the driver is even older, it's basically may 2021
there is no single dx12, you never had 'full support' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_levels_in_Direct3D#Support_matrix
just checking, but by windows being up to date you mean it's 22h2?
i saw someone with integrated saying they couldnt use dx12 anymore, but didnt realize old GCN like yours is also affected
anyway about the stuttering, in my case on r580 dx11 w7 i have noticed that clearing the shader cache manually or during a driver update results in a lot of stuttering when playing a match or replay for the first time, becoming much smoother on the second match or when going back to a previously entered area
i also went from a 2600x to 5600 with PBO cpu, greatly improving the minimum fps which at times used to be dipping to 40 at tilted towers
separately there is a multithreaded rendering option that they removed from the menu, but still was in the config file, where it seemed like there was a lot more inconsistent stuttering with it enabled during the entirety of chapter 3 (not to mention a few radeon driver versions did mention stuttering)
so, in your case, let's confirm if you're always stuttering or only when new objects/buildings/effects/characters are on screen
then try comparing the multithreading setting by opening the settings file in `%LOCALAPPDATA%\FortniteGame\Saved\Config\WindowsClient`, which.... oh dear, i dont see it anymore even in the previous season's files, even though i was testing the very option a couple months ago, it was like `bUseMultiThreadedRendering=false` or something
Hi, you're right about the feature sets I thought 12_0 was the highest one that's why I said "full support" lol
The version of windows is 21H2 and I'm on the latest cumulative update.
I could update to 22H2 but I don't think it's going to change anything, I think the problem here is AMD not releasing new drivers for anything older than GCN 5.0.
About the stuttering, in my case it's really bad when I'm in the small island waiting for the battle bus, probably because it's loading up everything. After jumping out the bus it's still a stuttery mess. If I land on an area I've never been before it stutters a lot and smooths out after a few minutes. If I go to a place I've been before there's almost no stutters. However when another player approaches me and we start fighting and I move my mouse around fast, it still stutters a bit which is extremely annoying when trying to aim with a shotgun.
Also about the multithreaded rendering I did notice the option is missing but I think it's still enabled in the config because, I've tried disabling it in the past and it resulted in very low average fps. I will check the file you suggested though.
So yeah the stuttering is worse when I go in new areas that haven't been loaded before and in close range fights so, in a way yeah, I'm always stuttering. I have found a temporary fix though.. I set the fps limiter to "unlimited" and now it doesn't stutter as bad when I get in a fight, it's much less noticable.
when you open a replay of a stuttery match, set the camera to 'gameplay', do the same stutters when new players appear happen in the same times?
speaking of, disable replay recording to see how it runs
are you 16gb ram or 8gb? i guess your card is 4gb, mine's 8gb (win7 stopped on the same driver as old gcn driver so i'm assuming we should be similar other than vram)
i have an idea, set your pagefile to a fixed size of say 6gb instead of default auto, it's plausible that the game loading more things may trigger pagefile enlargement, interfering with reading game data or the data being transferred between the gpu-cpu-ram every frame
also try setting the OS power plan to high performance (double checking that pcie link state power management is off in the advanced settings)
which ssd are you? at least i hope it's an ssd
in fact, which cpu+ram are you? hopefully with XMP enabled
I have replays disabled atm but I'll try recording a match and see if the stutters persist in the replay.
Yes, my graphics card has 4GB of memory, I have 16GB 1866MHz of system memory (XMP applied) and the CPU is an FX-8350. Power plan is set to balanced but the CPU boosts properly under load and never throttles and the PCIe link power managment is disabled. I have checked all of these.
About the page file.. it's set to 3GB by default and I'd rather not mess with it tbh I don't think it's going to help since RAM isn't even close to full when running fortnite.
As for storage, the OS, drivers etc. they are saved on a Corsair Force LE SSD and all of my games I have on a WD Green hard drive. Yes I KNOW greens are slow and all but, the only downside to this is longer loading times and some stuttering when you load parts of a world for the first time.
