Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Bugs & Technical Problems Sound out of sync, cutting off, stuttering fps

As already described here:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/435150/discussions/6/1620599015882513207/

The game runs quite badly after first start. And those issues reappear after longer sessions or when you change your game area [example getting from act 1 to act 2 etc].

Its supper annoying not to mention it is tied to some frame rate stutter. Wendigo source blast is the best example - the first time i load a save before that conversation the engine will always choke, frame rate will drop from 60 to 10-20 for a 1-2second, its a typical stutter/hang. And when i reload the same conversation again its fine, smooth animation, no frame drop, solid 60 fps durning the whole spell cast.
Its almost as if the engine have some issues loading some specific assets.

Same goes for the mentioned in the steam post kraken tentacle. The first time i go upstairs the animation will stutter and the audio will cut off for 1-2 seconds. Reload the save file - and everything is fine, smooth animation, no sound issues.

As for my PC config:
i5 6400 cooled by SilentiumPC Spartan 3 PRO
GTX 1050ti [evga]
8gb of ram ddr 4 [hyper fury kingston]
Mobo ASROCK B150M HDS
PSU SilentiumPC Supremo L2 550W

Nothing is OC, i have up to date drivers, i tested this issue with clean boot setup, without and with AV software on, with and without the msi afterburner and rivia tuner. I also tested the nvidia settings, pre rendered frames, power management mode set to high performance [same goes for cpu i tested the balanced as well as high performance modes].
Nothing i did changed the issue - im still able to perfectly recreate it.

Hope you guys will look into it, the game itself is awesome, but this is so damn anooying and makes it unplayable.

You always get some FPS drop when something graphically demanding suddenly happens, like with Windego's source blast. Mine would go from 60 to 30 for maybe a second then back up. Me, I don't mind that at all, cause it's to be expected, and it simply lasts way too short.

I tried doing as the steam post said, starting new game then going up to the top deck. There was no offsync audio with anyone, but when I got to the top there was some FPS drop and audio cutoff. But again, it was really just for a fraction of a second (and if you reload the autosave this wouldn't happen). Up here my FPS stays around 40.

I have a GTX 970M, and it's possible for me to get not-exactly-awesome FPS during some demanding scenes. But it would take a lot more than the occasional sudden FPS drops and audio cutoffs that last less than half a second to make it "unplayable" for me. Tbh, before trying all this just now, I couldn't even recall this stuttering issue even though it was always there. Apparently it never bothered me at all, lucky me.

No my friend - it is not normal for the engine to frame drop from 60 to 10-20. This is a lag spike.
Not to mention when you encounter it once, reload a save, recreate it second time - its not happening. im talking about the sorce blast from our old lady wendy =)
It would be normal if this was a regular frame drop, going smoothly from 60 to 50-45, but not when it creates a spike that freezes your screen for a second.

And the sound issue - it is an issue, you confirmed it yourself [you followed my instruction and you admit that sound hang was there, frame drop also]. Its not specific to any rig, its not on a user end, its game engine global issue that need to be looked into - thats all.

I think you misunderstood me - im not ranting about the game, i love it as much as i loved the first one. Otherwise i would not back it up on KS back in the day and i wouldnt for sure buy it.

Im just reporting kinda serious issue - that for me creates an unplayable scenarios, breaks my enjoyment from the gameplay and therfore - makes the game unplayable durning first 30+ min of gameplay [usually after 30-40min of gameplay the issue occur less often - i asume its due to the fact the engine "reloaded" most of the problematic assets that creates those sound hangs and frame drops]

P.S.
And no - im not expecting larian to magically "pump my pc", im perfectly aware of the fact my rig will encounter some framerate drops from 60 to 40 in intense combat scenarios, thats ok, i dont mind it at all. Im just not ok with the anooying lag spikes and choppy sound =)

So I just tried something, and it turned out to be quite interesting. I disabled my internet and started the game offline. Then I started a new game, and guess what, the source blast from Windego now only made my FPS go from 62 to 55. Then I proceeded to the top deck, and there was NO stuttering or offsync audio whatsoever.

