SMP Causing Stuttering

[Norie]

My current setup seems to have slight stuttering problems when I turn SMP on. The settings are by no means high, mostly a collection of medium settings. This is not a low FPS issue as I maintain a solid 60, but every 30-40 seconds the screen with freeze for less than half a second. When I turn off SMP the stuttering is drastically minimized and the stutters last less than .1 of a second and occur less often. This is not an issue with my hardware as the following setup is being used. Is there an underlying problem I'm missing here?

 

i7 4770k stock speeds (dud OCer)

EVGA 780 ti Superclocked 3gb

16gb DDR3

MSI Z87 GD65

Windows 7

 

 

[Ben Russell]

What weather source are you using?

 

My bet is UltraWX.

 

Try using static settings, no real world downloads of any kind.

[Norie]

Wow, I'm embarrassed I didn't think of this. So technically it is my connection to the weather servers that's limiting me! Very good, I'll give this a shot here in a bit.

[Norie]

Unfortunatly what you suggested was not the culprit. However I did a bit more testing and found the following results:

 

With very sever weather:

SMP enabled: Higher FPS, but longer and more frequent stutters .

SMP disabled: Lower FPS, but relativly shorter stutters.

 

With a perfectly clear sky:

SMP enabled: FPS capped at 60, still stutters though not as bad as the above section.

SMP disabled: FPS slightly lower 55 ish, but stutters are almost eliminated.

 

Clearly loading terrain and cloud data is causing the issue. Though I'm not sure what can be done to address it.

[sundog]

When the weather conditions change, SMP needs to "grow" new clouds, which is probably what you're seeing. The more clouds in the area, the longer this takes - it's the price we have to pay for realistic cloud shapes that don't repeat.

 

Turning down the cloud draw distance setting in the SMP configuration screen will help, as well as turning down the overcast quality setting. This will also be less of an issue in SMP 2.1 which uses a faster algorithm.

[Norie]

Great, thanks for the information. I'll be sure to play around with the settings; hopefully when 2.1 is released it will relieve some of my issues.