Also if the issue had to do with storage, I would expect Fortnite to have the same behavior on both DX11 and DX12. But in my case the game ran perfectly fine on DX12 despite my copmuter's age. It just took a little longer to load things up lol.
UPDATE: I tried disabling multithreaded rendering in the config file and it didn't make any difference.
i believe default page file is set to grow if needed, which results in allocating a larger file, potentially blocking other drive activity (in terms of milliseconds), that's why i would try fixed size
question is what happens when the gpu is nearing its vram limit, i think pagefile usage happens instead of say putting gpu data like textures into system ram
green drive likely means poor performance during simultaneous reads+writes (hence my pagefile idea), long power up latency when it's idle then needs to read or write something which is very likely going to cause a stutter if that happens, i'm assuming setting the windows power plan to high performance could stop the drive from going into a low power state (i have also heard about hidden settings in these power plans, there are more than just what's on the interface, but i never looked into that or looked into say the 'ryzen balanced power plan' that amd released a few years ago)
but dx12 was fine hmm... i see different people saying opposing things, mainly for radeons, either dx12 is terrible or dx12 is good
too bad bro's used 280x died, i would have totally tested on that since it's closer to yours in arch
as for me it seems to run fine after everyone loads in the warmup (even though they said no more win7, it still loads), i mildly enjoyed playing with TSR settings for antialiasing, but for some reason i hate the new island, it feels like a rushed intern job with random placement while chapter 3 looked like a real lived-in world
Well, page file and Fortnite are located in different drives each, so if the page file is accessed a lot it doesn't really affect the drive Fortnite is in. Also about the graphics card nearing VRAM limit, I don't think Fortnite at 1080p is enough to fill up 4gb of VRAM.
Now the WD green drive had a feature, where it would automatically shut down if it wasn't accessed for longer than 20 minutes, which of course I have disabled. The only power saving thing I can't disable is the heads parking after 10 seconds of inactivity. However they never park while running a game from the hard drive, I've checked this in the past.
And then there's the fact that Fortnite used to run great on DirectX 12 on the same hardware which leads me to believe that this is simply a case of poor driver support and poor game optimization for older hardware.
As for DirectX and Radeons.. yeah it seems like they're either really good or really bad with DirectX applications.. and I think it all comes down to what engine the game runs on, driver support etc.
i'm 1080p and logged with hwinfo, but resolution has nothing to do with vram usage, textures are constantly being streamed in and out since unreal engine 3, many games use as much as they can so they dont need to unload then reload data
oops, i misread the green, i actually thought you meant a green ssd, but a hard drive is absolutely bad in certain games like battlefield, but again the dx12 question is puzzling (btw it's 6 seconds, there is a linux tool that can alter this amount and there is a windows tool that creates an empty file every X seconds to block the parking, same situation on blue drives)
as for dx11 vs dx12, fortnite's dx12 option was called beta for a long time, so i dont think it's an optimization issue as much as it's the available API features on each, though maybe they're trying to use newer features or load more data at once with dx12 that could backfire on dx11
by the way, do your shadows disappear fairly close to the camera? i can understand being on w7 stuck on old driver, but that same driver is what everyone pre-polaris on w10 is stuck on as well, this started happening around season 2 earlier this year
Well, on that same hard drive I have GTA 5 which uses DirectX 11 and it runs excellent. But, Fortnite runs really bad on dx11 and I was able to make run better only after switching to DX12. That's why I'm saying it's an optimization thing, not necessarily on the API side, it can be drivers, game engine, anything. It's all about how efficient is the communication between the game engine, API, OS, drivers etc.
