Is Zombie Pathing the Cause of the Sutter in Cities...?

OneManStanding

OneManStanding

Scavenger
Mainly in cities, but here and there even in towns, when a group of zombies become activated during a quest the game can stutter until I kill all or at least most of them. For A21 it was mentioned that zombie pathing wouldn't update as much -- is this what it's going to fix?

 
As far as I know it is part of the problem. The other part are windows. These were also optimized in A21 so that the performance in cities should be much better.

 
I feel like I take a bit of a performance hit when they are wandering about, which I expect is probably due to calculations for pathing, but I find it is when they are hitting blocks that I really feel the performance hit, which is not really that surprising.

I did mod out the windows on the big POI's though, as I am currently playing on a popoto PC, looking forward to the optimisation for this one in A21.

 
Ananais said:
I feel like I take a bit of a performance hit when they are wandering about, which I expect is probably due to calculations for pathing, but I find it is when they are hitting blocks that I really feel the performance hit, which is not really that surprising.
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Pretty much this, except I do find the "hitting blocks" part a little surprising; it's not like it requires SI calcs until something breaks, but the lag seems to happen even while nothing is breaking.

Skyscrapers with some active zed roaming the floors below you seem to be the worst offender. For a mitigating effort, I end up going back down often and clearing everything. Seems to help, somewhat.

 
OneManStanding said:
Mainly in cities, but here and there even in towns, when a group of zombies become activated during a quest the game can stutter until I kill all or at least most of them. For A21 it was mentioned that zombie pathing wouldn't update as much -- is this what it's going to fix?
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Not sure the exact issue causing you problems but just to point out, the pathing change in A21 probably isn't going to help you.  It affects zombies further away and what you are describing are zombies close to you.  If you have issues during horde night, then it could be helpful for you but I wouldn't expect that to make much difference in what you're describing.

I'd suggest trying different graphics settings.  Also make sure your antivirus/firewall are set to *not* scan your game and saves folders.  Make sure your page file is set to be managed by Windows and is not set to a specific size.  If at all possible, make sure your game and saves are on SSD instead of HDD.  Consider adding more RAM if you have under 16GB.  It is usually not expensive and if your computer can support more, it's an easy upgrade.

 
This "stutter" you mention, is it only when looking in certain directions in a city? I have a base in Navezgane north of the city. Once or twice while in the city (once or twice in a month of playing daily) my fans spin up and framerate drops from around 130fps (v-sync on, 1440p, max details) to the low 90's. Looking in another direction momentarily resolves the issue. My fans spin up when this slow-down occurs. 7 Days is on a PCIE4.0 NVME, I have 64GB of DDR4, I use an i9-11900kl, and I use an RTX 3080 Ti. Not low specs, and my monitor is a G-Sync monitor, so that might be why I don't get the stuttering but instead have a slow-down. This only occurs when I am in the city, with or without friends, and looking in another direction usually resolves it instantly.

 
The_Great_Sephiroth said:
This "stutter" you mention, is it only when looking in certain directions in a city? I have a base in Navezgane north of the city. Once or twice while in the city (once or twice in a month of playing daily) my fans spin up and framerate drops from around 130fps (v-sync on, 1440p, max details) to the low 90's. Looking in another direction momentarily resolves the issue. My fans spin up when this slow-down occurs. 7 Days is on a PCIE4.0 NVME, I have 64GB of DDR4, I use an i9-11900kl, and I use an RTX 3080 Ti. Not low specs, and my monitor is a G-Sync monitor, so that might be why I don't get the stuttering but instead have a slow-down. This only occurs when I am in the city, with or without friends, and looking in another direction usually resolves it instantly.
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If that is reproducible for you, you might consider trying to triangulate the location causing the problem.  If it occurs when looking at the same general location from multiple angles, you can get a decent idea of where's it is coming from.  If you go to that area, you may be able to find the POI causing this and then can bug report it so they can look into why that might cause this problem.  Might take a bit of effort to lock down the exact POI but it could be very helpful for the devs if you can.  Of course, if this doesn't happen except from one direction, it might not be possible to determine which POI is the cause.

