the graphics card.

 

This once again makes me believe this problem is in fact a bug in the game. To summarize the symptoms are:

- Freezes up to one second, usually in the 100ms to 300ms range.

- High usage on one CPU core at the time of the freeze, low usage on the rest. Usually all cores are at 60% utilisation.

- Low graphics card load at the time of the freeze. It drops to about 50% whereas this is usually 94%. This and CPU usage characteristics where measured while running in windowed mode.

- Freezes seem to coincide with certain in-game events.

- The graph enabled through the PerfOverlay.DrawGraph command reveals a spike in CPU time equal to the length of the freeze, GPU time always remains stable an within reasonable bounds.

Message 9 of 48 (2,975 Views)

Re: Game randomly freezes for up to a second

Community Manager

I might have overlooked this. Try turning off Origin Overlay. 

 

https://help.ea.com/en-us/help/origin/origin/how-to-use-origin-in-game/

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Message 10 of 48 (2,940 Views)