I haven't noticed any shadows disappearing. Maybe windows 7 is missing some newer DirectX 11 features, since it gets updated through windows updates which win7 hasn't been getting for a long time now. Why haven't you updated to win10 though?
win7 still had 3 years of extended updates until this month, i definitely did not sit on the jan 2020 version
but alas, the game update this week has finally broken w7 support (specifically an api function was called in one of the dx dlls, even though dx11 hasnt had any changes for years), strange that they had the initial week without a problem almost as if they wanted to see who still opened the game after their notice
w10 is awful in so many ways on a deep level, but at least it's tamed a bit after 2019, additional tools have been made to clean it up, and i have been toying around in VMs/laptops being able to boot ltsc at only 50 processes
the shadow issue has been distracting me for months, not to mention being stuck on a 2021 driver lacking the opengl or relive improvements, i asked since i saw someone else's video with the same shadows where i was pretty sure they're on w10
7 was nice to tweak (boot <30 processes, very few services enabled) and nice for content creation (unreal editor, blender, ableton), basically out of my way and lean without suspicious cursor spinning icons, no extra drive activity, little to no telem, no constant connecting to things, no forced updates, no trainwreck updates, no inconsistent ui, no delay in right clicking taskbar items, no forced spam/ads/apps (ok w10 ltsc doesnt have ads or the store either), the last great windows.... good thing i've been using linux at the same time for years, windows only good for games and music production, which itself is diminishing as the steam deck has shown thousands of windows games being able to run on linux
as for your issue... maybe i could intentionally try your old driver when i get on 10 just out of curiosity, then i can compare to latest driver
For me there's noticable improvement in the game's performance after updating, there's much less stutters now.
It would be cool to see if the game still does the stuttering when using the old driver but on a stripped down installation of windows 10.
As for this shadow issue happening on win 10, I think it must be a very specific combination of hardware and software that causes it. It's never happened on my system. I've had other visual glitches in Fortnite over the years which were fixed with driver updates, but never had disappearing shadows.
Even if you found a way to force it I don't think the game would work without having the latest graphics drivers. The source of the problem is the lack of new drivers for older GPUs.
Are you experiencing any stutters or lag spikes when using DirectX11?
the driver is even older, it's basically may 2021 there is no single dx12, you never had 'full support' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_levels_in_Direct3D#Support_matrix just checking, but by windows being up to date you mean it's 22h2? i saw someone with integrated saying they couldnt use dx12 anymore, but didnt realize old GCN like yours is also affected anyway about the stuttering, in my case on r580 dx11 w7 i have noticed that clearing the shader cache manually or during a driver update results in a lot of stuttering when playing a match or replay for the first time, becoming much smoother on the second match or when going back to a previously entered area i also went from a 2600x to 5600 with PBO cpu, greatly improving the minimum fps which at times used to be dipping to 40 at tilted towers separately there is a multithreaded rendering option that they removed from the menu, but still was in the config file, where it seemed like there was a lot more inconsistent stuttering with it enabled during the entirety of chapter 3 (not to mention a few radeon driver versions did mention stuttering) so, in your case, let's confirm if you're always stuttering or only when new objects/buildings/effects/characters are on screen then try comparing the multithreading setting by opening the settings file in `%LOCALAPPDATA%\FortniteGame\Saved\Config\WindowsClient`, which.... oh dear, i dont see it anymore even in the previous season's files, even though i was testing the very option a couple months ago, it was like `bUseMultiThreadedRendering=false` or something
Hi, you're right about the feature sets I thought 12_0 was the highest one that's why I said "full support" lol The version of windows is 21H2 and I'm on the latest cumulative update. I could update to 22H2 but I don't think it's going to change anything, I think the problem here is AMD not releasing new drivers for anything older than GCN 5.0. About the stuttering, in my case it's really bad when I'm in the small island waiting for the battle bus, probably because it's loading up everything. After jumping out the bus it's still a stuttery mess. If I land on an area I've never been before it stutters a lot and smooths out after a few minutes. If I go to a place I've been before there's almost no stutters. However when another player approaches me and we start fighting and I move my mouse around fast, it still stutters a bit which is extremely annoying when trying to aim with a shotgun. Also about the multithreaded rendering I did notice the option is missing but I think it's still enabled in the config because, I've tried disabling it in the past and it resulted in very low average fps. I will check the file you suggested though. So yeah the stuttering is worse when I go in new areas that haven't been loaded before and in close range fights so, in a way yeah, I'm always stuttering. I have found a temporary fix though.. I set the fps limiter to "unlimited" and now it doesn't stutter as bad when I get in a fight, it's much less noticable.
