PSA: Eliminating micro-stuttering - a solution

I've had long-standing issues with micro-stuttering in PoE, and nothing I've tried seems to have fixed it. Until now, that is.

First: let's understand what type of stuttering I'm talking about here. It's not network-induced stutter that Lockstep is responsible for. You know, where the game freezes momentarily and then keeps going, sometimes speeding up to seemingly "catch up" with events. No, the kind of stuttering I've had problems with appears like the screen just pauses for a couple of milliseconds and then keeps going as if nothing happened. It's like the game skips a few frames.

This is usually not accompanied by overall low frame rates except you can see a dip in the FPS counter and a corresponding spike in frame time. So for example it may run just great at, say, 200fps and then dips quickly into sub-100 territory only to spike up quickly again. This feels terrible, a jerky, stuttering feeling to the gameplay.

As part of my CPU overclocking routine, I disable all power management features and set a lot of things statically as opposed to letting the CPU figure things out on its own. Just got a new gaming PC so I've played with it a bit, and that's when I found out what's causing these stutters..

It's Intel's SpeedStep technology. This is a power management feature that pretty much all modern Intel CPUs have that lets the CPU downclock itself whenever it's not pushed to the limit. It does this really quickly too, allowing the CPU to clock down (and up when needed) to conserve power and heat. It's also what is causing PoE to stutter momentarily, I've discovered.

If I disable SpeedStep in the BIOS, all stuttering is gone. PoE runs completely smooth.

The downside obviously is that my CPU is now running at a static clock rate, with increased power usage. But yeah, dang it's smooth. :)

So, you may want to try this if you want. I wouldn't call it The Solution, but it's A solution.

How to go about it? Well, there are lots of different BIOS setups out there, it's hard to make a guide. Look under CPU/overlocking settings and there should be something about Intel SpeedStep and it's always set to Auto or Enabled/On. Change that to Disabled/Off, save and reboot. Check the manual for your motherboard if you can't find it.

Hopefully GGG can use this info somehow and attempt some sort of fix.

If you are doing detailed overclocking, with lots of customization then speedstep can cause problems. It's basically fighting against all your other settings.

It's not the speedstep technology that is bad, it works really well. It's the fact you have told your computer to screw speedstep's technology, because you want to customize your overclocking which is fine. In those cases you need to disable the speedstep.

The problem is when you manually configure a lot of the overclocking you end up tweaking the cpu's power / multiplication ratios. Speedstep then applies the new ratios, and in some cases it can over apply them. Cause it's algorithm's don't match your custom ones.

If you do tons of special overclocking on your own, not just what your motherboard / cpu manufacture builds in, AND you get performance issues, then yes turn it off.

Otherwise it's best to leave it on, your light bill and cpu will thank you. also your cpu will last longer.

Yes, but in this case it's the complete opposite. If I run a completely stock configuration, the stuttering appears. If the only change I introduce is disabling SpeedStep - it disappears.

I agree that turning it off permanently is a bad idea, for many reasons. However, it does appear to eliminate the stuttering I've had for quite awhile now. It works equally well on my old system (stock i6700K - no overclocking) as on my new i8700K (overclocking in progress).

SpeedStep in general works tremendously well - agreed. Something seems to make it cause problems in PoE, however. That's the main reason of posting this; partly as a workaround for people suffering like I did, partly with hope that GGG can investigate and come up with a fix somehow. :)