Severe FPS drops making the game unplayable

[tomatoszs]

I have an issue where if I launch the game whether it's loaded with a modification or not, I seem to constantly get 3-10 FPS making the game unplayable. I never had this issue until just recently. I tried a clean installation, and still had the same issue. Although, sometimes I seem to get lucky and I'll get normal FPS like I should be getting, but It usually will not happen. Turning down settings did not work whatsoever, I already set the priority to high, I set the CPU affinity to just CPU 0, I tried running as administrator, but I still seem to have this issue. Any ideas?

I am currently playing on a laptop and these are my specifications:

CPU: i7-7700HQ @ 2.80GHz 2.81 GHz
GPU: NVIDIA GTX 1060 with Max-Q Design
RAM: 16 GB

I am also playing 911:FR on my C Drive (which is an SSD) with 123 GB free of 224 GB in case that matters.

[itchboy]

That's a pretty substantial setup so I see no reason for your problems.

There are so many different reasons why Em4 could do that, but for the time being, try setting this value in the em4.cfg to 0

<var name="e4_mbfastcopy" value="0" />

mbfastcopy should be 0. Some people reported this helped, but for others it did not.

Also check if your antivirus isnt running a scan due to Em4. I know that you have a relatively beefy PC but it could still be causing drag, but that's far less likely.

[tomatoszs]

10 hours ago, itchboy said:

That's a pretty substantial setup so I see no reason for your problems.

There are so many different reasons why Em4 could do that, but for the time being, try setting this value in the em4.cfg to 0

<var name="e4_mbfastcopy" value="0" />

mbfastcopy should be 0. Some people reported this helped, but for others it did not.

Also check if your antivirus isnt running a scan due to Em4. I know that you have a relatively beefy PC but it could still be causing drag, but that's far less likely.

I still have the issue after setting the value to 0. Also, my antiviruses are disabled as well as Windows firewall. This is a really weird issue. Also, my PC hasn't really been performing good lately, but I don't think that should affect my performance in EM4 because it is way above the recommended requirements, and it only happens sometimes and after around 3-6 tries, sometimes I will get lucky and then I will be able to get into a game without any lag. Also, if the lag does happen, it only starts when I either start a free play, challenge, or campaign without loading any mods, or it just happens when I start a fre play, challenge, or campaign when I loaded a mod.

[itchboy]

That is truly bizzare. You might have one of the worst cases of bad RNG/luck to have this lag.

Usually we hear these stories from AMD RX, Radeon, R9 etc users. For the most part, AMD users have this problem and the fastCopy trick works for them.

Tweaking the ingame graphics settings hasn't changed anything either right?

I was thinking this is likely a graphics driver issue, but I'm a 1050 user (so just below you) and on lastest drivers and I have zero problems whatsoever. A rollback might work but it might not be worth it losing out on your other games just to play this buggy POS game from 2006.

If my suspicions are true, then this game's lifespan is going to become even shorter than it already is. It's coming sooner and sooner that the game is entirely unplayable due to drivers or new hardware. The blame for this falls squarely on 16T Games and their publisher for not making any serious attempt at creating compatiblity for this game.

They had their opportunity with the steam release of Em4 Deluxe but nope, all they did was hire some dude on Fiverr to re-dub the supervisor and that's it; not a single bit of assistance or respect for the generous userbase that has kept this game alive for far longer than it should. I hope they enjoy losing their cash cow when (predictably) people will choose to stay with this game even after the release of that "new" Emergency game.

[tomatoszs]

58 minutes ago, itchboy said:

That is truly bizzare. You might have one of the worst cases of bad RNG/luck to have this lag.

Usually we hear these stories from AMD RX, Radeon, R9 etc users. For the most part, AMD users have this problem and the fastCopy trick works for them.

Tweaking the ingame graphics settings hasn't changed anything either right?

I was thinking this is likely a graphics driver issue, but I'm a 1050 user (so just below you) and on lastest drivers and I have zero problems whatsoever. A rollback might work but it might not be worth it losing out on your other games just to play this buggy POS game from 2006.

If my suspicions are true, then this game's lifespan is going to become even shorter than it already is. It's coming sooner and sooner that the game is entirely unplayable due to drivers or new hardware. The blame for this falls squarely on 16T Games and their publisher for not making any serious attempt at creating compatiblity for this game.

They had their opportunity with the steam release of Em4 Deluxe but nope, all they did was hire some dude on Fiverr to re-dub the supervisor and that's it; not a single bit of assistance or respect for the generous userbase that has kept this game alive for far longer than it should. I hope they enjoy losing their cash cow when (predictably) people will choose to stay with this game even after the release of that "new" Emergency game.

Tweaking in-game graphics settings has not changed anything, yes.

 

I am playing on my latest drivers too, but I agree that rolling back probably isn't worth it for this. And you're right, it is unfortunate that they decided to back off from a game with their best modding community and one of their their games that people still play instead of the other emergency games. I don't know what the point is in what they are doing, but.. I guess I will just wait a few months to when I will probably get a new PC. Thank you for your help! I guess you can archive this unless you have any other ideas for a fix.

[itchboy]

I'll leave it unlocked because somebody might come in with a solution.

This is how the AMD bug was resolved.

I hope this NVIDIA specific issue is sorted because it would screw over tons of people including me.

[tomatoszs]

So it looks like I managed to fix the issue. tagging @itchboy so you know what the fix is if someone ever asks).

Apparently, none of the games I were playing were using my GPU even though I set my NVIDIA GPU to be ran by default on each game, but apparently windows overwrites the integrated Intel GPU instead of using your NVIDIA GPU (only seems to happen with MAX-Q cards which is what I have). What I did was I went to graphic settings in windows settings, I enabled hardware something... (Don’t remember exactly what it said.) I then had to add each game I wanted individually to run with my NVIDIA graphics card since there is no way to do it globally.

Although, I am still confused on how I was still able to play smoothly with no FPS drops at times, but it’s whatever since I figured out the issue. Thanks for your help! And also, now you can archive this since I figured out the issue unless you want to leave this up to anyone else who might have this issue.

 

Edit: Disregard, looks like the issue actually wasn’t fixed and I was just getting lucky.