Fusion 2.5 Microstuttering (moved from Fusion 3 status thread)

No I was not being sarcastic

Yves is still looking at this however I would refer you to Manuel's findings, which Clearly show that this is not limited to Fusion. Given his wide range of packages demonstrating the issue, we have to consider the possibility that this is something like a hardware &/ DirectX/Windows issue.

[MENTION=28634]Manuel[/MENTION]

I had terrible stuttering in Godot 2.1 at first, until I discovered that vsync must be turned off for windowed games, and turned on for full screen games.
Crazy enough just the presence of a window border would degrade the performance, while maximizing that same window would run it smooth. Obviously you should turn off debug mode, and build the game before running it.

Once I knew about the vsync thing, Godot 2 games ran smoothly for me. Godot 3 improved thing further. I get very smooth game play with large parallax backgrounds now.

With Fusion, same story. No difference - although compared to Godot 3, even a simple game like
Please login to see this link.
doesn't run as smooth as games in Godot 3 for me, no matter the screen settings. The same regular micro-stutter occurs, but aside from that there is a degradation in performance that causes jittery movement while playing.

Then again, I have played other Fusion 2.5 games that seemed to have no issues, other than the occasional micro-stutter.

Like you, I tested various engines (Construct, Fusion, Godot, plain javascript with Phaser) and all sorts of 2d games to see how they performed.

No matter the "native" smoothness of the engines and the games I tested, one thing keeps popping up: every 10 seconds or so a small micro-stutter occurs. I replaced my old GTX590 with a brand new GTX1080 two months ago, and that micro stutter persists. I changed from Windows 7 to 10 a year ago, and still that stutter persists, although on Windows 10 it is much less apparent.

I tested DirectX and OpenGL 2d games: no matter what, that micro stutter doesn't go away. I also did testing on Mac and Linux and built the same games to test, and micro-stuttering seems a lesser issue on those platforms. One game of mine ran absolutely smooth on a Mac I was teaching on, and I was amazed to see no micro-stuttering at all for about 30 seconds.

The micro-stutter persists in commercial games just as much. Some games seem to have less of an issue compared to others, but still. Shantae:Risky's Revenge is terrible, while Pixeljunk shooter seems to run smooth (with regular occasional micro-stutter). The stutter happens in ALL 2d games.

Over the years I have come to the conclusion, similar to you, that we have three reasons for stuttering:
1) game performance issues. Such as Shantae, which starts to stutter when multiple enemies are on the screen. This may also be the case when games are run in a browser environment (which is why I gave up on Construct).
2) "bad" screen settings/preferences. For example, Godot windowed games with Vsync turned on. Full screen often works better.
3) hardware/driver and/or OS based micro stutters.

The last one I haven't been able to solve, other than testing the game on different hardware and OSs.

So, I am somewhat confused now. I tested Godot 3's new HTML5 WebASM export today with a simple game, and the same system wide stutter (every 10 seconds, or so) occurs when I run it in Chrome and Opera.

When I run it in Firefox Developer Quantum, however, the stutter is... gone. Very strange.

When I export a Windows executable, the same stutter happens again every 10 seconds.

Whatever Firefox is doing, I'd like to know - butter smooth and no stutter for a minute of playing. How very odd.

So just to throw my two cents into the mix, I've been experiencing this exact same thing and have been trying to find a solution to it. I'm glad to know I'm not alone here.

My project is a Pac-Man remake. One of the aspects of the game is however fast Pac-Man is moving is directly related to the animation of his mouth, as in every two pixels moved changes the animation frame. So if he moves 1 pixel per frame, you'll see his sprite move to the next frame of animation every two frames. However, at higher speeds, if he's moving 2 pixels every frame, then the animation would be advancing to the next frame of animation every frame of gameplay.

That said, it's been driving me crazy lately. On the original arcade game, when Pac-Man moves 2 pixels per second, it's a silky smooth animation of his sprite changing animation frames every 60th of a second, but in my CTF2.5 version, it's silky smooth most of the time, but microstutters quite frequently. It's ugly and distracting and makes the whole thing feel very unprofessional. I've spent amole amount of time trying to optimize and research what might be causing it to no avail.

That said, my project is available as a prime example of the microstutters going on. It's very noticeable and easy to show, if it helps anyone prove it's there.