 
The_Great_Sephiroth said:
This "stutter" you mention, is it only when looking in certain directions in a city?
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The stutter occurs whenever a group of zombies - say, 4 or 5 or more - activates at once. It mainly occurs inside city POIs; I very rarely encounter it in small town POIs but it does happen and it stops after I've killed most or all of the zombies. I was thinking it was the zombies all pathing at once - the dev streams said that zombies wouldn't update their pathing all the time in A21 and that this would improve performance.

 
I found the stuttering isn't due to numbers of them or being in cities, but down to zombies attacking barricades.

If I have 20+ zombies in a city, walking down the streets, I don't get any stuttering.

If I have 1-2 zombies attacking some fence trying to get to me, I don't get any stuttering.

The moment I get a decent number of zombies, maybe like 5+ attacking a fence though? immediate stutter fest until that stops.

 
I'm going to move this over to the support section since this isn't normal behavior at all. Could you please read the Pinned thread on how to report an issue, and provide a log from when you run into this?  If you could also mark the times when the issue occurs so we can cross-reference that with the data in the log, that would be great.

 
I have every intention of obtaining a log as soon as possible -- but this requires a city poi where five or more zombies activate at once. I have done a poi but didn't get a cluster activation despite being loud. I've read the part about reporting an issue, located where the logs are, and will follow through as soon as I encounter the issue.

 
SylenThunder said:
Could you please read the Pinned thread on how to report an issue, and provide a log from when you run into this?  If you could also mark the times when the issue occurs so we can cross-reference that with the data in the log, that would be great...
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Event triggered at 18:26 - drove to city poi, burger joint, and a lot of zombies activated around me inside and around the poi. Settled down once I'd killed most of the zombies. Also -- as I proceeded to do the poi, the console jumped down with a red line - never happened before, might be a different issue. 

Mono path[0] = 'C:/Program Files (x86)/Steam/steamapps/common/7 Days To Die/7Day - Pastebin.com

 
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Try turning DMS off. That sounds like the DMS lag issue by the way you're describing it. It's had a decent improvement done to it for A22. DMS is the Dynamic Music in the options

 
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OneManStanding said:
Event triggered at 18:26 - drove to city poi, burger joint, and a lot of zombies activated around me inside and around the poi. Settled down once I'd killed most of the zombies. Also -- as I proceeded to do the poi, the console jumped down with a red line - never happened before, might be a different issue. 

Mono path[0] = 'C:/Program Files (x86)/Steam/steamapps/common/7 Days To Die/7Day - Pastebin.com
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OK, I'll be honest. I fully expected to be presented a log with an AMD FX CPU or something similar.  While that generation of Intel wasn't great, it's well above what I would consider the current "recommended" bottom end CPU. (For Intel, off the top of my head that's around the i7-8700k currently.) Your CPU performance is only slightly less than the previous generation, so well within acceptable CPU performance.

Pair that with 16GB RAM, and the 3070, and it's a pretty well-rounded system. All told, it runs about 10% better than my previous system with an i7-3930k and extreme overclocking.  I never had this type of issue with testing on that system, so that tells me that what you are experiencing is most likely limited to your specific configuration. Either drivers, hardware setup in BIOS/UEFI, or other software getting in the way.

Looking at your log, a few things come to mind.

1. Are you using that controller to play the game?

2. Disable V-Sync. It's well known to create latency issues. Especially with input lag. If you need to cap the FPS, use Nvidia control panel.

3. Disable all options with the word "reflection" in them. This isn't really optimized yet, and I wouldn't recommend putting the extra load on the CPU. Other premium options like SSAO, ect should be disabled as well. 

4. I'm not seeing anything out of the ordinary around that timestamp. This further supports my thought that the issue is external of the game client. It's only using about a third of your RAM at that point with 9GB reserved in total. Since you have 16GB, and a flat system usually utilizes around 4GB of RAM for Windows, and most common background tasks.

As Jugg stated, turn off the Dynamic Music, I'd also recommend maybe disabling the Distant POI feature temporarily if your system is getting tight on free RAM while playing.