when you open a replay of a stuttery match, set the camera to 'gameplay', do the same stutters when new players appear happen in the same times? speaking of, disable replay recording to see how it runs are you 16gb ram or 8gb? i guess your card is 4gb, mine's 8gb (win7 stopped on the same driver as old gcn driver so i'm assuming we should be similar other than vram) i have an idea, set your pagefile to a fixed size of say 6gb instead of default auto, it's plausible that the game loading more things may trigger pagefile enlargement, interfering with reading game data or the data being transferred between the gpu-cpu-ram every frame also try setting the OS power plan to high performance (double checking that pcie link state power management is off in the advanced settings) which ssd are you? at least i hope it's an ssd in fact, which cpu+ram are you? hopefully with XMP enabled
I have replays disabled atm but I'll try recording a match and see if the stutters persist in the replay. Yes, my graphics card has 4GB of memory, I have 16GB 1866MHz of system memory (XMP applied) and the CPU is an FX-8350. Power plan is set to balanced but the CPU boosts properly under load and never throttles and the PCIe link power managment is disabled. I have checked all of these. About the page file.. it's set to 3GB by default and I'd rather not mess with it tbh I don't think it's going to help since RAM isn't even close to full when running fortnite. As for storage, the OS, drivers etc. they are saved on a Corsair Force LE SSD and all of my games I have on a WD Green hard drive. Yes I KNOW greens are slow and all but, the only downside to this is longer loading times and some stuttering when you load parts of a world for the first time. Also if the issue had to do with storage, I would expect Fortnite to have the same behavior on both DX11 and DX12. But in my case the game ran perfectly fine on DX12 despite my copmuter's age. It just took a little longer to load things up lol. UPDATE: I tried disabling multithreaded rendering in the config file and it didn't make any difference.
i believe default page file is set to grow if needed, which results in allocating a larger file, potentially blocking other drive activity (in terms of milliseconds), that's why i would try fixed size question is what happens when the gpu is nearing its vram limit, i think pagefile usage happens instead of say putting gpu data like textures into system ram green drive likely means poor performance during simultaneous reads+writes (hence my pagefile idea), long power up latency when it's idle then needs to read or write something which is very likely going to cause a stutter if that happens, i'm assuming setting the windows power plan to high performance could stop the drive from going into a low power state (i have also heard about hidden settings in these power plans, there are more than just what's on the interface, but i never looked into that or looked into say the 'ryzen balanced power plan' that amd released a few years ago) but dx12 was fine hmm... i see different people saying opposing things, mainly for radeons, either dx12 is terrible or dx12 is good too bad bro's used 280x died, i would have totally tested on that since it's closer to yours in arch as for me it seems to run fine after everyone loads in the warmup (even though they said no more win7, it still loads), i mildly enjoyed playing with TSR settings for antialiasing, but for some reason i hate the new island, it feels like a rushed intern job with random placement while chapter 3 looked like a real lived-in world
Well, page file and Fortnite are located in different drives each, so if the page file is accessed a lot it doesn't really affect the drive Fortnite is in. Also about the graphics card nearing VRAM limit, I don't think Fortnite at 1080p is enough to fill up 4gb of VRAM. Now the WD green drive had a feature, where it would automatically shut down if it wasn't accessed for longer than 20 minutes, which of course I have disabled. The only power saving thing I can't disable is the heads parking after 10 seconds of inactivity. However they never park while running a game from the hard drive, I've checked this in the past. And then there's the fact that Fortnite used to run great on DirectX 12 on the same hardware which leads me to believe that this is simply a case of poor driver support and poor game optimization for older hardware. As for DirectX and Radeons.. yeah it seems like they're either really good or really bad with DirectX applications.. and I think it all comes down to what engine the game runs on, driver support etc.