Not sure if this has been found previously, but with my new game I'm working on, I noticed that:

A) It's butter smooth when in windowed mode and NOT maximized.
B) If I maximize the screen (not real fullscreen but windowed fullscreen) I get nasty micro-stutter quite constantly.

I tried resizing the game-window to about 95% of my screen size (4k monitor and resolution if that matters) and it's still butter smooth. If I maximize the window, BOOOM stutter.

Not sure what that means? I think I'll do some more experimenting tomorrow.

[MENTION=15682]Volnaiskra[/MENTION] is the microstutter that weird thing that happens when the framerate suddenly drops to what looks like about 30fps or less, and it does it usually for half a minute or more before sorting itself out and returning to usual? I've tried vsync on, off, frame buffers, and nothing seems to solve this jitter issue. I think FNAF might even have done it, harder to tell with a non-scrolling game, but it definitely seems to be a Fusion issue. Have you made any new discoveries in recent months relating to eliminating the dreaded jitter?

That sounds like something happening on your individual PC rather than Fusion, especially if other games built in Fusion have displayed this behaviour.

Quote from elvisish

[MENTION=15682]Volnaiskra[/MENTION] is the microstutter that weird thing that happens when the framerate suddenly drops to what looks like about 30fps or less, and it does it usually for half a minute or more before sorting itself out and returning to usual? I've tried vsync on, off, frame buffers, and nothing seems to solve this jitter issue. I think FNAF might even have done it, harder to tell with a non-scrolling game, but it definitely seems to be a Fusion issue. Have you made any new discoveries in recent months relating to eliminating the dreaded jitter?

As Simon said, this is more likely an issue on your end. Something may be running in the background and hogging up resources temporarily. 30 seconds is about 30 seconds longer than you would notice microstutter at any given time. I used to have this issue when Photoshop and Fusion were open at the same time for a while, and I think it had something to do with Creative Cloud running processes in the background, but it went away after a patch. It also happens sometimes with Discord open.

Sure, I just wonder what would be causing the issue on my computer that would affect all Fusion games (if this this true, I need to test some other to be sure) since it doesn't happen with any other game engines? Why specifically would it affect Fusion games?

Microstuttering does not refer to FR drops but to uneven frame times. However, I think visible microstuttering with Fusion was solved with 2019's Windows 10 updates. Frametimes measured through DirectX APIs were not improved, but the visible experience is really different. For players that are on Win7 and 8 microstuttering is still a thing tho. Running the app in real fullscreen helps a lot here, so you might want to include that option at least.

We experienced a couple of possible glitches with Fusion (DX9 mode) during QA testing of Outbuddies as well as on the first weeks on Steam, here's a quick rundown:
x It is very likely that random dropping from 60 to 30 PFS is a sync issue. Your graphics card might force Vsync on the game or interfere with Fusion's internal syncing routine. If disabling Vsync in Fusion does not help, disabling Vsync for your App in your GPU driver settings might do it.
x Some dedicated cards don't work well with the "use high-performance GPU" option. Try to untick this in the game's runtime properties.
x The current Win 10 version 1903 seemingly has a bunch of issues with Fusion and the exclusive display output (reals FS) option. I experienced random 60/30 FPS shifting in that display mode occasionally. On the other hand (at least for me) the update also improved Win 10 desktop performance a lot, so for my players, I recommended running Outbuddies in Windowed FS only on Win 10 systems.

This thread (I think) also describes your issue: Please login to see this link.

Running DX11 is not an option for me. It might be specific factors in my game, but it stutters horribly in DX11 mode.

[MENTION=18480]elvisish[/MENTION] if you have Resource Monitor on your version of Windows, run it whilst running a game which causes the issue. In addition to allowing you to see which processes are using high CPU time, you can delve deeper looking at threads and child processes. When you see the slow down occuring, check to see whether there is another process suddenly using high CPU, or, if the Fusion made game/app suddenly starts using much higher CPU, see whether you can identify any linked threads/processes which are specifically to blame. Report back here your findings (screenshot if possible) and we can try to see what might be at the root of this.

The usual advice of course to close other high memory/CPU software whilst running your game/app, and also to make sure your system and drivers (GFX card in particular) are up-to-date. Also, try disabling your virus/malware scanner(s) temporarily too as this can often cause intermittent slowdowns.