I would also recommend verifying that you have the correct CPU and Memory configuration in BIOS/UEFI, and that you have removed the bloatware that ships with most PC's and motherboards. 

Lastly, ensure that the client is fully excluded from security software.  I cover this in detail in the Support FAQ.

 
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Sylen, Jugg, when this happens to me I get nothing in my log about it. My framerate drops to around 70fps but the thing is stuttering. This happens with everything in graphics options on low also. My gut tells me, based on past experience with other CPU-intensive games, that this is a CPU issue. Steam and the green FPS meter in 7 Days both read the same and at 70~72fps I should not get stuttering. This is NOT common for me as it happens only rarely, but it does happen. The next time it occurs I will upload a game log and everything for you to review.

Also, I have to use V-Sync to use G-Sync. Vertical sync should not cause random drops until you look around or kill zeds. It simply syncs the render buffer on the video card to the timing of the monitor looking at the buffer so the buffer is full. It prevents tearing and works in every game I own, including other Unity games like Subnautica 1 and 2, The Long Dark, My Summer Car, and more.

 
Not sure if it relates at all but I've noticed in 2 different games recently (not this one) that my movement would be jerky as if FPS were fluctuating greatly while playing even though the in-game FPS showed a consistent 60fps (max my monitor supports).  In one of the games, there was an option to limit FPS.  I set a limit of something like 56fps or so - I forget exactly - and it ran perfectly smooth.  This could be described as stuttering and occurred at all levels of graphics settings.  With a limit set on the FPS, I could run at ultra settings without issues.  This is on an AMD RX 580 card.  Not a high end card but handles ultra on most games without issues, so I can't complain.

As I said, this doesn't occur in this game for me.  Even so, perhaps try setting a limit on FPS and see if it removes this problem.

 
I apologise, I mis-interpreted what was meant by "or attach the log file to the thread" and attempted to add the log text as an attachment to my comment - seemed the simplest thing to do. And when that didn't work I just copied and pasted into the actual comment. The paste websites seemed like an unnecessary step. Sorry if I caused an issue. Will better understand what was meant in future.

Recommendations of better CPU? Wither or not it helps with the game issue, I am considering.

I do play with the gamepad, configured through steam for mouse and keyboard input as the standard gamepad controls are not very standard.

I will try disabling vsync and use Nvidia.

I will disable reflections and SSAO (whatever it is).

I will turn off dynamic music.

I will check out the other guides you recommended.

 
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OneManStanding said:
Recommendations of better CPU? Wither or not it helps with the game issue, I am considering.
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9th-gen was really the last "good" version for Intel as far as something CPU-intensive as this game goes. 10th and 11th-gen systems were weak, and 12th and 13th-gen use a new CPU architecture that doesn't scale well with heavy multithreaded tasks. Something Intel has beaten AMD at for almost 20 years, now they are losing the race since AMD's 3rd-gen Ryzen CPU's.

All told though, your CPU isn't bad, and should be perfectly fine. As far as hardware setup goes, I would consider it perfectly acceptable for a mid-tier system in the current lineup of games that are available, and for something as heavy as 7 Days.

SSAO is Screen Space Ambient Occlusion. It can save some processing power in managing Occlusion, but adds a bit of extra overhead that will increase GPU load a bit. 

Here is a good article explaining it some. https://culturedvultures.com/screen-space-ambient-occlusion-ssao-explained/

 
The only problem of applying all those fixes - minus the BIOS, as I'm not quite clear how to do that - at once is that it's hard to tell where the solution lies.

Nevertheless, I did two big city pois with a friend - brand new to the game - who managed to wake the  E N T I R E  sky scraper  A N D  the surrounding city despite being as stealthed-up as it is possible to be in this game (I even cheated in good stuff as we're about to start over) and I did not encounter the problem as before.

First night out, he got back to base with a twice-broken leg in a cast, overloaded on steroids, infected as heck, with a bloodied baseball bat and a worn out shotgun, and looking forward to A21 😁

 
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