I've only tried this once though, not multiple times yet. But I would still suggest that you try disabling internet connection and see if that makes any difference.

Tested it now - didnt changed a thing.
I asume you tried this withiut rebooting your pc right?
The issues i described occur after first launch, so if you test anything after you played a little bit without fresh launch after whole system reboot you wont be able to recreate previous lag spikes or sound cut off - you would need to get to the new point in game this issue occur - as far atm im on a new campaign after hotfix so i have no idea when the next serious issue will show up, thou i still get some random 0.5-1s sound loss in combat from time to time - for example i had small sound loss in arena at fort joy.

But thx for the tip it was worth a try.

As far as im competent in game engine mechanics - im more than 90% sure this has something to do with asset loading incorrectly or conflicting with eachother.

P.S.
I also think it is the hotfix fault, since in this post :
https://steamcommunity.com/app/435150/discussions/6/1488861734105573939/

2 months ago one guy had it and later it stopped to occur [after patch], now its back after the last hotfix.
Maybe hotfix reversed/bring back this bug.

You're right, after rebooting the machine I tried again and got the same problems. Then this seems to be the same kind of problem you usually have in games like Oblivion, Skyrim or, in my case, Dark Souls 3. The FPS always takes a dive when the game needs to load data as you enter a new "cell" or zone. Once it's loaded for the first time, it's probably stored as "temp" data and would be wiped when you do a reboot. This would explain why I was never bothered by this; I'm way too used to it.

Then there's not much we can do since the only real solution would be to play the game on a beefier rig - better CPU, more VRAM, and so on.

Well not exactly - this issue was not present before some latest patches, the game didnt had this kind of sound loss and ag spikes in alpha, beta and later even after few patches.

There is a chance they will fix it.

I did some more testing - the only solution to those issues, and bear in mind not the 100% perfect one, was moving the game to an ssd.
This eliminated 90% of sound cuts, thou they still happen from time to time. Stutter is also present but the same as sound, ssd eliminated almost 90% of the issues.


Still - i never had this game installed on an ssd and previous build running from my hdd worked just fine.

And as for my HDD - its less than 1 year old, no other games present this kind of issues. I benchmarked it just in case, the drive is fine, no bad sectors, no slowdowns.

Maybe its not the drive type issue, maybe the game runs bad when you have two drives and you install it to the second one - this is in my case my hdd, witch is my media storage and game space. Thou i have no way to test how would this title behave on two hdd when its installed on first and second one simple because i have only one hdd in my rig =)

So i did even more digging and gues what - i found the files that cause the issues =)
I used the Symlink Creator software to make simple links to files i suspected to be the cause of those issues.

I moved the instalation of course back to HDD and linked the files from the screen below to the SSD.
The Symlink allows you to move any file from one directory to another, create a simple link so the game reads the moved files from the SSD.



And gues what - no issues, no sound cuts, no menu lag when first time you enter the load save game screen. Thou the stutter is still there, not so big now but still present, but im sure i will find the file that fix this as well.

Hope this helps larian guys to fix this issue.


@edited
Found the 3 files responsible for stutter as well :

Shared.pak
Shared_1.pak
SoundBanks.pak

Moving those files via simple links to ssd eliminated almost all abnormal stutter.
The game still have normal frame drops, but there are no lag spikes that freezes gpu [usage drop down to 0] and hogs fpses from 60 to 5-10 for a 1-2 second.


And im more than 100% sure it has noting to do with ssd vs hdd advantage.
I moved just for the sake of the testing all other files, including texture pak files to ssd, leaved only the problematic patches files and the game still had issues there, so its not the fact ssd is much faster than hdd therfore it loads the files more smoothly.
Just the contrary, i should have seen huge improvements when the game had texture and effects + shader files on ssd.