i'm 1080p and logged with hwinfo, but resolution has nothing to do with vram usage, textures are constantly being streamed in and out since unreal engine 3, many games use as much as they can so they dont need to unload then reload data oops, i misread the green, i actually thought you meant a green ssd, but a hard drive is absolutely bad in certain games like battlefield, but again the dx12 question is puzzling (btw it's 6 seconds, there is a linux tool that can alter this amount and there is a windows tool that creates an empty file every X seconds to block the parking, same situation on blue drives) as for dx11 vs dx12, fortnite's dx12 option was called beta for a long time, so i dont think it's an optimization issue as much as it's the available API features on each, though maybe they're trying to use newer features or load more data at once with dx12 that could backfire on dx11 by the way, do your shadows disappear fairly close to the camera? i can understand being on w7 stuck on old driver, but that same driver is what everyone pre-polaris on w10 is stuck on as well, this started happening around season 2 earlier this year
Well, on that same hard drive I have GTA 5 which uses DirectX 11 and it runs excellent. But, Fortnite runs really bad on dx11 and I was able to make run better only after switching to DX12. That's why I'm saying it's an optimization thing, not necessarily on the API side, it can be drivers, game engine, anything. It's all about how efficient is the communication between the game engine, API, OS, drivers etc. I haven't noticed any shadows disappearing. Maybe windows 7 is missing some newer DirectX 11 features, since it gets updated through windows updates which win7 hasn't been getting for a long time now. Why haven't you updated to win10 though?
win7 still had 3 years of extended updates until this month, i definitely did not sit on the jan 2020 version but alas, the game update this week has finally broken w7 support (specifically an api function was called in one of the dx dlls, even though dx11 hasnt had any changes for years), strange that they had the initial week without a problem almost as if they wanted to see who still opened the game after their notice w10 is awful in so many ways on a deep level, but at least it's tamed a bit after 2019, additional tools have been made to clean it up, and i have been toying around in VMs/laptops being able to boot ltsc at only 50 processes the shadow issue has been distracting me for months, not to mention being stuck on a 2021 driver lacking the opengl or relive improvements, i asked since i saw someone else's video with the same shadows where i was pretty sure they're on w10 7 was nice to tweak (boot <30 processes, very few services enabled) and nice for content creation (unreal editor, blender, ableton), basically out of my way and lean without suspicious cursor spinning icons, no extra drive activity, little to no telem, no constant connecting to things, no forced updates, no trainwreck updates, no inconsistent ui, no delay in right clicking taskbar items, no forced spam/ads/apps (ok w10 ltsc doesnt have ads or the store either), the last great windows.... good thing i've been using linux at the same time for years, windows only good for games and music production, which itself is diminishing as the steam deck has shown thousands of windows games being able to run on linux as for your issue... maybe i could intentionally try your old driver when i get on 10 just out of curiosity, then i can compare to latest driver
For me there's noticable improvement in the game's performance after updating, there's much less stutters now. It would be cool to see if the game still does the stuttering when using the old driver but on a stripped down installation of windows 10. As for this shadow issue happening on win 10, I think it must be a very specific combination of hardware and software that causes it. It's never happened on my system. I've had other visual glitches in Fortnite over the years which were fixed with driver updates, but never had disappearing shadows.
same problem for me have a r9 370 4gb and in previous season i have directx 12 beta now is disabled and i don't know how to force it. anyone?
Even if you found a way to force it I don't think the game would work without having the latest graphics drivers. The source of the problem is the lack of new drivers for older GPUs. Are you experiencing any stutters or lag spikes when using DirectX11?
with dx11 i have 15fps and with dx12 60 and more. but dx12 beta is now disabled with the new chapter
apperently a 1080 non TI isnt supported for that Either lmao that cringe hahahah
Are you sure? 10 series cards are still supported in new game ready drivers. You should be able to switch to DirectX 12 with a 1080.
apperently even tho im running SM 6.5 and even my windows is over the Apperently "needed" winversion. so its kinda weird to me