P.S.
As for my HDD - its not the fastes hardware on the planet, but i average around 110-130mb/s transfer [minimal never went below 95mb], its WD Blue 1TB drive, and its not the empty one, i filled around 500gb, so my average speed is mesured on loaded drive.

I'd like to bump this cause I'm having a similar/same issue. I played the game when it was first released and it ran as smooth as butter. Took a break till now and after these patches the sound cuts off or is out of sync, insane lag spikes every time a fight starts or a new area loads. It's borderline unplayable cause it's so annoying. Tried moving the game to ssd but no results. This is 100% on their end and I was wondering if you guys figured out a temporary fix for this. I made an account just to post on this thread yo.

i've definitely noticed occasional fps drops that are a recent development

If i may ask - what is your SSD model and is it your main drive [the one that your OS is on].
And do you use the strict pagefile - and by strict i mean set to custom amout so it is not fragmenting itself.

Im curious because moving the game to ssd fixed all those strange issues for me [and by no means - this is not the fix for this issue, hope larian look into this, i would prefer to keep a 30+gb game on hdd that have 1tb space not on ssd with 120gb =P].

My SSD is my C drive with my win 7 ultimate as my OS.
I have set my pagefile to 8192mb, equal to my physical memmory and its a strict set min 8192 and max 8192 [this prevents the page file from fragmentation, sure it does not matter as much on an ssd drive, but i use this trick for around 15+ years, it always worked like charm in terms of os stability and mem management]

My SSD model is ADATA SU800 128GB SATA3. Not the fastes thing man ever prodused but its not a bad one either =P

My ssd is Transcend 128GB MLC SATA 3 and it's also where my OS is installed. Never even heard of pagefiles so no.

And when you moved the game to ssd the sound didnt fixed itself? No framerate performance improvement?
Im just curious, so far i tested the ssd trick with 7 other people from forums here and there, and everybody noticed the major improvement after moving the game to ssd.


Well you can set you pagefile to some strict size, just type in google "how to set pagefile for windows 7/8/10".

I admit i use quite big pagefile, equal to my ram, but i also use my pc to do some high res video and graphics remastering, so i sometimes have a need for big virtual memmory ammout. But you can set smaller pagefile, ususally 2.5-5gb is fine for 8 to 16 gb ram systems.

Btw it would be nice to have some larian tech guys reply here to at least let us know they aknowledged the issue.

I'm also having this issue, both sound and frame stutters. Really annoying as I was so looking forward to playing this. Has there been any word on whether a fix is coming? I'm on Windows 10, GTX1080 and i7 7700k, all updated drivers etc.

I have a little framerate drops in the first Windego cast, but i haven't experienced any other issues than this one.. btw about stuttering on some games is solved disabling a core (usually core 0 ) using Process Lasso (freeware). After the last patch i did the same also on DOS 2 , if you use a Nvdia GPU also Nvdia Inspector is pretty useful (here i use the default setting for DOS 2 already provided from the tools ) . And avoid to optimize setting using Nvdia Experience that put really lowered setting IMO.
I have a Nvdia GTX 960M

Reviving this thread after nearly 3 years to say that I'm having this exact same situation as well with my brand new PC. I'm getting frequent 1-2 second long freeze frames and half the time a character's dialogue will have, like, around 3 second sound delay. It's been quite a long time since this thread started, so I'm really hoping that there's a more permanent fix out there for this by now

Specs include:
AMD Ryzen 7 5800x CPU
Nvidia RTX 3070 (EVGA Black)
16G of DDR4 Ram (XPG Gammix D10 DDR4 2666MHz 16G Ram kit [2x 8G])
Kingston SNVS NVMe PCIe 1TB SSD
Seagate Barracuda ST2000DM008 2 TB 3.5" HDD
850W 80 Plus Gold Power Supply